While visiting a school in Fiji last year, which we saw was so poorly resourced with old and in part torn books. We saw nothing in the way of modern equipment such as a projector and all they had was one old computer. We also noticed that they had no arts and crafts materials. We were then told that its annual budget was $10 to 15 per student per year!

Absenteeism is high as some of the parents in that rural community are so poor they stopped sending kids as couldn't afford to send them with a lunch....makes you really question things.

So POS Solutions made a sizable donation of suitable education material, which finally arrived at Togo Primary School after two months of delays.

In appreciation, we received this letter.

We have loaded the latest ANCOL 2017 Mid Year Promotion File on our website. It is now available for download off our website.

For this and other supplier files please visit here

If you have any queries about this file, please contract

Kevin Mulhall

ANCOL (SA)

Telephone: (08) 8346 7745

What you will see soon on our point of sale software on the credit notes as on the gift vouchers already are expiry dates. (see red arrow above)

Our understanding of the law, and we are not lawyers and not qualified to give legal advice is that this is acceptable as long as the period is reasonable. You should check what is considered reasonable by your undustry body.

The big problem at the moment is that legally a new owner must honour existing gift cards and vouchers if the business was sold as a ‘going concern’. This has resulted in these owners having to pay debts that they were never knew about. In one case, I know about one of the old owner's brother presented a big gift voucher to the new owner. It does not seem fair.

We hope to see you there.

Here is a tip for you to think about.

What happens if, for some reason, you cannot be contacted for an extended period? Can the people in the shop work the point of sale software? Can they access the emails they require to work the system? Can they work the ATO portal? Can they access your Facebook page?

This is what happened to one of our clients when the owner/manager got a hit with a stroke.

Kaspersky Lab on Friday showed that over 98% of all documented WannaCry infections were running versions of the Windows 7 operating system. We are unsure whether it is WannaCry, but our engineering department examined a computer on Friday with the most incredible virus we have ever seen. It was on a Windows 7 computer. Avast was up to date and said it was protecting the computer. The Avast software could quickly search for a virus, showing nothing. It could not, however, run a full scan. The operator was alerted that something was wrong when he followed my advice and tried to run Bitdefender Anti-Ransomware, which did not allow this software to run. Then, when he tried to run a competitor's antivirus software, the computer crashed. We have never before seen such a sophisticated virus. Whether it's WannaCry, we do not know as yet, but it's a strong possibility, which means it is in our marketspace.

Since AVG and Avast are the same now, I would say any user of either of these products is at risk.

Please follow my advice and try to run Bitdefender Anti-Ransomware and check your computer, particularly if you are using Windows 7. If Bitdefender Anti-Ransomware is deleted immediately after running, you are infected.

Update: After spending much of the weekend on this computer, we have not been able to determine what is infected, as it is quite phenomenal. The information has been sent to Avast. However, as the client needs his computer back, we are deleting everything and installing it as a Windows 10 computer.

The future of point of sale is not all pretty and sometimes its benefits seem dubious to someone like myself who believes in twentieth-century privacy concepts.

Google has is starting to access credit-card transactions to push people to make purchases even in offline locations like retail brick-and-mortar stores. Soon I am sure that Google, Facebook, Amazon and others such as the authorities will follow as Google and Facebook make good spies.

Once they do that they will be able to match your Internet browsing to your purchases. This will allow them to make their work more effective but becomes another nail into your privacy, on the other hand. The consumer will win too as they will receive better service for those people who are switched on to the net.

Read more about it here.

Right about now, while doing a stocktake you will be going around the shop collecting damaged stock and unsellable stock.

Here is an idea.

Instead of discounting it to zero makes either a buy one gets one free group sell or a 3 for 2 special deal.

Alternatively, bundle the unsellable item with a sellable item in a group to sell it, e.g. an old magazine worth nothing can be packaged with a new popular magazine's edition. The proposed buyer will be rapt as they want one magazine, and they are getting the second free. You are rapt too as it a sale you may not have got, and it cost you nothing as the old magazine is worth nothing.

