What we are seeing is a massive shift in consumer buying behaviour. The public now is moving online at an astounding rate. 

Many of our clients have shown that people like yourself can have viable online stores. Online you (David) can compete with Goliath.

Want to know more?

As it is now crucial for your business to shift partly to an online eCommerce business so we would love for you to attend our next webinar on this topic.

Everyone is welcome to participate.

To join, go to https://www.facebook.com/POSSOLUTIONSAU/Live on Thursday 15 April 2021 at 2:00 PM Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST)

Hope to see you then.

While you are there, why not go to the POS Solutions Facebook Page and like us? That way you will be informed on future webinars too.

Have you ever investigated issuing your own gift cards in your shop?  

It widely used in Pet Shops where many of my clients use our point-of-sale system to sell their own gift cards. It is straightforward and easy to do. 

They use it as it increases sales and helps generate repeat business. 

Here are a few advantages.

1) Customer with a gift card often visit the shop more than once to redeem the card balance? 

2) Most gift card buyers and recipients tend to buy more than the face value of a  gift card. Studies show about 30% more.

3) Some gift cards are never claimed, so becoming pure profit. Industry figures are about 2%. If your average margin is 25%, then that increases your margin to 26.5% 

4) You can use them instead of a discount, offer say for every $50 purchased, a $5 gift voucher free.  It's a better deal for you than a $5 discount.

5) They make good discount voucher, better than giving away money.

6) Expand your market. Rather than give local charity money, why not provide them with a gift voucher to entice them to shop with you.

Take a look at it and let me know.

Go to cash register section > Gift vouchers.

Did you know when you at the cash register, you can split a payment?

Splitting the bill with several people is commonly used by our restaurant clients. It can help any industry. 

Unfortunately, most retailers dislike it. It takes time to divide up the bills as it always promotes discussion. Doing the payment takes longer. Plus it makes it hard to assign responsibility to anyone if the payment goes wrong.   Another point in restaurants is that people that split bills tend to be lousy tippers. 

Still, it can be helpful if someone has not got enough cash to pay for an item. Well, why not let them pay using cash and on a credit card?  

Also, many of your customers do like it. Many do often want to pay only for their bit. 

However, it is an excellent point of sale (POS) feature and the software will help you work out the correct amounts per person.

Try it out, and I am sure you will find it useful.

If you deal with people that buy in groups, you will find it soon a necessity.

A lot of us are wondering if remote work is the future? Retailers with large offices near are wondering if these customers are coming back? Retailers selling to home offices are wondering if these customers are staying. 

Well, Google had much to do with setting up remote working with its Google Meeting product. It was also one of the first company to convert to remote work. It has decided that it wants its employees back to the office at least three days a week.  It has rejected remote working. So everyone is advised to get the Covid-19 vaccine, but it's not mandatory (yet?). If employees want to continue to work remotely after Sept 1st, they have to apply for more than 14 days per year. They are also talking of pay cuts for employees that continue to work remotely as they are less productive. The problem from what I understand is co-ordinating staff if they work remotely.

Amazon has come up with a similar decision. It also wants its staff back.

As an employer, who has had to run the office remotely, I can relate to this. How are you supposed to manage when you really do not know what people are doing? How are you train someone if they are not there? There are times when it's just so better to have everyone there to discuss a problem. Another problem is that many people at home do not have an area and facilities to run a home office. 

After the experience with remote working, we have decided for our customers' needs that we need one or more support people, a hardware and software expert always in our headquarters at all times. 

Other big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter have now decided to allow most but not *all* remote work to continue.  

These are tech companies whose work is much easier to do remotely than companies. So, I would not be so sure that remote working is the future? If it does, as Google shows, it may come with a pay cut. Another issue is that I am thinking about is if an Australian worker can do the work from home, I am sure many Australian employers feel that Indians and Filipinos have homes too!

Currently, in Australia, because of our troubled vaccination drive, US is at 40%, we are at 2%, we probably will not see a decision soon on all of this?

Anyone have any thoughts let me know?

We offer in your POS Software, a professional systematic retail counter management!

Consider this your counter is where people are buying. In retail, it's much easier to sell someone something if they are already buying something. This presents you with an opportunity to increase your sales.

It is the destination point for your shop.

At that spot, think of what you can offer your customers.

Your suppliers know this. If you let them, almost all your suppliers will get you to put their product on the counter.  Great for them but not for you a good strategy.  

Any item on the counter should be marked to the counter for monitoring. This is your prime area, make a philosophy that for an item to be on the counter, it must be good. To do this, you need to track the sales of these products.

Here are some points for the counter here.

-Try to make the counter bigger. The bigger the counter, the more you can sell here.

-Remember to experiment. Only the best products survive here.  

-Go to large shops that sell items like you. Note what they offer here and how they present it. This will give you some ideas immediately.  

