Now what has happened that is interesting, Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP five years ago when Tony Abbott was Prime Minister, but occasionally if it is super urgent they will release a patch. So this supercritical patch is available here for Windows XP. Anyone running something later than Windows 7 or later does not need to worry about it as 

This patch is considered very important by Microsoft. If you want to read the technical reasons for this patch, it is here.

What everyone wondering is what is going on as Microsoft like everyone else, including us, uses automatic updates. No-one runs updates manually for 20 years, yet this update is manual. 

Our advice to those who are running Windows XP on a computer is to run it without access to the internet and to be extremely careful what they put on it.  We think its best that they put nothing on it because it is incredibly vulnerable to viruses.

All major retailers, when you meet them one report that you see that they use all the time is a comparison report of what they did in the last previous period, to the same period last year. So what they will show you now is a report that shows the year 2018 Q1 compared to 2019 Q1 and a column of percentage changes. Then the question they will discuss what was different, why did these figures change?

We have written a report almost exactly the same as one produced by a major retailer to give our clients this report. It is called the dissection comparison report.

What it does is compares by several measurements of the sales of stock items in different period.

Go to 

Main Menu > Cash Register > Register Reports > under the Select Report tab, expand the Stock folder > select the report “Dissection Family Class Period Sales Comparison”.

Now you will see this screen.

What I suggest you measure the first three months of this year with the first three months of last year to see how your sales are changing over time. The two measures that I recommend that you check are the quantity and profit percentage changes. There are many other key performance indicators (KPIs) listed too there, which can make interesting reading. From this, you can determine whether the problem is prices, your margins, your sales quantities etc. If you want you can check your figures to the Australian Bureau of statistics but do not use the seasonally adjusted figures as you have the actual figures here.

Now once you have bedded down that part of the report, check out the More Criteria tab marked with a green arrow. There is a lot more there.

 

You have probably come across the ABC inventory analysis called often the 80/20 rule or sometimes the Pareto Principle.

What it is, is that no matter what you measure, website hits, advertising expenditure, pilot kills in war, shop sales, political influence, etc. It all seems to come down to something like this that somewhere about 20% of the total gives about 80% of the results.

So everyone wants to find the 20% because that is giving almost all the results.

* 20% of your customers will bring you 80% of your business

* 20% of your products will bring you 80% of your business 

* 20% of your staff give you 80%

* 20%  of your advertising gives you 80% of the results.

* 20% of the shop fittings give you 80% of your business 

And so.

Now in inventory control, the ABC method identifies this and divide all your stock into three groups.

The first we call the category A-lines. They are the most valuable stock items you have. These are 20% of your lines that give you your 80% sales and profits.

 We then have the category B lines. They do pay for themselves but not a lot.  As a rule, they are about 30% of your lines and account for about 20% of your sales and profit.

Finally, we have the category C lines, which typically are about 50% of your stock lines and give about 5% of your sales and profit. They also usually take up most of the shop's funds.

Now the idea of the ABC stock control method is to identify your A, B and C items and then 

* A lines should be monitored all the time. You do not want any out of stock situations with them. 

* Your C-lines should be pruned if possible if they must be kept then, reduce the stock holding on them

* Your B-lines do pay their way, but you would not go out and order a lot.

Now if you go to stock reports > select stock N sales for a given period, choose now as a number of items 30,000 as we want every item.

Now run this report with a decent period. I would suggest running the report by profit, but this may depend on your business philosophy as some may prefer a number of units sold.

Now the first two pages of the report will be your A-lines, on those you need to concentrate. 

The last 80% of the pages, you should ask yourself, do I need these lines?

I did some reports recently for one of our clients a lottery agency, and I used excel to produce some graphs that will show you I think quite dramatically how it works as it makes interesting reading. They had in the shop 21,000 stock lines.

The number of sales ranked in order of top selling lines.

20% of the sales were from 2 stock lines about 0.01% of the stock lines 

50% of the sales came from 45 stock lines about 0.21% of the stock lines 

80% of the sales came from 4615 lines approximately 21.76% of the stock lines 

Here is the profit percentage by stock lines

​

20% of the profit was from 135 about 0.64% of the stock lines 

50% of the profits came from 1,873 about 9.35% of the stock lines 

80% of the profits came from 7,374 approximately 34.78% of the stock lines 

See how you go and as always let me know if you find something interesting.