What you will notice is that your customers will tend to see this as an add-on reward so less likely to devalue your brand in the minds of the customer by excessive discounting.

Our point of sale software talks to Microsoft Office which is in my experience a terrific program to use but in practice does require a lot of learning.

So if you feel you need to learn more to get a grip with its functions. Microsoft has released a training resourses and a roadmap here for it.

You will find these top-quality and highly instructional.

If you do not have Microsoft Office and do not want to get it, you can always with our system use the free Open Office system which is also extremely powerful.

What is your stock shrinkage? How much are you losing in your shop by causes? Many cannot answer this simple question. And if you do not know what to do if how do you know what to do fix it? I very much believe in the value of using data to help improve the management within your organization and this question is one of the most important ones in retail. The good news is with our point of sale software; it would be an easy calculation to find out.

Briefly, stock shrinkage is the difference between what you should have and what you actually do have.

Some major reasons would be if you have decent pos software.

1) Customer theft - The five finger discount

2) Damage - We had one furniture shop that was recording huge numbers of damaged goods somewhere between receiving and customer delivery.

3) Supplier fraud - Which is all too often, for example, a typical example is that a supplier bills you for goods shipped, but for some reason, you did not get all these goods.

4) Staff theft - In my experience this is nearly zero or nearly 100% of the problem.

After you do a stocktake which you should do next month and do your financial returns collect these three figures.

a) The value of the stock you SHOULD HAVE at the end of this financial year. If your point of sale is up to date, print out a stock valuation before starting the stocktake, if it is not, then your accountant will be able to give you an estimate of the (Ending Stock Value).

B) What is the value of your stock you ACTUALLY HAD at the end of this financial year. Your point of sale software will have this figure once you enter in the stocktake figure in the stock valuation report. (Physically Counted Inventory Value)

C) What is your total sales ex non stock items such as agency like lotto, as here we are interested in stock sales only (Sales of stock products)

Please do the following calculation.

Shrinkage% = ((Ending Stock Value)-(Physically Counted Inventory Value))/(Sales) x 100%

As a punt, I would say that it will be about 1.4%, but it does vary a lot. One client of ours reported after doing this calculation that it was less than 0.1%, which is the best figure I have ever seen. Conversely I have seen a shop which a receiver told me he recorded 6%.

Damaged goods (2) above you should be able to estimate and put that part aside. Goods that suffer a major damage problem should be moved to a safer place. I know a gift shop that after calculating the damage rate stopped handling glass products.

For the others as a first guesstimate, assume that (1), (3) and (4) above are equal and calculate them.

Now act!!!

Well, stocktake time is coming again, so time to get ready for the big count.

The documents in help section of point of sale software have been upgraded and should now automatically be in your pos system so press F1 and check them out as they list several methods of doing a stocktake.

I do strongly recommend that you whatever method you decide to run your stocktaking try it in training first to get familiar with the process. Better to know the process ahead of time instead of having trouble when trying to run the real thing, also consider attending a free webinar that will be done on 1/June/2017 at 2:00pm EST.

We hope to see you there.

People tend to be upset waiting in queues. Generally in retail the standard danger point occurs if the size of the queue if over 6 or more and/or the time taken is over 5 minutes. The problem with standards is no business is standard. If I go to a barber, I would wait 5 minutes. If I go to a shop and want a pack of cigarettes, I am not waiting 5 minutes, and I am walking out if I see six people waiting.

And retailers know this; this is why they want fast point of sale software and computers. Doing reports and data entry it's nice to have faster processing, but at the cash register, having people wait is retail death.

Ours is the fastest point of sale software that I know, as you can see where it is marked in green. The operators here were regularly doing transactions at a rate of four a minute in 2014 before the new Intel's Core i7 and AMD’s Ryzen computers came out and the new SQL was released. So I am sure we will now get faster speeds once we finish our new benchmarking results.

