SQ Insights Reports All POS Machine Starts as Revenue

This article describes a known issue or situation with the Alliance Laundry Systems (Speed Queen Insights / Huebsch Command) integration and a shortcoming with their platform's revenue reports.


Situation

Currently, the Speed Queen Insights / Huebsch Command dashboard does not differentiate between vend amounts from self-service customers starting machines from vend amounts sent via integrations with external software partners such as Wash-Dry-Fold POS (or any other POS system).


Current Status

Leadership at Wash-Dry-Fold POS has spoken with Alliance's Digital Products development team about this with a request to separate these different sources of vend amounts in their reporting. We are told that they are taking this feedback into consideration for future improvements to their platform.


Solution (for now)

In the meantime, we recommend viewing the Machine Starts report on the Reports page. Subtract the total from this report (example picture below) from the vend amounts reported in SQ Insights or Huebsch Command.

An example image of the Machine Starts report in Wash-Dry-Fold POS. The total Machine Starts amount is circled in red with an arrow pointing at it. This amount can be subtracted from the totals found in the Speed Queen Insights or Huebsch Command reporting dashboard.


The Cause

Alliance provides two methods to start machines from external software (such as Wash-Dry-Fold POS or any other software partner):

  • Remote Vend sends a dollar amount to the machine. Selection of more expensive cycles or modifiers after Remote Vend has been sent but before pressing Start on the washer or dryer is not possible because the vend price needs to be satisfied. This helps prevent fraud and theft and provides the most transparency in reporting.
  • Remote Start allows any cycle or modifier to be selected for free before pressing Start, regardless of price. There is no accountability for this - the price difference between what was paid for versus what was actually selected after the Remote Start command was sent cannot be easily tracked.

When we contacted Alliance about this, we requested that they consider either locking down cycle selection after sending a Remote Start command OR that they add a flag to incoming Remote Vend requests so that the amounts can be separated in their own reporting.


Here was the response from the manager of their Digital Products development team to this request:


I still recommend using remote_vend as the primary method because it tracks revenue, and you can limit cycle selection using the remainingVend value to the specific cycle options. I agree that the main issue is the inability to differentiate "self-service" revenue from "API/POS" revenue in the reports because our system see it the same currently.


They went on to state that locking down cycle selection after sending a Remote Start will likely not ever be an option due to how the machines are built, but they could add some type of identifier for Remote Vend amounts to solve this issue. We will update this article if they do so.