The GNS show is looking a lot busier than we thought it would be. We have had a huge interest in the Gordan and Gotch Returns Reconciliation and what people have definitely noticed is that we are the ONLY POS company showing dedication to the Newsagency channel by exhibiting. We are all looking forward to today, and hopefully it will be as busy as yesterday.

A few of my clients realised too late that they had missed out on extra sales due to World Chocolate Day. One that did promote it, told me that the sales today are very good on chocolate, the public really got behind it.

What it shows is that you have to follow the latest trends, it is not enough to use your reporting in the point of sale software with its low-stock alerts, because some days can if you push it, produce extraordinary sales.

Well finally, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has put a cap on the interchange fees. As such you should see on your EFTPOS fees a reduction on the card fees for the more expensive premium cards. Furthermore, check to see if you are going to pay more for the regular Visa and MasterCard debit and EFTPOS which some providers are passing on to the merchant.

Most importantly I do suggest that you do check to see overall, what are your new Merchant Service Fee?

What is happening now is that either because of user errors but mainly because of fault data in the electronic downloads, what is happening is that items are going on sale when they should not be? This of course costs the retailer money.

Please do not worry as we have a report that can help you and if you have such a problem, this report will show it.

Go to register reports> stock

There you will find a report "Stock on Sale Between a Given Period"

Now there are a lot of options there to help you, but I will keep it simple but I think that it's worth going through some of the more detailed options later.

Now what I selected was this month and note I ticked too "Show all within period"

Now what appears is this report.

As you can see some of the sales dates that are active are really quite old. Now I suggest you go over and check it. As its an ad-hoc report, you can edit it on the report itself, put notes on it, sort it by any order you like, etc., etc. Try it, and you will find the flexibility in our point of sale software is incredible.

Windows 10 updates can be a pain, and after my recent post on this another option came up that I think you should consider if you have a computer in business such as a point of sale system. It is the defer option.

In the advanced options, there you will find a "defer upgrade" option. If it is ticked what it does is delay many feature upgrades for a few months (not sure how many) but allows security updates though. This is great for people who are prepared to wait for some new features while other people test it for them.

If you can wait, why not tick this option, it may save you a lot of headaches.

Now is the time for us to reflect on what we can do better this year

I like this thought.

Make New Year's goals. Dig within, and discover what you would like to have happen in your life this year. This helps you do your part. It is an affirmation that you're interested in fully living life in the year to come.

Goals give us direction. They put a powerful force into play on a universal, conscious, and subconscious level. Goals give our life direction.

What would you like to have happen in your life this year? What would you like to do, to accomplish? What good would you like to attract into your life? What particular areas of growth would you like to have happen to you? What blocks, or character defects, would you like to have removed?

What would you like to attain? Little things and big things? Where would you like to go? What would you like to have happen in friendship and love? What would you like to have happen in your family life?

What problems would you like to see solved? What decisions would you like to make? What would you like to happen in your career?

Write it down. Take a piece of paper, a few hours of your time, and write it all down - as an affirmation of you, your life, and your ability to choose. Then let it go.

The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals.”

― Melody Beattie

If you are selling magazines, you certainly will be interested in our latest software feature, the new XChangeIT reconciliation which I believe we are the only ones to have. It will save you a lot of time and money. What it does is allow you to instantly compare your return figures to the supplier figures. Users of it tell me that it saves them hours of work and saves them a lot of money.

We will be holding a free webinar to run through the features and functions of this latest function on Friday 2:00pm AEST.

Please let us know if you want to attend.

If you are going to send SMS in bulk to promote your shop please be careful of what time you are sending it. One of my clients yesterday sent a few hundred SMSs to his clients advertising a sale for some products for Wimbledon tennis.

The SMSs went out at 2:00am. Although we do not think that any law was broken, I doubt many of their clients would be pleased with getting SMSs at that time. If you are using SMS, which under our group deal is now even more economical, please send them, it at a reasonable time, you may find this useful as a guide on this question.

This will save you some time.

What happened is that I went a few days ago to a site that has a competitor product, and they started to tell me about the frustrations they have with this product. While explaining the problems they told me that on their POS system, which is running Windows 10, is that when it downloads a Windows 10 update at night which is fine, what happens is that when they switch it on in the morning, they can be locked out of their point of sale software, once for about 40 minutes while the computer does its updates. This should not happen, but I could not understand why this was happening until this morning when I figured it out that their computer has not been set up correctly.

If this is happening to you, this is how you fix it.

Go to the control panel and look for Windows Update and choose the Advanced Options.

Now in advanced options, what you will see is a question "Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting up my device after an update," tick YES here

Now your Windows 10 will after it downloads the latest updates automatically log into your computer and install the update so when you come to use the computer in the morning, it is ready to go.

If you want to take advantage of the instant assets write off this year, tomorrow is the last day.

Here is an explanation of how it works, but let me first start off by saying I am not an accountant, and I do suggest you contact your accountant to discuss it.

If say you were to buy a computer system for $8,195 inc GST. The first point it does not cost $8,195 as 10% of this is GST which they will be getting straight back so the proposed cost is $7,375.50.

Under the old system

- 15% of this would be allowed as depreciation, which works out to $1,106.33.
- As the company tax rate was 30%, which means the business would get back $331.90 in income tax credits.
- This means the business needs to fund the purchase which needs to be arranged in the first year $7,043.60.

Under the new scheme

- 100% of this would be allowed as depreciation, which works out here to $7,375.50.
- The company tax rate under this scheme is 27.5%, which means the business will get back $2,028.63 in income tax credit.
- Which means that the business needs $1,696.36 less to fund the purchase which will be to it $5,347.24.