Although I said it is nice to have faster processing speed, it is mentally frustrating on the mind for people to work slow computers. People are extremely fast in detecting speeds. A typical person can detect changes visually at .013 of a second and react in .25 second, if you want to know your reaction time click here.

If you are waiting 20 seconds while your computer is thinking, you are reacting potentially physically 80 times. That is why time seems to go so slowly when you press on a computer Y instead of N. Your mind internally is going No, No, No, ... 80 times.

Computer and software speed does matter.

As a market-leading point of sale software provider, we deliver on our promise of creating a huge number of business reports that transforms our users into wizards by giving them accurate, on-demand, and highly interactive information that they can act upon.

We offer 100s of pre-written reports and if that is not enough, we give you ad-hoc reporting too where you can write your own reports.

Go to the reporting section and you get this.

[Image removed]

Click on an item here and even more will pop out

Running through these reports in no particular order, you can see crucial sales metrics such as:

Profit

The number of items sold.

Breakdown of sales
Employee performance
Departmental performance.
Price performance
Sales
Inventory
Payments
Register breakdowns
Gift card sales
Gift card usage
Total sales
Hourly sales
Total transactions
Average transaction amount
Order history
Payment summaries
etc
etc
etc

All these give you massive insights that help you to better understand your shop. You see stock is over/under performing, what is selling, who is buying what, when they are buying, how they are paying for it buying it and which employee is selling it to them.

This is how you can gain the detailed insights you need to make informed decisions about your shop.

Note unlike so many other pos software systems you do not need to buy extras to access this data. Want to compare systems, demand to see the reports, count them quickly, I have not seen a system with more reports then us, demand to see them run with full data not play data as unlike us, many do not use proper SQL so the run like a dog.

Several retail experts, I have spoken to recommend that a shop should count all stock four times a year, as well as doing monthly stock takes for various high-risk departments such as tobacco much more. Personally, I have never known a stocktake, not to find something of interest. It is the only way to determine much about your actual stock. However, whatever in theory it is coming to the end of the financial year, and all stock should be counted soon.

A typical client of ours, tend to take about four working days to count the stock, so its not a minor investment.

Here are some tips.

Prepare - Set an actual date for the stocktake take.

Estimate what you are going to do when. Try if possible to pick a quiet period to avoid distractions. You can either do a rolling stock take which allows it to be done in stages, which is what we suggest or do it all in one hit, which is what many of our clients prefer.

Make sure that on this day, your point-of-sale system is up to date with the stock receiving and sales.

Go over the shop and make some order so all the stock is tidy and together.

Make policy in advance

How you will handle damaged stock?

How you will count? For an English speaker, the convention is to go from top to bottom, left to right. Set the convention to be systematic. This avoids counting duplications.

Learn

You may have known how to do it last year but the odds are you need a refresher course. So do one or two small sections first as a test run to get a feel of what is involved before the big day? Learn the correct computer procedures, I do not suggest you try a learn when you have extra staff counting. It is going to cost you time and money while you get organised.

Stocktake day

Do a backup at the start just in case,

Make sure that you have enough staff when the stocktake is required.

Have a place markers for each staff member so it is clearly marked where they start and where they are up too.

Make sure that the supervisor of the area is available if required.

If possible count everything although be aware that sometimes you will need to estimate.

Do a backup at the end just in case, I have seen people enter everything in and someone not knowing exactly what to do has gone into some section and wrecked all the figures. The stocktake had to be redone.

I am sure you will agree that having many tills on one computer does speed up customer processing, but it has other advantages too such as employee theft.

One point that really annoys me, mainly because I have a financial background is what I see in many point of sale software solutions that are poorly implemented and badly understood by the owner and operators who have received marginal training.

