We are all stunned at POS Solutions by Microsoft's recent announcement here that they are releasing more security updates for operating systems like XP that are no longer supported. They must have found something big that they do not like.

The Australian Parliament has passed the low-value GST for offshore tangible goods under $1000. Like many I have mixed feeling about this. What it does mean is that many overseas retailers will have to charge GST to Australian consumers which is a win for the government as they will collect more tax.

We tell everyone of our clients twice a year at the end of the financial and actual years to check and review their passwords well its time now to do that.

SplashData last year released its sixth annual list for its “Worst Passwords List” to highlight the insecure password habits of people. The current list comes out of data drawn from over 5 million leaked emails, so its real.

Looking through the list you will not see much improvement this year compared to last. "123456", which is used 4% of the time and "password" still top the list.

You might say to yourself well I will never be targeted as I am just not important enough, well a small Queensland newsagency password was used to bypass the security and enabled a corrupt employee to take over $36,000 in two years, all due to poor password security.

How do you check them?

I recommend this site here.

It has a list currently of 3,805,360,380 accounts that have been compromised. It is time to check your accounts.

The next point is to change even if only slightly your important passwords, just putting say a B after your password for the second half of the year is a big step. If you want to check how hard, it would be to crack your password, please go here

Good luck and we will talk about this in another six (6) months.

Not having stock people expect in your shop, is pretty bad. I spoke earlier about it Shelf Intelligence here.

Now I will show you one way to address it with a unique function in our point of sale software.

Go to cash register report > stock

You will find a series of reports, which can help but the one I will talk about now is highlighted here with the blue arrow.

It is the "Sold Out or Selling Out Stock Lines"

Now when you click on it, out will pop this.

Now there are heaps of options here, supplier, manufacturer, dissection, etc. and there are more options still under Criteria and Traffic which I urge you to look through later.

However, just to keep it simple, I asked for all stock items that have less than 10 items in stock and are selling more than a day in the last 15 days.

What I get is a report of items that I need to immediate look at.

Please have a look and see.

What is happening now with our point of sale systems is that windows have been doing a lot of updates recently with all these improvements and updates some of which have been really good?

However, sometimes for various reasons, the temporary files have not been cleared out plus as people have not been cleaning their hard drives and over time, the rubbish has collected on their harddrive. As such their computers have been running out of space. If you know what you are doing it's easy to clean.

However, over the years, people have written programs that allow a novice to clean the computers extremely well. My first choice to do this cleaning is a program CCleaner which I think is the best and free. It is a very good product for freeing up disk space by removing much of the rubbish that collects on the harddrive, including temporary files that Windows often leaves.

On this run, you can see I gained 2 GB of room on my harddrive.

You can get a copy here.

As always, take a backup before running it.

Here are some practical tips that help our users to increase their margins.

Fast service on the front counter.

I have never seen a POS system that can go as fast as our system. It is a system built for speed. As such you are going to lose fewer clients as they wait less.

Find your price points

With our point of sale system, you have reports that show you the price points that sell in your shop. Find the prices that work for you.

Dynamic pricing

Some items change in prices several times during the day, for example, petrol changes all the time, in other shops the night price of tobacco is different to day price.

Change prices in general

As prices change you can instantly prices on goods in your shop.

Slow-moving items.

You can instantly determine which items are not moving well both the bad and the ugly items.

Discounting

A VIP system that works and does not need continuous discounting to make it work. It is great to move items but once your customers are taught that you are continuously discounting, what they will do is simply wait for the next round of discounting.

Roistering

Schedule employees when you need them, it is available free in our system. Using the traffic reports so you will see when you do not need that many people or when you need more. Want more we have a traffic system that can tell you when people are in the shop and not buying.

Missing reports

Look for items that are missing. I had one client that using the missing report discovered that almost all his rubbers were being stolen. He was actually not selling many at all.

And many more

Our point-of-sale software allows you to track sales and stock holding at the shelf. The reason why this is so important is highlighted in a report by the Coca-Cola Company Retail Research Council, which is available here.

On a typical afternoon, more than 8.2 percent of supermarket stock was not available for consumers to purchase. Much of it was fast-moving items, the stuff that is actually selling well. 34% of the time, they discovered that consumers refuse to buy alternative products, which meant a net loss in retail of 5%. Plus, of course, the business looks bad because it does not have the stock it should have.

