Uniform Link has been making uniforms in Queensland for more than 30 years. School, sports and corporate ranges, decorated in-house by embroidery and sublimation, supplied to more than 600 schools and 1,000 sporting clubs. Head office and the wholesale side sit at Northgate in Brisbane. The retail counter is in Cairns.
What matters is that they manufacture. The same garment made for a school's bulk order is the one a parent buys over the counter. The shop is not a separate business with its own stock. It is the last metre of a supply chain.
Uniform Link was running a split ledger. Business Central knew about every item in the business except the ones on the shop floor, which were written out of the ERP, re-keyed into the counter system, and reconciled manually once a year for the financials.
With eCommerce running alongside it, that pattern was heading for a third disconnected version of the truth. What they wanted was one number for what they hold and one number for what they sold, without anyone counting.
Business Central locks an invoice once it is posted. Shopify's combined POS exchange flow works by editing the original order. The two behaviours are incompatible – the edit arrives at a document the ERP will not accept, and the return sits unresolved. The Australian localisation compounds it, refusing to post a credit note without a reason code, and that field was arriving empty.
Which meant the most ordinary transaction in a uniform shop – a child needs the next size up – was the one the integration handled worst. All of it inside a compressed timeline, with a client team new to Shopify.
One decision set the sequence. Business Central is the system of record, and Shopify is where that record gets acted on.
That sounds obvious and it is not. The tempting path with a point-of-sale launch is to build the retail range in Shopify, because Shopify is pleasant to work in and an ERP is not. Do that and there are two product masters and a reconciliation problem inside six months. So our Unified Commerce team specified what had to be true in the ERP before a single item reached the till – retail range identified and coded, barcodes and item references in place, prices corrected – and only then pushed it through the native Microsoft connector. Nothing was built twice.
The online store was already in place. Our scope was the counter and the ERP boundary behind it.
Our Unified Commerce team configured Shopify POS Pro across two registers in Cairns: smart grid, tax and receipt setup, hardware and payments on the live store, staff roles with individual PINs so every sale attributes to the person who made it, and a configuration audit before go-live. Made-to-order lines were deliberately kept off the till. Sublimated team kit is a conversation and a draft order, not a counter sale.
Testing caught the thing that mattered. Business Central was sending prices exclusive of GST, and Australian retail prices are quoted inclusive. Every item on the shelf would have rung up short, on a receipt that looked perfectly plausible.
Three weeks of trading then corrected a second assumption. The shop had been described as almost entirely cash. In practice 95% of takings arrived by card, and 55 customer records were created from a base of zero.