In such a situation an employee with knowledge of the system is sometimes able to bypass the internal checks with disarsterous results to the business. Say if two or three people are working one till and money has disappeared then no-one is responsible. If on the other hand everyone has their own till, then every till has someone responsible. This is another big advantage of having many tills on one computer because this is what you can do, give everyone their individual till.

As a retailer, dotting your I’s and crossing your T’s must be at the top of your priority list.

Recent major retail breaches and my own experience highlights that point of sale system security is still a big problem plus the current large-scale cyber attack that is underway now using the WannaCry worm, which is I am sure is only beginning. As there are too many aged computers, which are running old not updated running operating systems, which are wide open to attack to WannaCry.

So what are these hacker's prime targets in retail, well it will not be ransonware but EFTPOS. A Ransomware attack gets them say $500 US (hackers always work in US dollars) but here is a guesstimate of what a small shop will bring in for the hacker in EFTPOS.

A small shop doing say half a million a year in EFTpos, with say $50 an average transaction, say the hack lasts two months, and you could say 50% are repeats customers.

= $500,000 / $50 x 2 x 50%

= 10,000 accounts , now that estimate is probably a bit high.

But if say half of these credit cards are hit for $200 US each, which is very conservative that is $A2.7 million dollars which I think is a bit low overall.

Many retailers mistakenly believe that because MasterCard and Visa take responsibly for the debt, so they are okay for this sum. This however is not true. What happens in these situations is that banks, Visa, American Express, Mastercard and more will look into recovering their monies from the retailer unless the retailer has a very good excuse, and they will be asking for as well fines and legal costs. These costs are not trivial and in the US according to a study by Experian, although they do not say the cause, I am sure that much of the 60% of retailers that they reported closed down within six months after a data breach are for this reason.

As a result, we do look into our clients EFTPOS security and ask you to do so too.

Our recommended system is tyro. here are some function that we see, and we like.

Tyro was the first and only Australian EFTPOS provider who is successfully validated against the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

The main unit used by them is a Yomani which we inspected a short time ago.

Now if you notice they are curved everywhere part on the reason for this is to prevent skimming hardware from being attached on top of this unit. Plus note that for the security of a cardholder’s PIN entered, and these PIN pads are protected with a unique key entry shield to increase privacy.

Plus tyro terminals are PCI-PTS compliant.

All cardholder data is encrypted on the Tyro terminal, and the hacker would need to have a lot of technical knowledge to get the data, as the EFTPOS data in this terminal never goes into your Point of Sale software from the EFTPOS unit, plus they have a system of tamper resistance built-in. In the event the unit detects any hardware tampering; they will refuse to perform any transactions. More likely depending upon the type of attack, the terminals if it picks it up will display one of the several messages, but generally give you something like this.

If this happens, the unit will no longer work and will need to be replaced.

Plus even if the retailer could get the data it is decrypted.

All of this is of course very good, but I still urge everyone to make sure their security is up to date.

Your windows should be current, at least now Windows 7. Your antivirus software should be up to date, note the free Microsoft product windows defender is quite good, if you want more there are several excellent antivirus software packages around, plus of course be careful.

If you want to know more, please let me know.

You have a long line of customers queuing up at the till. Would it not be great to have a second till?

As a shopper, I can assure you that it is very annoying to wait a long time in a queue. Sometimes there is not enough room at the counter to add another register, often its not worth it to buy another cash register, etc. So one point that our system handles very well is that you can have several tills on one computer.

This can help to reduce traffic pressure and prevent customer dissatisfaction It might even save some sales as less people give up waiting and leave.

Plus the speed in which transactions are done on how POS system is really something.

Delivery, the latest study by Paypal stated that 63% of Australians would be enticed by next-day delivery; however, the figure dropped to 28% for a shop that offered 4-7 days. 46% of Australian businesses had plans for a 24-hour delivery, plus I can guarantee you quick delivery will be a key part of Amazon's marketing strategy in Australia. So if you have not already, its time to start thinking about 24-hour delivery and thinking about the same day is even better.