-This area is for impulse-inspired sales. It needs stock items that attract customer attention. What you want are products that do not make much debate by the customer. They should be items that customers want or need, such as novelty items, hand-sanitiser,  plush toys, etc. 

-You need items at your customers' price point.  You will need to experiment with this as the price point on the counter are different to the shop.

Every week or so, go to cash register reports > Sales stock > Sales by Store location for a given period as above.

Put in a reasonable time frame. Start longer than you think you should use. As you bed down, the counter management gradually move to a better period.  Now study this report. Over time you will see a lot of good information.

Try it now and let me know how it goes.

The COVID-19 situation in Queensland now is showing that these sudden lockdowns are still happening. This is despite the vaccine rollout which unfortunately we are way behind on schedule. These shutdowns are causing havoc with our clients. This is particularly with those that deal with perishable products. I have a client now throwing out three days of food. He told me he could not justify buying quality food in his restaurant now with this happening?

If the rollout doesn't work or takes too long, retail, I am sure, will pay a heavy price again. I doubt the public know how devastating these restrictions and lockdowns can be.

This is made worse by the attitude of many landlords now toward retailers.   To be fair, many landlords have much to be worried about eg JobKeeper has ended. They know this will hit their clients, some directly but all indirectly. Then there is also the removal of the laws that allowed people to trade while insolvent. 

It is a good time if you rent to negotiate with the landlord. 

Still, there is a lot of optimism. 

People have much in savings. Plus people now want to go out. There is nice weather now, which is unusual for this time of year, which helps. I intend to join them outside, so I am taking a few days off too. I will do some blogging, but that is it. If you need me unless it is urgent, please call someone else at POS Solutions. This is the first break I have had since COVID hit, and I am looking forward to a few days off. 

I hope you have a good Easter and stay safe. 

We all in this together.

We provide free in our software an Asset Register. This is because businesses of any size need to manage a variety of assets.

An asset register is a listing of all your fixed assets. This then is used to summarise both accounting and deductible taxation depreciation expenses. Your accountant then uses this to calculate the book values of your assets. 

One point I do recommend that you should mark your assets with a permanent sticker. This practice can be a valuable loss prevention tool.

I would recommend non-removable metal stickers work well or use an engraver.

The metal stickers are dearer but look better. What you want is your asset number and your name on the label.  

Engravers are about $35 in your hardware. They do not look as nice.  It does take longer too. 

Using it will be a great way of keeping you better organised.

 Refrigerated items such as packaged foods products require you to do special handling.

- It also requires sometimes for you to prominently mark on your label something like “Perishable - Keep Under Refrigeration.” 

- It often requires close monitoring of these items once they pass a certain date. Then they must be transferred to a secondary location so they can be sold at a discount price. Then this has to be monitored as after a certain time they often require to be tossed. 

So what can you do about it?

What we recommend is that you identified and mark these refrigerated items. 

This is so you just by looking at the item on the screen know that these items may require special handling.

You’d do it like this:

Go to stock maintenance in your point of sale software -> Edit marked them as in the red box.

Just another example of how our software has useful items that you can use.

There is a tremendous increase in computer hardware sold. We have been moving heaps. Here above are some pictures of yesterday.

The big problem is the troubled supply line because of COVID. 

This is partly because of the increase in the tax concessions for computer hardware now available. So now accountants are advising their clients to buy as they can write off more. You can probably writeoff a lot of money now. 

It is also because new computers are much better than the previous ones. Some of the new AMD ryzen and Intel chips are a qualitative leap in technology. We see a 50% increase in raw speed on benchmarking. This is together with their dramatic price decrease. In a typical retail system, upgrading one computer, the server can increase the systems speed. So if you get one computer, make the old server a new cash register, and you have a more extensive and faster computer system.  

Also what people are doing is moving from the older hard drives to the newer hard drives here that are much faster. It is a low-cost way of increasing your speed.

It is also because of COVID. The lockdowns have forced people to see that they need more than a mobile to meet their technology needs. For example, if you need a home office,  you need a proper computer, large screens and webcams for zoom and printers at home. 

As I said, the biggest problem is the import complications of getting computer hardware into the country. So we have many people just waiting for gear.

If you want to know more give us a call.

- Still manually tracking inventory and sales?

- Are you trying to decide what your sellers are? 

- Need to know how many you need of an item?

Try this. It will take you one second.

Go to stock maintenance. 

Call up an item and then press Summary.

Here you get a detailed historical figure in real-time for any item for the last 24 months on that stock item. View the historical details of the stock item. See its sales trends over the past 24 months. It is excellent for reordering. 

Having our POS Software will make it much easier for you to provide your clients with what they want when they want it.

Before you think it is of little help 1%, let me show you have much of even improvement per year this can make.