NASA's Mars 2020 Rover is heading to the red planet and if you click here you can submit your name and it will be stored on a memory chip in Mars when it arrives.

Makes a nice gift for someone.

It is a shame we cannot convert these frequent flyer points to QFF or Virgin?

One of the most time-consuming tasks and daunting tasks in retail is setting the right price, the next is trying to justify your prices to a customer who comes in and suddenly makes an issue as what the price of a product was and why now is it different. Another example would be a supplier rep who is now in the store or phone, and you need to check old costs.

So we have made a unique screen to help you so you can get the answer instantly. 

In the stock item, you will find a Price Change screen marked in green above. 

Now when you click that, you get another screen with the cost price shown in red and see the blue arrow, you have your retail price. 

Now you have a full history of the costs and retail prices, and you can go up and down by dates. This can help you determine your retail pricing strategy to use in determining the right price for your products.

Note: You also get a lot more information on the screen and on the bottom which I will discuss later.

What they are doing now more are paying by debit card and the new alternative methods. Of the alternative methods, the fastest growing is Alipay. Although I have no current figures, about a year ago in 2018 10,000 merchants around Australia were offering Alipay as a payment method. ​

What has been happening is that consumers in Australia have been rapidly changing from cash to other forms of payments. 

Look at the alternative payment figures, Alipay it is the fastest growing segment in this category. What Alipay is, is the largest online payment platform in China. It has been snowballing in China for years and now is the preferred payment method for Chinese students and tourist in Australia.

Studies have shown that  99% of Chinese tourists in Australia have Alipay.  In 2018, Alipay transaction volume in Australia increased by 110% and using Alipay the amount spent per person was up by 40% and its a wide range of products that they buy here. 

The Alipay fees are comparable to many VISA and Mastercard transactions now, and there is no cost to switch on so for our clients, I cannot see it as anything else but a no-brainer to try it out.

So we are pleased that we are offering a direct integration of Alipay. It will work through Tyro EFTPOS which as Tyro has no fees or contracts, so it is easy for any of our clients to add this payment type if they want it. If you are interested, let me know.

Research indicates that customers want simple rather than complex and if it starts to get too complicated that many people tend not to choose, so giving you a no sale rather than a purchase.

Now with this in mind, consider if you make a hamper or pack name.

In stock pricing, you will find this under hamper packs. See the green arrow.

Naming your hamper or pack is a good idea (see red square) as long as you make the name understandable and straightforward. Say you are in office stationery why make a name like "The flying carpet pack". Besides this name telling your customer nothing and so confusing them with something meaningless, it makes it complicated.

Make it simple with something they can identify with, eg "Secondary Student Plan", "Home Office Plan" or "Kindergarten Pack."

Another idea that works very well is to make a "Starter Pack", "Small Pack", "Medium Pack" and a "Large Economy Pack". 

The same idea applies to syndicates.

It is a great way to upsell.

I have a question!

This is a prediction made from an *expert* the day before the election.

Labor to win by about 11 seats! This was a typical prediction.

Okay this is my question how could the polls, from every company, the private polls done, the polls done from the political parties and the exit polls on the election day all get the same result which is so badly wrong?

Today in modern retail, a shop can make many extra sales by extending itself into the online space. This is because many modern customers want to choose when they want to buy?

This is where modern retail is heading!

To do that a shop needs a consistent customer experience between your online and brick-and-mortar shop. Customers have to interact with the shop in both places. They need to view online as part of your brick-and-mortar shop one company.

What is very popular today and what you need is Click and Collect

Where they buy online but pick it up in store? 

One popular solution is to combine the power of the point of sale software with Shopify this we can help.

What to know more click here.

Our point of sale software is one of the most popular systems used by Toy and Hobby sellers in Australia. Which is quite an endorsement as very few systems in Australia, in my view, can handle Toy Stores.

One of my clients here invited me to the little war expo in Melbourne which is advertised and almost certainly as the "premier event for wargaming in Australia". It was packed when I came.

Here are some pictures, what it does show is the extensive range of stock items and the need for advanced category management in the Toy and Hobby industry that our system has.

Each game can have over a hundred different pieces you can buy, from many different suppliers, plus often the retailer will make their own products. It can very very difficult to keep it under control. The other issue is the customers are equally diverse, WW2 naval enthusiasts are not going to be interested in ancient Roman battles or probably not even WW2 air battles.

