Skip to content

See a demo

30 minutes with Sasha Zhang · video link on confirmation

Loading scheduler…

CPG glossary

Petrosoft Retail360: the mobile back office

What Retail360 is

Retail360 is Petrosoft's mobile store management software for convenience store and gas station operators, described by the company as "a comprehensive back-office mobile application designed to help you run your business from anywhere." It is the phone-shaped surface over the same back office as CStoreOffice rather than a separate product with its own data.

That last point is what most Retail360 questions turn out to be about. Someone is tracing a number, and the answer is that it came from the back office and was only touched here.

What it does

Petrosoft's own capability list for the app covers most of what a manager does between shifts:

CapabilityWhat it means in the store
Inventory and invoicesReceiving and counting without a desk
Price book managementRetail changes pushed out to the register
Multi-location price managementParent-child relationships across sites
Sales data reconciliationRegister activity against what was expected
Shrink identificationWhere the count and the expectation diverge
Restricted sales complianceNeeds a Loss Prevention Analytics subscription
Barcode scanningAdding an item by scanning it
Fuel price updatesReal-time forecourt price changes

The multi-location row is the one worth reading closely. Petrosoft says the app can "manage retails across locations" and "manage parent-child relationships," which is the multi-site pricing story, though the company does not publish how those two interact. Establish that before you let anyone change a retail from a phone, because the blast radius of a price edit is exactly what those words leave open.

It is an interface, not a system of record

Petrosoft does not publish where Retail360 keeps its data, so treat this as a practical reading rather than a documented architecture: the app routes through the back office rather than beside it. The company's own fuel example runs "Find Your Competitors Prices in Retail360 Mobile App" into "Push New Competitive Fuel Price to the Back Office," which is the shape of an interface, not of a second system of record.

Read that way, two consequences follow for anyone tracing a pricebook number.

SmartPOS: the registerRecords the transaction as it happensOwns scanning, never reconciliationCStoreOffice: the back officeReconciles against cost, invoice and countHolds the item file every other surface readsThe mobile app: a window on the row aboveSame data, reachable from a phone in the stockroomAn edit lands in the back office, not beside it
Retail360 is the third row, not a fourth system. What it changes lands in the second

Tracing an edit gets harder. A cost or retail change that appeared overnight could have been keyed at a desk, imported from a distributor file, or tapped into a phone in a stockroom. The app widens who can make a change and where from, which is the point of it, and it means "who changed this" becomes a question the back office has to answer rather than one you can infer from context.

A reconciliation question is never an app question. If a figure disagrees between the register and the back office, the app is the messenger. The CStoreOffice entry sets out the desktop division that governs it, and Retail360 is a window onto the reconciliation half of that split.

Capterra lists Retail360 under Inventory Management and describes it as covering "point of sale (POS), inventory control, inventory tracking, and inventory auditing for retail operations," which is a fair summary of the table above and a reminder that the app is catalogued as an inventory tool rather than as an analytics one.

The tobacco scan-data path runs through it too

Petrosoft's own documentation, which writes the product as "Retail 360" there, shows CStoreOffice and Retail360 using the same "Tobacco Scan Data Supporting Altria" report, which "sets up the transaction-level scan data export to the AGDC."

Altria's programme runs four tiers. Petrosoft lists that report under the requirements for Tiers 1, 2 and 3, and states that Tier 4, personalisation, is not currently supported. The report is therefore the floor of the programme rather than a top-tier upgrade: every tier Petrosoft supports rests on it.

For an operator that means enrolment is a back-office configuration task rather than an app task: it is one report, reachable from either surface. If the export is not running, the place to look is the report configuration, not whichever screen you happened to open.

Where Scout fits

Scout does not put a back office on a phone, and it is not a mobile app for walking the aisles.

What it does is answer the question an app on one site cannot: what holds true across the whole estate, over enough history to tell a trend from a bad week. Groups already running Petrosoft keep it and read the item file, the invoice history and the register export into Scout on top. Groups tired of maintaining one item file per site can run the pricebook, the invoice reconciliation and the inventory on Scout instead. Which way round is a preference, not a constraint.

One thing stays out either way: Scout does not schedule shifts.

The short version

  • Retail360 is Petrosoft's mobile back-office software for convenience stores and gas stations, sold as a way to run the business from anywhere.
  • It covers inventory, invoices, price book, reconciliation, shrink, forecourt pricing and barcode scanning; restricted-sales compliance needs a separate Loss Prevention Analytics subscription.
  • Petrosoft does not publish where it stores data, but the app routes through the back office rather than beside it, so read it as an interface rather than a second system of record.
  • It can "manage retails across locations" and "manage parent-child relationships." How those two interact is not published, so establish it before anyone changes a retail from a phone.
  • Altria scan-data submission uses the same supporting report from both surfaces, which makes it a back-office configuration rather than an app feature.

Sources: Petrosoft, "Retail360 App"; Petrosoft University, "Altria Digital Trade Program"; Capterra, "Retail360".

See your CPG data answer questions in plain English (book a Scout demo)

Want the rest of the CPG analyst's glossary?

Drop your email and we'll send the full set of CPG and retail-data definitions as one reference sheet.