A fairly substantial saving.

Right now, we are getting a lot of interest in the rental of our software. The reason is people who need to upgrade soon have suddenly been realising that the End of the Financial Year is tomorrow. They want to take advantage of the accelerated depreciation of the equipment and as there is no time to prepare a lease, our rental is quick and easy to set up, so they are jumping on rental to not lose the tax benefits on the computers.

It you do not want to miss out, you need to contact us now.

Here is another amazing fact, its 50 years ago on June 27, that the Automated Teller Machine (ATM) was first working at the Enfield branch of Barclays Bank in London.

Click here for more details.

On June 26, 1974, the first ever barcode on a chewing gum was scanned commercially as part of transaction. now everything has a barcode.

You can read more here.

When are you busy? This is an important to know in a shop. You can be busy as the tills are busy or your shop can be busy as clients are in the shop, and you need to serve them. We can help you to find these answers.

PS This is also a very good test of the speed of the pos software, there was seventeen years of data, and it took less than a minute for our point of sale software to calculate.

Now please go to Traffic analysis which you will find in register reports > Sales.

Now if you already know this report, it's worth going into as we have recently improved this section.

As you can see there are quite a few reports here, which it is probably worth your while going through them to find the one that works for you best.

Now here I select "Traffic Analysis by Trading Hour" and this pops out.

Now if I click on report criteria, see red arrow.

I just left the dates and ignored the options, for the time being, out pops a chart, which shows by customers how busy the shop was per day. This will tell you how busy the till operators were.

Now if I selected traffic to see red arrow, I would get a similar report but based on people in the shop. This will tell you how busy your salespeople were.

Like I said there are a few such reports slightly differently, so test which one works for you best.

The major growth technology in retail, is now in mobile technology. This is becoming a major path to engage your customer. As such we will be holding a webinar soon on how to engage your clients with mobile technology.

These question's business owner should know about their business, such as what is happening, what their staff are doing, what their customers are doing and how much profit they are making.

Well with point of sale software, they can with a few clicks see this and more, for example, just how much they are making from each of their staff, their clients, the products and services they are providing in seconds. They can see at what times and days they do their most trade.

The intelligence supplied by our POS software has been specifically designed to help you optimise your business so that you can reduce your costs and increase your profits.

Talk to us about putting an end to guessing in your business and make fact-based decisions.

We are committed to helping you grow your business.

Almost half the out of stock problem in a typical client of ours can be avoided by use of the automatic (focus) ordering system.

This can avoid much of the negative problem in a business such as people coming and walking out because you do not have the product they wanted. What is even worse is if they get frustrated with you not having the stock they want and going elsewhere.

It does not look good either, what do you think of this shop shelf?

What does it say about the business to its clients?

There are many advantages to having a point-of-sale system running on different equipment through a WIFI and/or cloud solution. We hasve some special routers and an improved microsoft SQL that can make such a system fly.

Here are some examples of what advantages it can do.

1) Having a tablet with a register means that someone can go out with a tablet and add immediately a new register if the queue gets too large.

2) When doing stock returns, the goods are in front of you, do you really want to go to a computer to get the information required? No, you want the information while you are in front of the goods as there is a lot of information as our system is considered the best in stock returns. Without a tablet, or laptop you need to often remember or write down some info on paper and go back and forwards from the computer to the goods.

3) You are in front of a potential customer and need as much information as you can get. Do you really want to step away from the customer, and to go searching on a computer just when they are thinking of buying? How much better is it if you could have all the information on your mobile/tablet right in front of you without stepping away from the customer and put in the order immediately.

If you want to link into such a system, please consider that it would be a serious loss not to move now to take advantage of this year's immediate tax write-off, which allows businesses to immediately deduct the full value of every asset purchased to the value of $20,000, instead of claiming the deductions over a number of years.

Sometimes on the front counter, space is at a premium. Sometimes you just need to have a pos register that is portable. Not everyone can carry a heavy computer. .That is why POS Solutions delivers a point of sale solutions for tablet

or laptops.

The cost of running these is very low assuming that you fully drain and charge your tablet every other day, it will cost around $2.70 for a year. Laptops are about $13 per year, if you charge your laptop, every day with a 45kWh charger that is less than a family takeaway meal.

Last warning today at 3:00pm EST we will be holding a webinar on End of Financial year reporting.

Any of our users or reader here if they like are invited to attend need to join which can be done simply by visiting our facebook account here at 3:00pm unfortunately though only the first five will be accepted

The following reports which your accountant will require from your point of sale software will be discussed in detail

Sales reports
Stock Valuation
Customers Outstanding
Creditors Outstanding
Subagents Outstanding

Tyro recently made a special End of Financial Year Offer, which had a very unexpected result.

What Tyro offered was to those people that switch to them, that they would give them a saving of 10% on their EFTPOS bill and 6 months-free terminal rental, which is a good offer.

What no-one expected is that so many of our Tyro clients (over 27%) used the offer to switch from a stand-alone Tyro system to an integrated Tyro system.

Obviously, our clients saw the chance to switch at a cheap rate to an integrated solution and jumped on it.

There are many advantages to an integrated system, principally.

1) It reduces operator errors by eliminating double data entries and re-keying errors from manual entry on the EFTPOS.
2) Improve speed of service for your customers, as you can see an integrated Tyro Efpos (dark blue) takes just a fraction over a second on any day of the week.

Plus of course, you would get a

a) One receipt from the POS software
b) full reporting of all transactions on your own merchant online portal
c) Seamless end-of-day reconciliation.

It now is clearly a good time to look into it while the offer is on the table.