Enjoy the pictures

These Post Apocalyptic Models, I found to be of extremely high quality, I particularly like the plane. I would say that this is not just a hobby but a work of art.

This game took about seven (7) people to play, and I was told that they could have used another two players. 

Like so many, there many brought their kids who enjoyed themselves too.

This air battle game came in a WW1 and WW2 version.

Today almost every one of our clients uses thermal receipt printers although there is a going trend by retailers to use electronic receipts. It is cheaper, many customers prefer it as it does not fade and it is easy to store when they need it, and it gives the retailer client information for their loyalty program. So I expect that soon the paper receipt will go partly because of the trees and the lack of use. Soon in the US, I expect in many places it will be mandatory that a retailer must be able to do electronic receipts are compulsory on all retailers with Australia then following.

However, currently, we all use paper receipts so now sometimes I get asked for how much does the paper cost for a thermal receipt printer as let's face it the purchase price of the printer is only one cost.

This is a hard question to answer as it depends on many factors.

* How many receipts do you print? If you use electronic receipts, it will be very low.

* Do you print extras, eg do you print advertisements on the receipt, do you print discount vouchers, do you print heading with logos, etc. All this will add up. I would not write this part off immediately as if you notice the major retailers e.g. supermarkets who have done the maths like to print long receipts with advertisements so it must pay them to do it.

* What is your buy price on receipt paper? 

* Wastage rate of receipt paper, I have seen people that buy a big lot of very cheap receipt printer, only to discover that when its time to use it, that many of rolls are useless as they are ruined. 

* What sort of image are you prepared to give your shop, a low-quality receipt paper looks cheap. You may want something better.

* How many are you willing to buy, I have noticed that receipt rolls are much less expensive if you are prepared to buy in bulk plus the delivery costs are much cheaper per roll if you buy in bulk. 

Firstly what you need is the number of receipts you print a day, if you do not know that you can use this calculation

How many transactions do you do in a period, your point of sale system should tell you this? 

As a guess what percentage of your transactions, do you need to print a receipt?     

Number of receipts a day = ( Transactions per period) x (Percentage of transactions where a receipt is printed) / (the number of days in a period)

The bigger the period you work with, the more accurate your figure will be.

Now you need an estimate of your receipt printer roll costs. I would expect that it would be somewhere between $2 to $10 a roll, so what are your rolls cost each?

How long are your rolls generally it is about 16 ft (for some reason it has not gone metric), but it works out to about 120 cm.

How big are your receipts? A typical figure is about 5 to 20 cm.

So your daily paper costs= (Number of receipts a day) x (Cost of your receipt roll) x  (Length of your receipt) /  (Length of receipt roll)

- It will add up say you do a hundred receipts a day

- Say you buy at $3.5 roll of 16 ft about 488 cm

- Say a receipt length is about 10 cm

 It works out to about $7.17 a day.

Over a year it is about $2,582

Free checks!

We have recently purchased for our website business, a professional web site checking software that can audit websites. What it is designed to do is check for problems in a website such as these sort of errors. Besides making your website look unprofessional, it will hurt your internet traffic.

What this program does is scans your website examining the heaps of details on the site. This process without such software can take many hours and even days. Our website with the use of this software took almost two weeks.

What I do say about my company and what I am very proud of and what I say is that many people can sell you a website, but we do know what we are talking about. I personally have not come across a point of sale company that has as much professionalism as ours.

It's not an accident either and I practice this myself.

If you are a client of ours, want a professional scan done of your website, please let us know, and we will do one free for you. 

Here are seven tips to improve your barcode scanning rates at the point of sale.

Experiment with your scanner what height it reads best the barcodes that you use. This will vary depending on what barcodes you use and your barcode reader. Take a few items, try and scan them and see what works best.

Try if possible to avoid scanning the barcodes in places with bright lights eg outside on a sunny day and clients of mine in a bar have reported problems with the lights flashing in the bar. What you want is a low steady continuous light.

Make a convention in your shop where you are going to stick the barcode, front, top, back, etc and try to stick with it and if possible this will save people having to hunt for the barcode.

Try an put the barcode straight, as well as making it less of an eyesore, sometimes not having the barcode straight can cause problems to a scanner to read the barcode.

Try and avoid putting barcodes on shiny objects, for example, a product like this when scanned as the light will reflect back into the scanner can cause problems. 

Cleaning your barcode scanner and printer can help a lot. A rag and some cleaning material can often do wonders.