People are going to spend a lot of time in front of a computer and what tends to happen is that people working quite a long time with their computers suddenly snap, and they have to stop working on the computer.

Overall using some simple adjustments you can get about 15% more output from people. This chart has some pretty good ideas.

This question comes up every year about now. Stocktaking is a big job, and many want to avoid it. I refer you to the following ATO requirements for stocktaking here {link removed} where it states

"If your business buys or sells stock, you usually need to do a stocktake to value your stock at the end of each income year if:
your business turnover is greater than $2 million,
or the difference between your stock level at the beginning and end of year is more than $5,000 (you can make a reasonable estimate to determine this)."

Another requirement is that to get out of a stocktake you need to show that you have a reliable stock control system if questioned. How do you prove that without doing a stocktake?

Reading this, it's clear that the major of our clients are required to do a stocktake. Having said this performing a stocktake is a valuable method of stock control its the best way of determining what stock has been lost to theft, spoilage or taken for personal use. I would recommend that all businesses do a stocktake at least once a year.

Please click here for an article on this question with more details.

Yesterday afternoon we ran a user meeting in Toowoomba. We would like to thank our hosts Robert (Rowdy) Reid at South Side newsextra. It was well attended.

It was an especially productive meeting apparently resulting in lively discussion and sharing of tips and ideas used by various attendees to make their lives easier.

Looks like some people had some fun too.

Dear Bernard,

It was great to see John yesterday. Thanks for the User Meeting, it was very informative. I hope there will be more in the future.

Cheers

Sue Nichols
High St Newsagency
Toowoomba

Hi Bernard,

Just a quick message to say thanks for allowing John to visit today, it was good to pick his brain, and those of a couple of other agents. I learnt at least 2 things that will save us time/effort from now onwards, and I am also considering the website integration.

All the best

Trent Donovan
Nextra Toowoomba
nextra Grand Central | news extra Ruthven Street | news extra Hooper Centre
Phone: (07) 4638 2817

Several of my clients have been getting emails and brochures from a company which is offering to write them a website, linked into our software or other point of sale software and claiming that they will get them a top spot on google (SEO). I actually know the company, and I am sure that if you ring up and speak to their CEO, she will give you a great speech about their experience and then offer you a free e-commerce demonstration about how they will move some of your business from bricks and mortar shop to the Internet and gain you many new clients on the net. Despite what she says they have little experience in SEO, although they do have I experience in web design, mainly internal from what I have read what they are trying to do is move you onto some standard web e-commerce solution.

Firstly, let me say that the Internet is now an established business. When selling online started is a subject of is much debate, the first transaction is said to be in 1971 or 72 interestingly enough with a purchase of a bag of marijuana. Large companies moved in 1994, with Pizza Hut, a bit later Amazon and Ebay a bit later again. Today these are some of the largest companies in the world. They know what they are doing, and they are spending billions to stay on top.

Here are a few reasons why you should be wary of promises to immediately get your website to the top rank on Google.

There is no top rank as such.

How google ranks its search on is a secret, but we do know that there are 100s of factors involved.

When you search with keywords, e.g. say I want pet food for my dog, so I go to google and say, "pet food {my suburb}." If this search for dog food is highly marketable hey, everyone serving my area that sells dog food wants to be at the top spot for that search too. Now they all cannot be top on those words on Google, can they?

No one can guarantee SEO.

SEO is an extremely complex field and requires professional people. One large company that we deal with has two of the most brilliant search engine optimisation professional whom I know doing nothing else but SEO work full-time and, even they often fail.

Anyone who guarantees they can get you the top spot on Google is flat out lying. I would love to be able to promise my clients' top spot in Google with just a few days work. If I could do it, it would make me look great. I would be going to some of the largest companies and governments in world and be charging billions of dollars. I would not be trying to get a few thousand dollars from a small business.

SEO is not set and forget.

These factors keep changing without warning, what works today will not work tomorrow.

These factors depend upon many things that have nothing to do with you. If say a famous film star, promotes a particular pet food, then the rankings will change even if the factors do not, simply because of the power of their SEO. Here is some current Facebook likes.

Shakira (81 million likes) ...
Vin Diesel (64 million likes) ...
Lady Gaga (62 million likes) ...
Will Smith (59 million likes) ...
Bruno Mars (46 million likes) ...
Pitbull (43 million likes) ...
Miley Cyrus (42 million likes)

If say Lady Gaga (62 million likes) wrote a song about a dog food, then that dog food rankings in google would change.

