Point of Sale Software

Here are some Articles from the Blog Subject - point of sale management -

Protecting credit card numbers on your point of sale system

POS SOFTWARE

One software company, I know well has recently released a statement that because they do not hold credit card numbers in their software that their clients have tranquillity about their customer credit card details and fraud. Well, it might get them off the hook if a potential court case starts, but it is certainly not the *whole* truth.

Firstly let's start off by saying that such data breaches are extremely serious as I wrote here of a study by Experian, showed that 60% of small to medium business closed down within six months after such a data breach. Much of this, I think must be because the banks, MasterCard and Visa looking into recovering their monies go for the retailer and then there are fines and legal costs too.

Now what is happening is a relatively new class of viruses called PoS RAM Scraper Malware has been created by hackers to specifically target retail shops and its huge. The reason why retail shops are simple, there is a lot of credit card details going through the POS system.

Here is a map of PunkeyPOS found by a well-known antivirus company in June this year. What it shows is the places where they found it.

 

You can read more details here on what they found here.

What can be done?
 

You may want to have a chat with your credit card provider however here are some tips, I would recommend.

1) Be careful where you and your staff go on the net. If you must go to these sites, use a computer that is not on your POS system.

2) Make sure you have a virus protector that is maintained. Let me warn you here that there is no best antivirus out there, they all have pluses and minuses. Note the window defender in windows 10, I think is very good and its free to all businesses.

3) Update your windows software with the latest patches.

4) A firewall would be good. I would recommend setting up your firewall on the machine that does EFTPOS to stop access to almost all the net. The other advantage to doing this is that your employees will surf less on your time. I think the free Windows firewall is good. Fairly easy to use. It passes all inbound tests (both stealth and open port) and does not have any popup alerts which can be a real pain. Also, it is not likely to conflict with your other programs. Plus most techs know it.

If all of this does not work at least you can have a good argument in court that you did try your best.

Test free cloud backups.

POS SOFTWARE

Now we recommend all our clients use cloud back up as a secondary and last emergency service. At the moment, we are finding cloud back up to be the best defence against ransomware viruses.



Although hopefully, you have your own internal backup system, which is your first call if a disaster takes place, and we do not suggest that you change that yet.

Cloud backup is very good, but it has problems too a cloud effectively is somone elses computer and nothing is 100%. For example one of our clients had a laptop that was stolen. They could not restore the information from the cloud, and it ended out in an argument with their cloud supplier as to who was responsible.



Still for many of you that use Telstra, there is currently a good offer for you to try a cloud backup free.





Onedrive works well with cloud backup and your systems and even the 5GB offer that onedrive has free for anyone is probably enough for most people. At the very least, it's a great way of testing cloud backups free of charge, and if you decide to pay for it, it is $1.99/month or if not you are still free to look elsewhere.



Here is an information sheet on how to set up and use cloud backs with onedrive and our system.



There are of course many other excellent providers of cloud back up too that our clients use, which have their own backup systems, and I am certainly not suggesting that there is anything wrong with these.

 

 

Dumping the credit card for the mobile

POS SOFTWARE

Currently, we have 16 million smartphones in Australia, about 25% use them to make retail purchases. When asked 61% stated that they would use a mobile to make payments. So I am sure that lots of people will soon be dumping the credit card and replacing it with the mobile. No card and no PIN to remember as it uses face recognition. There is also no need to pick up the receipt either as it is in the mobile.

 

It is available now in our software.

 

 

 

 

Christmas, what you need to do now for your store

POS SOFTWARE

It’s October, and you can already see many retailers are adorning their shop fronts with Christmas paraphernalia and starting to adding Christmas stock such as Christmas trees and decorations. However, many leave the preparations too late.

Although the economy is not doing well now this year, the signs do appear to show this will be a good Christmas, retail sales are up, interest in Christmas is up from last year, which was up from the year before and the public mood seems positive.

 

Measured interest using Data Source: Google Trends (www.google.com/trends)."

One of the points I have noticed and this graph show that the selling season for Christmas is in recent years getting longer. It is now from mid-December to late January. So we are talking about 6-7 weeks.

Among the million and one jobs, you will need to do now is to plan your stock ordering, so you need to estimate your stock requirements something our point of sale can help you with. You also need to look into your staff levels again something our point of sale can help you with all this; I be talking about these soon.