Remember dirty or wet barcodes or barcodes with staples are not good for scanning. 

Note: A better printer and barcode scanner can help too. 

Now as it is coming close to the End Of Financial Year when people often decide to upgrade their POS computer systems, many people are wondering whether to buy a cheaper i5 or the faster i7 computer or whether to splurge on the i9. Now there are several technical advantages that the i7 and i9 has over the i5, eg  Hyper-Threading which will give a significant performance boost in point of sale software processing.

The first point to remember is that the difference in price is not that great between the i5 and the i7, but there is quite a lot of difference in price between these two and the i9. Also that there are many points that go into buying a computer and the speed of the processor is just one of several factors, eg a faster hard drive.  But for this article, I will concentrate solely on the speed of the computer.

On this site, I ran some results from the large number of speed tests done.

Now as far as speed is concerned we are not looking at gaming, in point of sale software, most of the work is done primarily on the workstation. 

The i9 gave 124% on the workstation compared to the i7 at 96%, effectively 29% higher which is quite a considerable speed increase. 

Similarly, on the same system configuration, I decided to test an i7 to an i5.

The i7 gave 96% on the workstation compared to the i7 at 76%, effectively almost 26% higher which is quite a considerable speed increase. 

Interestingly the speed increase of going up from an i5 to an i7 is about the same as going from an i7 to an i9.

That sort of speed increase you will notice. When we did some tests internally here we found that this speed increase resulted in about a 10% speed increase, mainly because as I said there are many other factors like the hard drive that come into play here.

Still for an hour task on an i5 you would be looking at about 54 minutes on an i7 and about 48 minutes on an i9.

Since a point of sale software tend to run continuously over an 8 to 24 hour day, this time saving would quickly add up.

Ultimately it is a choice many of you will need to make, I would say for the slight difference in price not to look at the i5 but make a decision between the i7 and i9. As over the lifetime of the computer, you would more than get your money back just on time saved 

 As far as I know, we are the only offering bitcoin as a payment type in our marketplace. We are in the process of upgrading it too as we feel there is a need here for this payment type. 

For those that live on the far side of the moon and are not keeping up to date with bitcoins, what they are is a form of cryptocurrency that can be used like any other currency to purchase goods. They are also for those that want to invest dangerously a popular way of investment that is more valuable than gold.
 

Say you had brought a bitcoin, five (5) years ago, it would have cost you about $700 Aust, three (3) years later at the end of 2017; you would have been able to sell that bitcoin for $23,000, then the price fell to at the end of April it was about $7,300. A fall like that would hurt, but now it is about $8,500 and rising so in the last ten (10) days made $1,200. Like I said they invest dangerously.  

From the consumer's view, there are many advantages to using bitcoin. What I particularly like is that it is a quick, hassle-free payment involving no third parties, which is often cheaper in fees.

There are some issues with using it in the shop if you accepted it as a payment type in your shop a bitcoin. 

The first question do you use bitcoin if the answer is yes or no. If yes, then you use this bitcoin to buy something, there is no transfer fee. It's a plus as effectively the customer has paid the transfer fee for you.

But if you do not use it, if you sell someone an item with bitcoin, and you do not use bitcoins you have to transfer that money to cash? If so I will need to pay a transfer fee.

Now the first problem with cashing it in is that with such a volatile currency (4%) here is today's daily chart.

In comparison, the Aust/USA currency had 0.35% movement.

So most that handle bitcoin want a transfer immediately, but this is difficult as fees like most payment methods are much more for fast transfers, for a transaction I was quoted to do a transfer to Australian currency.

* In 10 minutes would cost me $1.32

* In 30 minutes, the fee was $1.29

* In 1 hour, the fee was $1.04

If I did ten (10) transfers a day, over a year, it starts adding up.

Furthermore, if your customer is using bitcoin to pay well, you are going to have to wait until you get your money.  

Even so, now there is another problem, in that fees like many other money transfers depend very much on how much you are changing over, for example; a well-known bit coin exchange quotes the following costs. 

* If the total transaction amount is less than or equal to $10, the fee is $0.99.

* If the total transaction amount is more than $10 but less than or equal to $25, the fee is $1.49.

* If the total transaction amount is more than $25 but less than or equal to $50, the fee is $1.99.

* If the total transaction amount is more than $50 but less than or equal to $200, the fee is $2.99

So most people will collect the bitcoins and do it in one transfer so they take the gamble and wait.