If you do not consistently work on your website, your SEO will drop, Google likes above all new content.

Do you really believe that your competitors are going to stand around and see you on top spot without doing something? Say they see you doing something right. What do you think they will do? You can do everything right, but they do something better in the 100s of factors then you can lose number one.

If Google finds out that you are doing something naughty they will drop you in the ranking fast. We had one client go from page 1 to page 13 in less than a week for being too clever.

If someone promises you number one immediately your bullocks alarm should go off.

Conclusion

Having said this there is a major industry in SEO. If you do want to boost your search engine ranking, it can be done. I think it's crucial for your business’ health, but it will need time, money and resources plus above all honesty.

If you want a reputable company to find out more, and you are in Sydney on the 13 July, please click here for a free class. I think it will be worthwhile and cost you nothing.

We will be having a webinar on 22 June 2017 at 2:00pm AEST on the end of the financial year with emphasis on the reporting requirements.

The following reports which your accountant which they will require from your point of sale software will be discussed.

Sales reports
Stock Valuation
Customers Outstanding
Creditors Outstanding
Subagents Outstanding

To make sure you do not miss out on this webinar as we expect this one to be very popular please register your interest by calling or emailing us.

The ATO has changed the GST reporting for business with an annual GST turnover for GST purposes of less than $10 million, which means most of our clients.

Our clients do not need to be concerned as we are ready for it, as we were briefed on it by the ATO earlier having represented our marketspace to the ATO.

What is required now is

Total sales

Total Normal Sales (and GST)

Total Purchases (and GST)

This will not be a problem as many of our reports already show totals and GST. The Dissection sales report shows both for sales. The Stock Purchases reports show both for purchases. However, as not everything for many of our clients does go through the Point of Sale Software, so our reports will not include everything.

A terrific feature of our point-of-sale system is that it integrates directly with many major accountancy systems such as MYOB cloud. MYOB is Australia most popular accountancy system. In our marketspace the top three accounting programs are MYOB with 47.3%, Quickbooks has 30.9% and cashflow manager with 5.5%. All I think are very good programs.

This integration allows our clients to streamline their accounting. This saves time, reduces mistakes and saves time as it is much faster.

Tyro is offering those people that switch to them a saving of 10% on their EFTPOS bill and 6 months free terminal rental! Ask for a calculator showing the exact savings.

This offer ends on the 30 June.

Now you have a computerised till in your point of sale, you will have noticed a significant speed increase in processing transactions. The next step is to speed up the payments system by putting in an integrated EFTpos unit. When you do that you will see your sales going direct from the POS software into your EFTpos unit. Not only is it faster, but it's also more secure as it means no more manual keying-in so fewer keying mistakes. In our point-of-sale system, the EFTpos unit can be centralised too, which is a great bonus for security.

If you want to know more, please contact us.

The reserve bank issued its latest economic snapshot for May 2017

Compared to many overseas countries now its actually good but in comparison check out our economic snapshot for May 2016 and it does not look so good.

Although its not shown here the debt, checkout our debt clock here It's a worry.

For retailers, I can see that inflation is up, the workforce and earnings are about the same.

If you have a marketing season coming up, start a countdown leading up to it

Your POS software allows you to put notes on, so you put on 12 days, 11 days, 10 days, etc.

If you have a Facebook page or email marketing, you can take advantage of social media marketing for free too to begin counting down the days until whatever holiday it is you are leading up to. As you connect with your customers share daily updates regarding how many days are left for this upcoming holiday. You will be surprised how many of them intend to do something and forget.

The idea is to keep things rolling.

One report I would like you to look at in your point of sale software, is the dissection comparsion report.

This compares the sales of stock items in different period.

You will find it

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

Then you will see this screen

What I suggest you measure is like for like comparisons, say the first five months of this year with the first five months of last year to see how your sales are changing over time. You can see by a wide variety of KPIs, including quantity, cost, sales, profit and GP%. Plus you can see the percentage change. Furthermore, you can check quickly on the left, whether you have enough stock plus how much stock, you have. I do suggest that you run through these key performance indicators (KPIs).

In addition, check the side panels and of course the More Criteria tab marked with a green arrow.

This is just one of the many merchandising reports available, which provide you with a high-level, organization-wide perspective for analysing the effectiveness of your marketing strategies available to users of our POS Software.