One point about our point of sale software, is that it has a very powerful delivery system built into it, which was designed in it from day one.

It is currently being used by many businesses that do deliveries and require a point of sale software that is fast-paced in a high volume ordering environment. Our POS software can quickly and easily process customer orders to meet the unique needs of delivery based companies. It allows entry of customer's name, phone number and address. Operators can input additional notes for the deliveries such as driving directions and delivery instructions. They can also add any applicable delivery charge fees.

Want to know more, please click here.

Many retailers today are looking at using cloud based solutions for their POS software. It is actually our favourite solution from large retailers, and we have installed a few such sites, for small to medium-sized businesses. We can do it, but we do not recommend it.

Since we have a lot experience in the cloud, let me explain as any system you adopt including cloud will have it own strengths and weaknesses.

The big problem in the cloud is the user experiences an occasional slow downs and stoppages. Since it is not regular its hard to track down because everything works fine until it does not.

Most likely its the Internet, as a cloud depends on having a top-quality Internet connection which adds to your cost. What Optus suggests for good reason that every cloud user have in addition an emergency backup that goes through the mobile network, the cost of this is about $25 to $45/month per site. Then if the Internet goes down; the mobile network takes over. Otherwise, what will happen is that you will occasionally experience these sudden slow-downs and short stoppages due to problems with the Internet.

The next problem is the hosting. If it's in the cloud, then its not your computer, if the hosting is causing a problem, you have to ring them up, and the hosting company has to check, which takes time. What the hosting company will probably do is say its your Internet connection, your computer, your router, your setup, etc. Then if you convince them its not and they cannot fix it what often they will do is reboot that hosting computer, this is not recommended in point of sale software.

The other problem which we have had with hosting is that the hosting company works to its own agenda. Suddenly, they say we are upgrading your hosting computers, and they have checked and there will be not a problem with you. Subsequently they upgrade and sometimes you go down. Then they then claim, well we are sure you understand, the need for the upgrade. The problem was of course unavoidable as the upgrade had to happen sooner or later.

Lastly with us you own the software in your shop, you can run our software as long as you want AS IS. We have people still using our DOS system version L, which is 27 years old. With cloud based system, the cloud hosting company will run your retail software are long as its profitable. Once the number of users drops off, soon you will get a message from the hosting company to say that you need to upgrade, and all support for your software will stop on this date. Whether you want the upgrade or not on that date, your system stops without an upgrade.

Finally let me say with us, if you want cloud based we have it and it works.

Having the right stock is critical for a physical retail store.

Thus the great success recently of a technique call "mirror marketing" which we pioneered into our market space, and only we offer it.

What it did, however, show is that it picks up everything. For example, Australians were extremely interested in Eurovision. Partly because Australia is doing very well in these contests where we are earning praise for our professionalism and our musical ability. This year we made it to the grand final and came ninth and in the process, we beat many of the established heavy weights like Ireland, UK and Luxembourg. Then there was a streaker with an Australian flag which added to the interest.

So what happened was when one of our clients ran their mirror marketing reports in our pos software, suddenly out popped a few items dealing with Eurovision. Although she did not know much about Eurovision, once she did some research and knowing the demographics of her area, she then immediately put a few relevant items together and created a Eurovision stand in her shop.

What it does show, is that you cannot just wait for a marketing season to show up, yes its great to plan, have suppliers support and no doubt she will be marking it into her diary for next year if it works this year, but you need to use the data you have and reports in your point of sale software to look for sales opportunities as in modern retail every sale counts.

Here are some graphs that can show you what I mean.

Here is the last five year trend for Australian interest in Eurovision compared to Mother's Day from google trends.

As you can see its comparable. probably about 75%.

Here is the last 7 days interest

Now this is interesting that Mother's Day come and goes but Eurovision lasts longer partly as they have a few contests not just one.