Right now, there is something else that you need to check is all your equipment work? The odds are its going to get much busier. Many of you are now planning to bring in some of the old POS machines “out of the closet” to accommodate the rush period. Have you tested it to make sure it works? Some of it have not been used in almost a year, a lot can happen in a year even if its just in the shelf. Have you checked that you have all the cables? Do you have a connection into your network where you need it? Can this equipment link into your system? Does it all work if you plug it in? I suggest you try it now.

What is going to happen if you have extra staff and the computer register does not work? I have seen this happen all to often.

It is wise to test this now in advance to ensure they’re running properly.

The closer it gets to Christmas, the harder it gets to repair in time.

Preparing for the Christmas holidays is a fun time, but you need to use these next two months wisely to put your best face on your store.
 

Overstocking on bad selling items

POS SOFTWARE

What can happen is that while selling and ordering stock is for some reason you are stocking large quantities of poor seller in your shop.

Obviously you want to review why you have so many of these items There are a few ways to do it but I want today to show you the power of ad-hoc reporting.

So what we are going to look for is items that have a low return on investment (GMROI) and have reasonable high stock quantities.

Go to reports and select "Sales by Return On Investment (GMROI) see the red arrow.

Now I am going to use the stationery department in my example,

 

When my report comes up here, I select the export option to put it into excel as I showed you the other day. Once in excel, I sort my excel sheet by the holding $ field. I then deleted everything under $500. Next I sorted by my ROI%. I deleted everything that was in negative there because these items normally mean the data is wrong. I do suggest you review them but this is a different excercise. I then deleted all items with a GMROI of more then 10% which left me with this over $160,000 worth of stock with an average GMROI of 2.45%.

I can review these items see what I got. It is pretty awesome report which I could invent myself. I did not need to convince a programmer in my computer supplier to produce for me. This is the power of adhoc reporting.

 

 

Now if there is significant interest in learning excel to enable you to do ad-hoc reporting like this. please let me know, and I can schedule a webinar to teach you.

Cash Draw Management

POS SOFTWARE

I reckon almost every client I have, would have had employee theft at the cash register. It is very tempting for many as they see large volumes of cash freely available right in front of them.

As a result not only do we have many reports and an advanced security system in our system, but we also offer individual cash drawer control to further protect against employee theft. On the same cash register, we can offer you a method where each employee will have their own personal cash draw. Our system then tracks each of these cash drawers separately.

As each cash draw is tied to a specific employee, t makes the close-of-day less time-consuming for you while also providing employee accountability and financial security.

If you want further security, it can use blind closeout method too with our system.

 

VIP Loyalty Programs

POS SOFTWARE

We have detailed instructions on setting up a Customer Loyalty Program.

 

I think this guide is a great way to get a Loyalty Scheme up and running, with advice on discounts, discount vouchers and points-per-dollar as well!

 

Our software has a very powerful and easy to use Loyalty system, which can dramatically improve your customer traffic and turnover with most importantly tracking.

 

News Limited on statement fees in Victoria

POS SOFTWARE

With everybody asking questions about statement fees, we just received this clarification from News Limited in regard to statement fees.

The only circumstances under which a postage fee can be applied is where the customer has first been offered the option of receiving their account via email with no additional charge, and has instead chosen to receive a hardcopy invoice via Australia Post. HWT can provide a template customer letter for newsagents to use.

Stephen Kaye
Circulation Director
The Herald & Weekly Times
T 03 9292 1221

Victorian newsagents using our software can charge a statement fee as our software can easily be set to these requirements. 

More supplier catalogues

POS SOFTWARE

Our comprehensive supplier catalogue is proving very useful for our clients. As it is getting close to Christmas we are starting to update them for Christmas.

We have put together a 

GNS Christmas 2009 Catalogue
GNS Christmas 2009 Newspower Catalogue

Guide to EDI Returns

POS SOFTWARE

With all of the recent changes to returns processes, POS Solutions has put together a series of help documents to help you get the most out of XchangeIT Link and EDI returns.

These will be released next week

Regards

Garth

Network returns though XChangeIT

POS SOFTWARE

An informative webinar will be held next week to discuss doing network returns using the latest XChangeIT. It will discuss how it works and some issues in the use, that we have found.

It is designed for people that actually do the network returns.

Before doing the course, I suggest that you check out the following two information sheets.

