Are you thinking that under the shelf you do not have enough room for a point of sale computer then look no further.

How does this computer meet you requirements? It is a full blown computer.

A put a pen on it to give you a sense of size.

Fast, small and light weight can handle large temperature differentiation. Although I would not recommend dropping it, we did accidently drop one and it was undamaged.

They can handle register and servers.

We have been installing these for a while now.

Click here for the change in business ownership form

There are several sound reasons for making sure that we get a filled copy of a change of business ownership before the actual transfer takes place including that it can save you money, and it allows them to get free training. Unless and until this, form is completed and received by us, the point of sale licence will remain your property and your legally responsibly plus the new owner cannot get customer support which will not make them happy.

All it takes is a few minutes to fill out this form and email it to us.

Then please allow us a few days for your request to be completed.

If a valid email address is on file, both the Releasor and Acceptor will receive an email confirmation once the change of ownership has been completed.

One software company, I know well has recently released a statement that because they do not hold credit card numbers in their software that their clients have tranquillity about their customer credit card details and fraud. Well, it might get them off the hook if a potential court case starts, but it is certainly not the *whole* truth.

Firstly let's start off by saying that such data breaches are extremely serious as I wrote here of a study by Experian, showed that 60% of small to medium business closed down within six months after such a data breach. Much of this, I think must be because the banks, MasterCard and Visa looking into recovering their monies go for the retailer and then there are fines and legal costs too.

Now what is happening is a relatively new class of viruses called PoS RAM Scraper Malware has been created by hackers to specifically target retail shops and its huge. The reason why retail shops are simple, there is a lot of credit card details going through the POS system.

Here is a map of PunkeyPOS found by a well-known antivirus company in June this year. What it shows is the places where they found it.

You can read more details here on what they found here.

What can be done?
 

You may want to have a chat with your credit card provider however here are some tips, I would recommend.

1) Be careful where you and your staff go on the net. If you must go to these sites, use a computer that is not on your POS system.

2) Make sure you have a virus protector that is maintained. Let me warn you here that there is no best antivirus out there, they all have pluses and minuses. Note the window defender in windows 10, I think is very good and its free to all businesses.

3) Update your windows software with the latest patches.

4) A firewall would be good. I would recommend setting up your firewall on the machine that does EFTPOS to stop access to almost all the net. The other advantage to doing this is that your employees will surf less on your time. I think the free Windows firewall is good. Fairly easy to use. It passes all inbound tests (both stealth and open port) and does not have any popup alerts which can be a real pain. Also, it is not likely to conflict with your other programs. Plus most techs know it.

If all of this does not work at least you can have a good argument in court that you did try your best.

What about the potential security threats within your company? We can help here.

What you can do is give your staff the resources to do their jobs, so they can do it to the best of their ability, which involves giving them access to your point of sale software. However you do not have to give them access to all the system. What out system allows you to do is select exactly what they can have access too.

Please go to

Main menu> staff > staff maintenance

Then click Security Level tab on the top

Now you will see the user levels with our suggested functions for each level. Change them at will to suit your own particular needs.

Now click Staff Maintenance

This screen appears

Now set your staff with an suitable security level that they need to do their position making sure that you give them the functions and information they will need without compromising sensitive and dangerous functions and information.

In this current update, on our point-of-sale system, you can print a pre receipt before issuing a formal receipt.

For those that do not know what a pre receipt is, pre receipts are widely used by our clients so that they can issue their clients with a document to double check everything before the transaction is done. It is similar to a quote, but it is only valid now so the wording is slightly different for legal reasons.

In this update, our Point of sale software will now make a special beep if the stock being scanned price is under cost. The reason for that is to warn the people scanning the item at the cash register that something is wrong and to stop scanning more items without checking.

All my life, one product in retail that I have monitored is newspaper sales. Even so, in Australia, probably because I am too close, I just got used to the decline in newspaper's sales so. However, when I went overseas, from what I can remember it was a shock to see the worldwide decline in newspaper sales. The big factor internationally are the cheap android smartphones, which can and are being sold profitably for $50, so just about every potential newspaper customer now has a smartphone including as I saw in poor people in poor countries like Egypt.

France

France used to have many fine newspapers based often on political views, when I spoke to people in France, they told me that the quality had dramatically declined, and they had lost all interest in newspapers. This is the stand this retailer gave it. A wall hanging over the side of the magazine rack.

They had however a nice magazine shelf.

The magazines were all nicely presented and quite reasonable. I thought in price. I saw nothing like the piles of non sellable magazines that I too often find in Australia. Every magazine was well displayed, in order and clearly being monitored for sales performance.