Going to the ATO benchmark study they give what I consider the best benchmarking figures for businesses in Australia today free.

Now I picked a hairdresser shop just because it is something most of us can get our head around. Then picked the average for everything. I put it into an excel spreadsheet and then made a new column for 1% improvement.

Bottom line: I got a 25% increase in profit. That is pretty impressive.

How do we do this 1% improvement?

Well, there is an excellent quote in management theory. I learnt that "what gets measured is what gets improved." What we need to do is measure over time. This will tell you where you are, and how you got there. Then how you go compared to others. Then see where you are going if nothing changes. 

And with our POS Software, you have the tool.

Look through our reports for ones that you like, here are some key metrics, I suggest you start with.  

Total Profit
Most would say this is the most critical metric in a shop today. It is the primary method used by people to determine their business value.

Number of Customers (Customer Traffic)
The number of customers in your shop is the most straightforward metric for your retail business. 

Average profit by the sale  
This is always an exciting measure in a shop. Are people that buy more or not?  

Basket size
This shows how productive you are in the shop.

Often these are linked. For example, if you see profit per sale is down by basket size is up. Well, you are pushing the wrong products, or maybe you are overdoing discounts. 

Try giving your business a standard to measure itself for continual improvement.

How Fast is Your POS System?

Industry-standard is 40 seconds a transaction plus three seconds for each item.  So if a sale has three things, the time is about 40 seconds plus three things in their basket which is 9 seconds. Thus you are looking at about 50 seconds. 

Consider this:
 80% of customers state that they are unwilling to wait in line if it takes longer than five minutes. So if your queue is six people, there is an 80% chance someone will walk out.

Sometimes, the retailer needs speed.

So how does your point of sale transaction speed stack up?

I took about 20,000 cash register transactions off one of our client's system.  Here is what the graph above looks like for transaction speeds. As you can see, our average speed of transactions was 36 seconds a sale.  In a pinch, our client was doing much better.

On speed, I am sure we match any system on the market.

Now here are some free and low-cost ideas you can do to speed up the transactions. 

- Often a better arrangement of your computers can help, use your faster computers upfront. 

- Use scanning more. It is faster. Put barcodes on more items.

-Consider having several cash-draws on one computer. Besides having better security, it means in a pinch; you can have more people working the tills.

-Integrate your EFTPOS and use Tap and Go. Besides reducing errors, it is much faster. 

-Use at the counter touchscreens. It is more natural and faster.

-Switch to email and/or our new free SMS receipts. 

Our point of sale system (POS) can allow you to serve more customers faster.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are being implemented by everyone now. 

You can install one, too, as your Software has a CRM inbuilt. This gives you the tools to build thoughtful relationships. It is harder to get new customers than to develop current ones. This is what CRM helps you to do.  We give you the means to know your customers better without the need for extra and costly CRM software.

Your business's best CRM solution is your POS software, as it knows your customers, stock and sales.  So it can often deal automatically to better market to your existing customers and so improve customer value. Also, it targets your audience to provide you with customised marketing campaigns. That makes your front-end sales efforts go further. You will also get access to detailed reports about how much sales and profit are coming in on any campaign.

A POS software CRM system offers you the features that your business needs to expand.

When you deal with a company, generally, you deal with one person there. 

So say you have a question that you want to discuss with this company? What you need to do is get the contact information for that person. Well, you can look at your business card list, which takes time and mucking around. 

Here is a better idea when you get the business card. Call up the company in the creditor section of your POS software. Then add the person's details in the contact section.  You have a lot of space there, so if you need a few, you can add them, eg. 

Accounts Mary 038503186 | Sales  John 0415423787 | 

Now when you need to call, go to your computer, and get their details instantly.

One resource that has exploded now as a result of this pandemic is online learning. There are many lectures and course on almost any subject currently available. Universities, various education institutes, companies, organisations, professors, private people, etc., now do talks, lectures and courses on any subject. We have too. Currently, we do almost all of our training online. Heaps of our clients' now book in for training sessions. Besides being the only way now, it is efficient. 

I am finding some of them helpful eg the Victorian Chamber of Commerce (VCCI) has been running some practical talks, which I have attended. Often it gives me an understanding of the issues. Plus an appreciation of what the authorities are looking at with these issues. I also did an SEO course run by a leading SEO company and an online course on SMB marketing which was excellent.   

Overall the importance of disseminating knowledge has been highlighted through COVID-19. 

Here are some tips which I use.

1) Unless you have some career *resume* reasons, do not worry about doing the course tests or diplomas. 

2) Check first if you can do it when you want. We are not students with the time to fit our lives into a course. We need something we can do, stop at any time and come back too when we have time—no point in signing up for something that is done on a schedule. The kids will scream about something, an important phone call will come through, or some goods will arrive and needs your immediate attention.

