The Trusts

The Trusts is West Auckland's largest community-owned liquor and hospitality group — but for most of its history, it operated under its own banner: West Liquor. In 2022, The Trusts made a major strategic decision to migrate its entire retail estate to two of New Zealand's most recognised national liquor brands: Liquorland and Super Liquor. This became known internally as the 'Big Brands' project — and it fundamentally changed the complexity of running the business.

What made the transition uniquely challenging was that Liquorland and Super Liquor are competing national brands, each with its own supply chain, pricing structure, promotional programme — and critically, its own point-of-sale system. Liquorland stores run on Infinity POS with data aggregated through a central staging database; Super Liquor stores run on POSperfect (Today Software), with data managed through a separate multi-store controller. There was no common system, no common product catalogue, and no common reporting layer between them.

The Trusts now found itself in an unusual position: a single community trust operating 14 Liquorland stores and 12 Super Liquor stores side by side — direct competitors under the same ownership — with no way to view their combined performance. Store managers, regional leads, and the head office finance team were working from separate exports, separate spreadsheets, and data that was days old by the time decisions needed to be made. The hospitality estate — eight venues including bars and restaurants — ran on a third system entirely, Today Software's hospitality module, and sat completely outside any retail reporting.

The Trusts needed a reporting solution that could do something no off-the-shelf tool was built to do: unify data from competing national brands, running on different technology stacks, into a single consolidated view — without compromising the integrity or independence of either brand's data.

Following the strategic decision to join the Big Brands programme, The Trusts engaged 2IQ in June 2023 to scope a centralised reporting solution. The project — formally titled the House of Brands Centralised Reporting Project — was kicked off at The Trusts' head office in New Lynn on 11 July 2023, with representatives from retail operations, finance, payroll, and IT all present to define requirements.

MyIQ was selected because it was the only platform with proven, pre-existing integration capability for both technology stacks in play. MyIQ already connected to Today Software's multi-store controller — meaning the Super Liquor estate could be onboarded without custom development. For the Liquorland stores, MyIQ's team built a new data feed from the Infinity staging database, translating and transforming transaction-level data into the MyIQ schema on a near-real-time basis.

Equally important was the platform's understanding of the New Zealand liquor retail context — promotional structures, scan rebates, gross profit benchmarking, and wage cost dynamics specific to this sector. The Trusts would not need to explain its business to MyIQ; MyIQ already knew it.

MyIQ's implementation for The Trusts was delivered in two phases. The first phase, completed in December 2023, brought all 26 retail stores online — a new data feed was built between the Infinity staging database and MyIQ's existing sales data pipeline, with the Liquorland national system providing complementary product and pricing data across the Liquorland estate. Store managers and regional leads gained access to daily sales, gross profit by department, promotional analysis, and a live wage cost dashboard with sales-per-labour-hour visibility.

The second phase, completed in November 2024, extended the platform to The Trusts' eight hospitality venues through hospoIQ — bringing Taphouse Avondale, Workshop, Bricklane, iTi Drinks & Bites, The Hangar, Greenfields, Mr Illingsworth, and The Good Home onto the same reporting environment. Each venue now has real-time sales, covers, and wage cost data flowing into the platform alongside the retail estate.

The MyIQ Event Calendar allows the team to annotate trading periods with events, promotions, and public holidays — making it simple to contextualise performance variances at both store and group level. Financial reporting through Business Central feeds the platform's P&L and budget tracking capability. Stock analysis draws on live inventory data flowing from both the Liquorland and Super Liquor estates. Cluster reporting groups stores by geography and brand, supporting regional performance management across the portfolio.