In comparison to the magazines, the card display was small, very small. Why Australia sells so many cards compared to many other similar countries is a mystery to me.

One point that stunned me is the large number of electronic price tags being used there. We have sold many of these, but I had never seen it in such a quantity.

Germany

Germany newspapers tend to be divided up by cities, each large city has their own newspapers. I used to see often a large stand full of German newspapers.

Well as you can see, the stand is gone.

The magazines stand is still there. Not as nicely presented as in France but its tidy and well laid out. Of course very little in Germany is not tidy and well laid out.

Morocco

In Morocco, as in most of the Arab world newspapers are generally sold from newsstands and street vendors in the morning. I noticed a few international French and English papers as well as Arabic newspapers. I saw no magazines for sale there. When I asked people there they told me that they tended to read the newspapers on the Internet, this may be as although Morocco is much better than most of the region the democratisation process has stalled so if you want real news; the Internet is better. Still here is a photo of a newspaper stand I saw there.

Hope you found this all useful and interesting.

I am back at work from today, but as I am starting to work through what is a mountain of work waiting for me, please give me about a week to get through it all.

For those that are interested here are some pictures of my trip. Overall, I think Egypt, Morocco, the Baltic countries (great value for Australians as they speak English there, the food, alcohol and prices in general are good and cheap) and Russia all are exceptionally interesting places. For an English speaker like me, Morocco can present some problems as the primary foreign language spoken is French, although they can handle English and the food can get a bit monotonous. Finland I would suggest giving a miss as there is little to see there.

While in Europe, where I went, I did an informal survey about Brexit. It pretty well confirms what polls show. A few newsagents I know there all wanted out. They were upset with the extra red tape and costs imposed by the E.U. and wanted out. Although it's bad for big business both in the U.K. and Australia, it should I think open up the trade routes for Australia to the U.K., as the U.K. now have to trade with someone and without the E.U., our products have a better chance to get in.

P.S. The French people, I spoke to are happy about the result as they prefer Britain out, the Estonians; I spoke to want out too and are hoping this leads to their exit, and the Finns think because of the political situation they are in, they have to stay in the E.U.

While in Germany, one place I had to go to was the pet shop in Duisburg called Zoo Zajac as it is according to Guinness World Records, the biggest pet shop in the world to get ideas for our software. So we drove five hours to get there, which is not unusual as many people go that far just to buy something there. Once I saw it, I could see. Why. I just went "Oh My God." The warehouse alone is bigger than the MCG. They call it a zoo, as it has more animals then most zoos. It has just about everything for animals, including animals like crickets, meerkats, dogs, cats and monkeys. It has something like 500,000 different types of fishes. It has 170 staff.

Just to walk around is a big job. This is not much of a problem to the owner Norbert as he drives around on a bike all day. I found talking to him; I had an unexpected problem as he only speaks German but fortunately my wife is a polyglot and speaks six languages one of which is German. So she translated for me.

I also meet his brother who was very friendly and fortunately speaks English, and we talked while he and my daughter fed the animals.

Overall pet shops have not done well in Germany in the past few years; they used to have 3,500 but now only about 2,000 exist. Although you would not see any economic trouble in this store, as it was full. It started 40 years ago as a very small shop. The whole philosophy now of the shop is to make it a destination store, as although they are big in Internet sales, they prefer direct sales partly as they get paid immediately as opposing to waiting two to three weeks to getting paid. for example when they feed the animals they make it a public demonstation as here.

I took a lot of notes, pictures and got quite a few ideas for our software.

Here are some pictures, and I hope you enjoy them.

Now is the last chance you have if you want to upgrade your computer system and take advantage of the $20,000 instant asset tax write-off to do so. It would be a serious loss not to take advantage of it if you do intend to upgrade soon.

What I suggest is that people look at getting a new server with an SSD drive. As these servers will run considerably faster than the current ones, this speeds up the whole network so saving you and your staff a lot of time.

I would suggest that you speak to your accountant about it ASAP.

We had a very busy dat at the annual Nextra Conference on the Gold Coast on Saturday. We are proud to be the ONLY POS Software company to be invited to the Conference. We work very closely with Nextra and many other groups to provide services above and beyond most software companies.

At the moment I am on holidays starting with Egypt, I will be back early next month.

This is a must see if you go to Egypt

Another must see

The sweets are deadly here.

I have carried my girl now over 50 countries, I reckon. Its getting tough, she is getting bigger all the time.

Some of the pictures on the wall are just mind blowing

Halva - sugar, tahini, nuts and more sugar.

An automatic patch to handle the Queens Birthday edition of the Financial Review has just been released. You will have it in version 1.1.79.O

A couple of people questioned me after my last post claiming that Microsoft did not give enough warning about windows 10.

