It is your legal and social responsibility to keep a lot of information you have confidential and you can get into big trouble if you do not.
I have spoken about this problem before but a few days ago. One of our clients in the middle of processing the weekly payroll system suddenly had to go. While he was gone an employee looked up the pay sheets for the bank and noticed another employee was being paid considerably more than him and complained that his pay was less. Whatever you think of this; I think most of us would agree that an unnecessary problem occurred that should never have happened.

On a computer as anywhere else there is no magic method to stop the invasion of your privacy but there are some points you can do to reduce the problem. The problem in most point of sale retail environments in SMB businesses is that generally anyone in the organisation can get access to everything on your computer. I divide these people into four groups, government officials - who can come in with a court order; coworkers and computer support people - who have access because it's necessary for their work, family and hackers.

That is why we like VeraCrypt. It's free. Your information once it is set up is automatically encrypted before it is saved on the hard drive and only decrypted after it is loaded. The information cannot be read without the use of a correct password. I do warn you it does somewhat slow down processing.

So what we do is set up our users with an encrypted VeraCrypt system. Anything in this until they supply a correct password is unreadable. Once they put in a password, it acts as a normal drive with its own letter, accessible like any other drive but only on that computer so only that computer can read the information. So I downstairs on another computer in the network cannot read that information. When they finish and close VeraCrypt, the information becomes unreadable again to anyone without their password.

VeraCrypt can be set up so secure, few could break it.

The reality is that many suppliers do not offer EDI invoicing even though EDI invoicing saves you a lot of time. The problem is increased if you order frequently to save resources, but the problem is the increase in management costs in controlling a large number of orders.



Our system provides a solution to this problem by giving you an automated stock control system which can run either manually with its replenish or Min/Max systems or the completely automatic focus ordering system. It also creates an electronic order that can be printed, faxed or sent by email. It can then create an EDI file that when the goods arrive can like any other EDI invoice be adjusted and imported after you check the supply when the stock arrives. There is no need to enter all that stock anymore. This will save you considerable time and resources.



If the fully automatic ordering system is adopted what the point-of-sale system will do is consider the ordering cycle (designed to reduce carry costs), the purchasing cost and lowest order quantities to produce the maximum profit for the minimum outlay in your store. This is unique to our system unlike the many manual systems out there, which end out in getting you to place orders that are larger than your immediate needs so tending to increase purchasing costs and produce overstock, which requires discounts on sales to get rid of extra stock.

Overall it releases resources, which allows you to respond to unexpected market opportunities. This will also reduce the number of stockouts on many items and its associated costs leading to increases in your clients' satisfaction.

 

If you want to learn more, please contact us, as only we offer at present focus ordering in our marketplace.

Creating a roster is not easy and to do it properly can be a lot of work.

So we have recently added more facilities to help our clients to make their rosters easier. This allows them to improve business efficiency.

One report that I do recommend you study while creating a roster is the traffic analysis report by the hour which you will find marked with a green arrow below.

Put in dates from a previous period that you feel will give you a typical results for the roster you are trying to create.

Now what you will get is a colour coded analysis which shows the activity in the shop divided into four groups with red the busy period.

This graphically shows you when you can expect to be busy.

This is just one example of how our point of sale gives you the tools to help you to achieve profitability.

The latest Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) figures show no surprises – print sales are still declining.

Overall about 5% down.

What is going to happen now? Fairfax has already announced that it is inevitable that they will axe the Monday to Friday print editions of both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and go digital. The rumours are it will happen this year, although I am sure that more profitable print than digital there is no future in newspaper print, for newspaper companies if they want to survive they must go digital.

Overall, these have dropped marginally worse than newspapers, but unlike newspapers, which are all down, there is some good news here for some publications. Not only that but as a magazine can run quite successfully on lower circulation, the immediate long term print view is not so critical.

Click here is a good report on the state of magazines in Australia. Check out Cosmoplitian its a real shocker, 43% down.

This is just something to make you think.

There are three types of pricing philosophies.

1) Have your regular price and occasionally run sales.

This is the traditional model for most large retailers. Then every now and then, they run a big sale. The problem many retailers see is that the regular customers after awhile learn to wait until the sale happens.

2) Make your prices a bit cheaper and run with it all year.

Many discount shops use this approach. One problem I see here is that it is very hard to be the cheapest all the time.

3) Flexible which raise your prices when the market is high and lower it when it is low.

An example would be many of our customers when supermarkets are open lower their cigarette prices and when the supermarkets closes they raise them. As they can get more after hours.