3) Try short talks because the odds are we will not have the time or interest to finish. Often what we want is one good idea and then time to digest it. 

4) Try varying the talks. A change is as good as a holiday.

5) I do like YouTubes, as I can listen when I want and stop when I want. I do not know how kids have the strength to keep going for hours of education. I need a break. Forty-five minutes is, for me, the maximum. Then I will often stop, then I have a break and only then come back to it.

6) The other point good about youtube is the comments. Read them as it lets you know what others think about the ideas presented.

For many of us stuck in this pandemic, this online learning has kept us sane.

I have now clients that are doing much of their business with a Buy Now, Pay Later  (BNPL) service. They have little choice as most users of BNPL have stopped using their credit card to spend goods. It makes sense if you hold a BNPL account and say you buy $20 in a shop on EFTPOS, they get surcharged 50 cents, so it costs him $20.50, and they have to pay now. If they buy the same product with a BNPL card, they get it for $20 and gets up to eight weeks to settle. 

The retailer's problem is that the current business model of the BNPL is to charge the retailers the fees. Then demand that the retailer does not pass on these costs. So to the retailer, the immediate problem with BNPL is that they are losing between 3 to 7 percent.  Many products my clients handle cannot afford these fees. 

For some items like Lay-by, most retailers, I see, will accept this loss. This is cheaper than monitoring the Lay-by, plus it avoids the current legal minefield of Lay-bys.

This is about to change with the Big Banks coming in. What the banks will be offering is a much bigger mass distribution of BNPL. According to the CBA bank, they will do a check on someone. If that person is seen as a reasonable risk, which seems to be everyone with an income source, they will offer them a BNPL option. If your customer uses this option, which I believe will work on your existing EFTPOS system, you have no added fees to you, the retailer. I am not sure whether you will know your customer is using BNPL.

If so, the retailer is looking at the BNPL market doubling in size and the fees coming down massively.

It is going to be big!

I did bring up with the CBA but did not answer is many products are not allowed with BNPL, e.g. live animals. We had to change our systems to make BNPL work because of this. Will they be permitted with commbank BNPL? Who knows? If the retailer does not know BNPL is used, how do they enforce this ban?

Cloud computing is incredible.

As this woman above shows, you can be anywhere. This picture was taken at the snow. As long as you have a decent internet connection, you can get into your system. During the COVID lockdown, many clients ran much of their business using the cloud from home. It works great. It is also great for linking if you have several shops into one system. 

Conducting your computer activities through the cloud is now getting more popular. 

Yet, cloud computing depends on your Internet connection. Here are some notable problems with the internet now.

Few people buy high commercial grade internet. I have seen $5,000 a month quoted. For most, it is not worth it, so they buy a cheaper system trusting the claims, which often dubious. If you are our clients, you can call us, and our internet people can help you here. 

Now the internet is under strain since COVID hit. Traffic has skyrocketed. I have clients whose internet often now comes to a halt when it gets busy online. 

When something goes, wrong technicians are harder to get them out to fix the problem. The days of the internet going down and a technician coming the next day is over. It is so frustrating. I know people who have now been waiting for a year to connect to broadband despite being told it was available. 

With the cloud, sometimes it goes quickly and sometimes it takes forever. Get used to that, because it is not changing soon.

In many places, the internet is not up to scratch. 

To make it work, you need all the business-critical software you run on the cloud to have *offline syncing*. If there is a network problem, at least you can work. When the access is restored, the software will automatically sync the files. This way, you run your system on the computers where you are *local mode*. So you have the speed of local computers and the benefit of the cloud.

To do this, you need cloud architecture. It involves emergency internet connections and computers that can handle the replication of data.

We call this hybrid cloud. We have it.

Also if you are running email over the cloud, consider using off-line mode eg Gmail.

Business Interruption Insurance pandemic

Many insurance policies now have a business interruption clause. They sell it to cover a business if it has to close because it cannot function, e.g. fire or flood. Many people thought it covered their business over COVID with this clause. Well, it appears that some insurance companies dispute whether COVID is covered here. A meeting was held by newsagents, to which I was invited about the knock backs on claims by insurance companies on their business claim here. This problem, of course, is not only affecting newsagents. I would say almost all retail was affected. 

The situation now is unclear. We had a case on this in the NSW High Court. The insurance company lost, but it was both a narrow claim and it probably will be appealed to the High Court. The problem is that many insurance policies contain several exclusions. In particular, here for infectious diseases and the question of whether COVID is a *quarantinable* disease. This is yet to be finalised in court. Considering the cost to the insurance companies, I am sure they will test every bit of it.

The other issue is that onus on proving the value of your loss will rest with you. I hope you have your financial figures and documents in order.

Still, if you operated a business covered then under business interruption insurance policy, you have a valid claim even if the insurance company has knocked it back.