They are titled

EDI Returns via XchangeIT LINK - Quick Guide FINAL

Quick Reference Guide - Shipping Unsolds To Network Services All states FINAL Sept 09

We are holding a webinar, on this too

More information sheets

POS SOFTWARE

We have added more information sheets in the XchangeIT section dealing with returns from network's view. The information is useful to anyone using XchangeIT

They are titled

EDI Returns via XchangeIT LINK - Quick Guide FINAL

Quick Reference Guide - Shipping Unsolds To Network Services All states FINAL Sept 09

 

posbrowser on magazines

POS SOFTWARE

One newsagent looking to upgrade to posbrowser asked me to look at his data to see what his magazine department looks like.

While discussing it, we decided that if a magazine sells about 20 in a shop. A delivery of 25 would be acceptable. However, a delivery of 40 would be unacceptable.

I imported his information of the first quarter of this year into posbrowser and processed it using a business rule, that an acceptable return rate was the greater of one or between 20 and 30% of expected sales.

So I made an excel chart,

I used nil are magazines that come into the shop and posbrowser based on history expects no sales. As you can see 41.6% of all magazines coming into the shop are expected to sell nothing. These did include a few new titles so it was exaggerated slightly but almost all were genuine. A typical example was BRITISH FOOTBALL WEEK. It was coming frequently and selling nothing. These magazines were uselessly labelled, paid for, put on the shelves, a while later they were taken off the shelf, processed as returns, electronically sent by XchangeIT and then physically sent back all at the newsagencies expense. In this newsagency, the worse offender for nil products was Gordon and Gotch with 46% and Network was the best with 33.7%.

Over are those the newsagencies are getting too many. As you can see about 23.8% of magazines are coming in higher amounts then the newsagency would like. RDS were the worst with almost 34.6% of its titles, Gordon and Gotch the best with 14.0%.

Okay were the magazines the newsagency thought got it right. That is 21.7%. Say five titles came in now, only one could be expected to be in a quantity that this newsagency wanted.

Unders were those magazines that posbrowser thought the newsagency did not get enough. About 13.4% of magazine titles, the newsagency needs more.

Clearly, with these figures, posbrowser could make an immediate improvement in his magazine department.

Laser or barcode printers ?

POS SOFTWARE

Recently several of our clients contacted me about getting our software changed so that magazine labels can be printed on a laser printer, as they feel it is cheaper; I, personally, am not so sure that it is cheaper. Still, since we always provide our users with choices, we are creating an update that will do this. The patch should be available in a few weeks.

My thoughts are that since barcode printers do not use ribbons, ink or toner they are cheaper to run. The labels have all the relevant
information on them. Barcode printers are easy and quick to use. You just put the labels in and away you go. Peeling them off is simple.

Let us look at laser printers.

Many of our users have used other systems that print using laser printed labels, so I asked them.

The biggest problem with laser printers is waste. Laser printers print on a whole page so they are not ideal for small batches of labels.

This struck me a few days ago when I met a newsagent using another system. An incredible number of perfectly good label sheets were in the rubbish bin.

I decided to write a simulation program on waste, the kind you could expect, assuming you print several runs a day. As you can see the waste is increasing dramatically! Total sheets are shown in red. Incomplete ones are shown in blue.

Clearly with laser printers you need to do a few print runs as possible per day because of the wastage rate increases dramatically.

Seeing the number of unused labels remaining on the scrap sheet I asked them why they didn’t reuse these perfectly good labels. They replied that they tried. However, first they had to estimate how many dummy labels they needed, then waste toner by printing a dummy batch and then print the labels they needed. It was messy. Also, the labels themselves would curl up inside the printer if the label sheet was reused.

I then asked why they were using an expensive label sheet. They replied that they could get cheaper sheets but were reluctant to use them as sometimes the labels leave traces of gum inside the laser printer causing it to jam. I too noticed this when I looked at the gum residue left behind by the more expensive label sheets.
The other problem was it was a bit of an art to getting the paper lined up correctly in the laser printer. If it is not correctly lined up it causes problems.

Although it did not concern them, I do know that laser printer manufacturers may void your warranty if something goes wrong because you put label sheets through the laser printer.

The laser labels are not as good. Not surprising, as a barcode printer is made for labels and can print finer details. See for yourself by checking the middle and the bottom labels.