So which model is the best, obviously there is not one answer that fits all, but a study in the US showed that generally (1) is the best. Run with your regular prices and occasionally run a sale.

Have a read here.

As readers here will know, our point of sale system uses integration in Microsoft Office to allow users to gain insights into their business. What they can also do is use it to make life easier too. Let us say you needed the print larger on a report.

What you can do is send the report into Microsoft Word and then select the font and size to make the report easier to read. What you do as above is press the export button shown by the arrow in green. Now selected the format to Word for Windows and destination as application shown with the red arrows. Once in Word, you can pick any font or size you like.

This is just another example of how much better our software is.

People who sell books will probably think that Amazon is hypocritical by having a brick and mortar store.

From the pictures, it does look like a typical bookshop except, there is a lot more full face then spine-out.

What does look unique is the way they have linked in their website in the shop. They show on the shelf labels rating, user recommendations and reviews all that are useful information to someone buying particularly if they do not know much about the product. This is something that I think many retailers in many different industries could consider copying.

I think you will get some ideas looking through these photos which are available here.

Here are four common mistakes that people make when it comes to putting in this great idea into practice their shop, that I have seen.

Mistake #1: Have a plan

What are you trying to do? It is a good idea to write down a few words like a school science project. List what you are trying to do? Why you are trying to do it? What you hope to accomplish? etc. Set up key goals and failure criteria.

A short note in the diary is often enough.

Mistake #2: No measuring (KPI)

Reader here, might be interested in knowing that Friday post on data visualisation created much discusion.

Several questions were raised. One was very interesting was that much of the data that you want to investigate with your shops data is not available in your shop's information, for example, the weather, retail statistics, unemployment, inflation, etc.

So the asked can you get something like this say the weather into the data visualisation?

The answer is yes. If it can go into SQL or excel not a problem.

So how was the next question.

The first point is you go to the Meteorology Bureau website, then you go

Bureau home > Climate > Climate Data Online > Daily Maximum Temperature

And click where I have highlighed with a green arrow to download an excel file of date and maximum temperature.

and do the same for rainfall.

Bureau home > Climate > Climate Data Online > Rainfall.

Now you can put these into an excel spreadsheet and then import it into your table.

As you can see Rainfall been added.

Now let us compare sales of greeting cards by rainfall. This produces the following graph.

On the top is the average profit of cards per day and on the bottom is the how many points for each measurement. I then added a trend line, and as you can see there is not much there of a trend. Card sales are clearly not much affected by rain here.

I then decided to do it by the temperature. Again if you look at the trend, there is not much although a nice hot day is making some improvement.

This makes me conclude that the weather does not make that much difference in this store to card sales.

However, I decided to measure the drink department. Now you will see that the weather here made a big difference.

The trend is clearly up, hotter weather is generating more sales here.

This simple example shows the power of our data visualisation.

POS Solutions was honored this year by being the recipient of the award by the Lucky Charm group. Here Helen Kentros, the Manager of Operations at The Lucky Charm group is officially thanking POS Solutions with an award for all our help.

This award recognizes that we have made significant contributions to retail management and the group.

POS Solutions was honored this year by being the recipient of the award by the Lucky Charm group. Here Helen Kentros, the Manager of Operations at The Lucky Charm group is officially thanking POS Solutions with an award for all our help.

This award recognizes that we have made significant contributions to retail management and the group.

A picture it is said, "is worth a thousand words" so in this day of huge amounts of information, pictures make a terrific way of showing things.

With our point of sale software, you can have some amazing data visualization exploration that is I think head and shoulders above what many offer.

It does, however, require some training to use this visualisation but once you master it, you can do some amazing stuff creating your own graphs, charts and even personalised dashboards in a way that is meaningful to you.

I will show you an example here.

This is a graph of card profits per day in a shop over four years

What I have done is on the top showing the profit per day, I made average line and marked in red all days that were below average.

On the bottom, is the number of sales per day.

Now if you look at the graph, you can see that it does have a yearly variation and a lot of other variations, but its not obvious why.

So what I can do is click the date field

Now I pick year, and I get instantly a graph like this.

Do not worry too much about 2014 as its only a partial year, but you can see that daily sales on average are dropping dramatically by numbers over the years but that the profit is fairly stable. You can see the shop has gone up market with its cards.

Now I click on quarter and look at sales per quarter, and get this.

No surprises here as you can see that in the fourth quarter, come Christmas sales of cards go up.

So I decide to click on month,

As you can see, December in this shop is a good month for card sales.

So now I click on days of month.

I do not see any meaningful pattern here, although interestingly days of low sale, seem to be days where more profitable cards are sold.

