How do I set up an employee company store with allowances, approvals and cost centers?

You set up an employee company store by defining who may buy, what allowance each group carries, what needs approval and which cost center the order belongs to. The store checks the allowance first, takes a card for any remainder, and raises a purchase order if procurement wants one.

The pieces: a closed store with sign-in, customer groups that carry their own products and prices, a wallet or allowance balance per employee or per group, an approval threshold above which an order waits for a named approver, and a cost center field that rides on every order through to the invoice. Redemption codes cover uniform issues and new-hire kits, so a code in the welcome email buys the kit without any balance being loaded. Orders can be produced on demand and shipped to the employee's door, or drawn from stock the company already owns across one or several warehouses. Invoices and net terms are there for companies that would rather be billed than swipe a card.

Without this, an HR coordinator emails a spreadsheet of sizes to a supplier, tracks who has spent what in a second spreadsheet, and forwards receipts to finance to code by hand. Every new hire is a fresh email thread, and every quarter somebody argues about which department paid for what.

This fits distributors and decorators serving corporate accounts, and networks whose locations serve local employers. It runs under the decorator or distributor serving the brand, so the buyer never leaves their supplier's world and the supplier never loses the account to a store platform. The caveat: an allowance is a spending rule, not a payroll deduction system. A company that wants deductions keeps that in its payroll software.

See the corporate page, or how wallets and allowances work.