Also, in newsagencies, labels need to endure rough treatment, rubbing and sunlight. Labels need to be read by people and by the barcode scanner. So I ran my fingernail several times over our laser printed label and our barcode printer label. See how the laser printed label on top smudged quickly? The barcode label printed below, despite even worse treatment, was unaffected.

Finally, laser printed labels darken faster with age. I noticed this particularly on the cookbooks.

If you look at this page, which I used in a previous blog for the running costs of a laser printer, you can see that it varies from 3.5 cents to 7.5 cents a page. The figures for labels are an underestimation as label paper is much dearer than plain paper, also toner and drums costs are much higher as they use more ink. Printing many pages of labels can be a very expensive exercise solely in terms of ink and toner costs.

Of course, no printer is perfect for all types of printing but a barcode printer should be used for small runs.

With Posbrowser you can use either a barcode printer or a laser printer or a combination.

The choice is yours with posbrowser.

Helping a user with their magazines department

POS SOFTWARE

One user who recently came to us, decided to go over his magazine department to weed out those magazines that are not profitable. He asked me to help. So we decided to use one extremely powerful feature of posbrowser, its profitability section. It has become an interesting exercise.

We immediately identified that this newsagency had over the past year had sales data for 813 magazines. Immediately we saw that six magazines were so badly shoplifted the newsagency lost money on them. In those areas they are displayed, the newsagent is now thinking of putting in security cameras. About another 120 had either no recorded sales. Some the newsagency just returned them without displaying them or they were displayed but never sold. We also found many that had such bad data that we could not work with them. That left us 687 magazines to examine.

We then compared the profit to the average stockholdings using

Return on investment (ROI) = Profit/ (Average stockholding)

The graph is here.

<all graphs have been removed>

As you can see there is very little relation between how much stockholding of a magazine you have compared to the profit. If you look at the right side of the graph, you can see the problem. Many magazines with high stockholding are returning little and are just eating overdraft.

Of these 687 magazines, only 474 made the newsagency more than 10%. The newsagency was paying more on bank interest than in sales on the remaining 213 magazines. You can see the graph of the ROI% compared to number of magazines. Note all magazines with more than 49% ROI are listed here with 50% plus.

Since the newsagent believed a 25% return on investment (ROI) was required, we tested that too and found that only 296 magazines made more than 25% ROI.

He is now in the process of rearranging his magazine section.

I felt like giving up today on some newsagents suppliers.

POS SOFTWARE

The first is a well-known supplier of inkjets. We have told them 100,000 times of the problem with the files they have been sending out to newsagents. Yesterday they send another problem file to a client. After much frustration, the client rings us up, with a request “Just get it so it usable.” I am not surprised he had problems. What do you think of a barcode number 9.3E+12, it happens because someone in the supplier’s office has saved an excel spreadsheet wrongly. The supplier fixed that. We then patch this file so the computer can import. When testing the importing, we get warning that errors are everywhere. What do we find, duplicate barcodes everywhere! Heaps of products have the same barcode, with different prices. Newsagents are going to scan it and have wrong prices in the register. A barcode must have only one retail price. What am I suppose to do here? The newsagent is ringing us up every hour to tell us how frustrated he is that he cannot scan his inkjet. So I create a file talking out the low priced item if there are several barcodes. At least now, it scans. But I know what will happen when the higher price comes up. The customer will complain, the newsagents will look very bad. But it is that or no scanning.

The next that aggravated me was John Sands. They still do not have categories neither does Hallmark. Promises and promises and nothing from both to show for it after almost a year!

Yesterday a client rings up after importing John Sand’s electronic catalogue; his cards are now scanning with wrong prices. He has stopped scanning them. It turns out it is the file so we get another file from John Sands. It comes today. After importing this file more than 50% of the John Sand’s are not scanning. Patching up the file we get him scanning. Although some problems remain so we are too afraid to release the file to everyone.

The next one was another John Sands card file. A client rings up today frustrated. He tried to import in this file. It will not come in. We try many things but nothing works. So he sends us the file. I think it is special cards as it contains cards items that I have never seen. Again a file is wrong. I have to patch the file up before my client can import it in. Once he has this patched file, I am sure it will be fine.

Now, why do newsagents and we have to put up with this? I estimate that three newsagents, one support staff at POS and I have wasted because of supplier’s incompetence almost all of today and some of yesterday.