I will be discussing in more in future posts but if anyone wants to know more now please let me know.

 

In a survey in the last "Global Retail Theft Barometer" is released, which is the most significant and authoritarian report in the world on shop theft and supplier losses in retail businesses, it came up with a percentage breakdown in Australia by type.

• Dishonest employees will be about 25%
• External - shoplifting (39%)
• Administrative (accounting mistakes, pricing errors and process failures) about 23%
• Supplier fraud (no delivering what they said) 13%

The last two, in particular here, what it shows is that in those surveyed about 36% of the total losses are in the supply chain. This shows the importance of a good computer system in retail for stock control. 

Now the first item which I will discuss today on this is the problem of duplicate supplier codes. One problem is that you order and the process by supplier codes. The problem is that many suppliers have for various reasons what you consider different products with the same supplier code. As such you could easily order in the wrong product. 

Now go to reports

Select duplicate supplier codes by supplier.

Now select the basic report, we can discuss the extras later.

Now out will appear this report

In it, you will have a listing of items by supplier code for you to investigate and hopefully fix.

Best get started with it.

Two years ago, the Australian retail world was in panic mode as Amazon was coming directly into Australia. Retailers here had seen how powerful Amazon had become in other countries such as England when they came direct and were worried that their world was coming to an end. It did not end but the ripples are being felt across Australia’s retailers' industry. The big plus that Amazon had was their range of goods and loyalty program. The big problem with Amazon's model in Australia is our overpriced delivery system. I can buy online and get free postage from China but I have to wait while for a similar product from an Australian supplier, I need to pay a large delivery fee and can get it in a few days. This is where the traditional Australian brick and mortar retailer needs to look at they can provide using Omnichannel instant free delivery through a website with a click and buy model. 

That it works for SMB retailers, yes and I have figures to prove it. We have websites that our clients are using integrated into our software that is more than just paying their way. 

Want to know more, click here.

If you want an example of how quickly the economy is moving, look at cheques? 

In 2015, when I looked at a few of my clients' information cheques made up about 20% of all payments. Since then it has dramatically fallen. 

Today its become so minor in retail that one of our competitors has announced that they are pulling out support for cheques. They may be right as so many of my clients have stopped taking cheques mainly as so many people now days do not have or do not use a cheque account.

If current usage trends continue, I expect in retail as a payment method it will disappear entirely by the end of this year. Then we will review the situation.

What it enables you to do is backing up your data, to an online storage service. Popular services include Dropbox, OneDrive (which is my favourite) and Google Drive.

When I first started talking about low-cost or free online backup for point of sale available, many of my competitors were negative. I suspect as they wanted to sell the dearer one. 

Today almost all my clients use such a service, and most of my competitors offer such services in their software. 

Some of the pluses would be 

• Your backup can be largely automated.
• It is safer as it is off-site so even if the shop burnt down and every backup was lost; you would still have a copy.
• Data can be easily transported from one computer to another say at home.

However, we recommend all our clients use cloud back up *ONLY* as a secondary and last emergency service as some of the minuses would be 

• Online storage services sometimes do lose data, do not believe just because Microsoft has your data that it is safe. One of my clients lost most of their backups when one staff left and removed the store's Microsoft 365 licence from her home computer. You still need to watch it.
• It can take a long time to do the backup. A 1.5 Gigabyte point of sale date file at 512 Kps (which is a good rate) will take about 7 hours. While it is happening, your internet will slow down dramatically. 
• People tend to take it for granted once it is back up to the online site that it is okay. Not necessarily. I have seen corrupt backups from the cloud. The data can be faulty just like any other backup system. The backups still need to be checked.
• The free cloud services probably will not provide you with an automated solution from what is today a significant problem - ransomware attacks.  

This is one of these fun holidays celebrated on the First Thursday in May every year.

It was created to awareness of how important it is to take care of your passwords. In my experience, all data breaches, that I have seen and I have seen quite a lot has been caused by bad password security.  

For example, we had someone who had their passwords on a sheet of paper that was stuck on the wall near the computer and anyone who came into the office could read it.

If you want to know some figures on what a data breach could cost you, click here.

Change passwords. 

Do not use the same passwords for all your sites.

Try and make each of your passwords as long and unique as possible.

If this is too hard, have you considered using a password manager? My favourite one is lastpass.

@passwday