So now I click on weekdays

As you can see Friday and Saturday are the best days, and Sunday is generally a bad day for them to sell cards. All things being equal if they were doing any disruptions to the card department, Sunday would be the day to do it.

As this very simple example shows, data visualisation can show us a lot. The shop has gone up market on cards, we have good month sales in December, and poor card sales on Sunday.

Well, I thought I should add that a similar process can be done with discounts. I spoke about this before, but I think it should be brought up here again as the emphases is different.

What happens is a staff member rings up a sale, charges the customer the full amount, then put on the transaction a discount and keeps the discount or just gives his mate a very good price on some items. They cannot issue a receipt so what they need to do is wait until the customer leaves before finalising the transaction just in case the customer does ask for a receipt.

At the end of the day the tills balanced but money is missing.

See green arrow to get to transaction enquiry

See the two questions marked in red. In this case, we are following the transactions with discounts

To continue on what to do please press here.

Despite spending millions of dollars, our first online Census failed catastrophically. Right now almost ever Australian knows it is a total fiasco.

The website is still down, if you try to call to ask what is happening you cannot get through to someone on 1300 number.

Last night's census debacle provided many lessons in how not to manage a project, here is some:

1) Never promise what you can't deliver.

2) Think before you speak, if it was a hack as was first claimed, then how can the census reassure people that our data security is guaranteed?

3) Supply people with meaningful information. People who tried to log on after many attempts yesterday, and today are getting this message.

This 15 minutes when I tried again 30 minutes later thinking what they said was true still showed the same message that the website was still down and to try again in 15 minutes.

This has now been going on for a day.

Maybe we should all send the census a fine of $182 per day until the situation is resolved.

If you have as we suggest a Facebook business page for your retail shop you should check out the new layout, as to what has changed if you have not yet noticed it.

I like it better as it looks more like a website. Details of the changes are here.

If you ask me, this is common sense, and this is what many of my clients are doing now.

You can and should put all the security you can on your point-of-sale computer, but it's never going to make it 100%. Even the top security experts in the world cannot do that, but the simple truth is that almost all computer data breaches and ransomware attacks can be avoided by just being careful.

Do not allow employees or yourself to play on the computer, those computers are for work not fun. Make a policy about it. If you are prepared to let your employees surf on a computer on Facebook, celebrity gossip, download torrents, look at porn or do online gaming let them use their smart phone and your wifi so they are not connected to your network. If you are going to do emails on a computer attached to your system, be very careful where you go and what links you press. I know people that have a special accounts machine that is disconnected from their POS network. They transfer files if required only using USB sticks.

Avoid if possible online financial transactions that might reveal your passwords or personal information.

Frequently changing your passwords

Watch who is looking over your shoulder.
Do not let unauthorised people get into your system.

etc.

This is not rocket science, but it works.

If you want to enforce a policy a one good software, I recommend is to put on your network Norton Family available here.

The free version should be good enough for most people and tell all your staff, in fact put a notice so everyone can read that you have monitoring software installed, and that it allows you to monitor everyone on your network. It's not a 100%, but it should be able to do about 90% and it does monitor a lot. Together with your cameras it makes a powerful monitoring service.

Locking down a system can save you a lot of grief.

Since Microsoft released an edict that it would no longer use SHA-1 for code-signing or its certificates after January 2016 one by one, companies have been dropping SHA-1 and go to SHA-2.

So from the start of this year we have been busy helping our clients prepare for the SHA-2.

Now Tyro has announced that they too are dropping SHA-1. This means that anyone using an old version of Windows XP needs to either upgrade it too SP3, which is free, or if they want Tyro to keep working go to a more advanced windows. If so we have very good pricing on Windows 7 and we can do even better on Windows 8 but I do not recommend Windows 8 if you want now but our advice would be to go to Windows 10.

There are good reasons to upgrade beside this.

For example, the older the operating system is the more vulnerable. It is to the security threats. Here is a chart from Kaspersky Lab where I have highlighted the XP infection rates in green. Its almost triple Windows 8.

Furthermore, new servers with SSD drives are much faster. How much is it costing you in wasted time for you and your staff just standing in front of a computer while its processing?

Its for their Let's GROW seminar which is a FREE 2 hour seminar for retailers.

It will be held in Sydney on the August 10 - Limited seats. For more info and booking details please click here

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Here is one of their tips, there will be six more at the talk.

Tip 2 of 7/ Ask every customer to buy something additional from you.

It costs you nothing to ask - this script converted 24.8% of customers to say 'yes'!
The store has been doing it every day for over 16 months.

Click on this youtube here for some more tips