I do not believe so, Microsoft gave many warnings, to many just ignored it. Nor do I think its a bad thing what Microsoft is doing. I agree with their advertising that they have been "consistent, transparent, and predictable timelines for which software is supported."

However, if you are wondering what your Microsoft product's status is, then you can find your answer here.

Those people that are running XP or early need to be aware that the old version of the windows XP security certificate runs out on 6/June/2016, which is less than four (4) days away. As such on that date and after many do not accept it, including the banks and courts do not like it, that people are running out of date and unsupported operating systems.

If you want to know technically what is happening please click here.

Now if you are running Windows XP and are running such programs like tyro on that computer, please check what service pack you are running.

To do this, please

Go to the start button and click on it

Then type run in the search.

Then type "winver" here and press the enter button.

Now a window will appear with details of service pack and the version of windows.

Now check here that you are running XP and if so what the service pack is?

Only if you are running Windows XP, SP0, SP1 OR SP2 and one of these programs on that computer, then you will need to update to service pack 3.

Please only do this during business hours when you have access to support just in case something does go wrong but it most likely, it will not, but Windows being Microsoft, who knows?
Now click here.

Download and install this update. Problem should be fixed.

Note: I should say here, that we do recommend that you consider going to windows 10 as what you have is very old but this can be a subject of another post.

A key benefit our clients tell us about our system is the speed of the cash register.

Here is a sample report of the speed and efficiency of the transaction time being done in less than 3 seconds a transaction on our point-of-sale system.

I believe one big advantage my clients have many other systems is the speed of processing transactions on the cash register where it is important that a person can come in and be done in seconds. Too long a wait and often people simply leave without buying, if they are nice, they will put the items back on the shelf. If not, they will dump them anywhere leaving you to put them back on the shelf.

Often this problem is ignored, and yet I believe it's one of the main advantages; I think our clients have over their competitors.

There are three main KPIs used for measuring queues. The first is called transaction time; this is how long it takes a customer from when you say "Hello," and they say "Good-bye." This is what is shown above.

The next is how many customers are in the checkout line at any time; this is important as many will look at the queue coming in and just walk out, if they think, the queue is too long. That is why some retailers put barriers up to hide the size of the queue from the people walking in and why many prefer small queues and many tills rather than one queue and many tills.

The last KPI commonly used is. How long does a person wait in the queue, that is why it's important to have a cash register system as fast as ours. People will walk out if they wait too long.

As a first step what you need to do is go to your traffic reports shown in green.

Despite what some people say, upgrading to Windows 10 is not a virus or whatever. We consider it not an additional cost but a necessary function that has to be done to keep up to date with technology.

Consider when you move house, it often is really difficult and stressful but in a short time, it is better than before. Plus you get a feeling of satisfaction that comes with having the latest. In a short time, you feel better than in the past. Who feels good living in the worst house in the street?

Windows 10 is the best Windows yet and for most of you its free. Sales of Windows 10 have been incredible. It starts faster, has many good functions such as the mail and calendar which are first rate; many of you will find onenote to being the best and most useful program you ever had, which interfaces both on your mobile and to our software. Furthermore, you no longer need any third party antivirus software. In Windows 10 there is a free built-in antivirus software Windows Defender, which is a pretty good product, and as it's built right into Windows, so it does not slow you down like so many others blotware security suites do. Plus that is what everyone will be using, and soon many of your staff will soon only know Windows 10.

Much of what is being said is in my view rubbish.

We were ready for it.

We released information for those that did not want to upgrade to Windows 10, on how to stop this upgrade.

The upgrade, although I do not like the sneeky way, it's being done now,

is almost always straight forward and quick. We have not had to increase staff. Just make sure that you do it when you have support just in case The big issue here is that not all equipment can handle Windows 10 particularly if it's very old.

Furthermore, when the first beta version of Windows 10 was released, we made sure that it would work with our software, which turned out to being pointless as our point-of-sale system even early versions could handle Windows 10. I confess I do not believe the people that are claiming on their system that the serialisation; anti-theft system cannot handle Windows 10. It is in my view a grab for money.

As such as we do not see our purpose in having our clients sit on obsolete old software and we think they should have the best that they can.

As such we do recommend the upgrade. Now is as good a time as any.

The MPA comprising of the magazine companies has just issued the MPA Pilot Interim Report in magazine to the ACCC. As we had much to do with this report, we were given an advanced briefing but told not to talk about it until its public release. Which means now.

To recap the events, the MPA went to the ACCC to be allowed to do a study of magazines to improve the efficiency of magazine retailing by doing tests in pilot programs. Well if its going to improve our clients' magazine efficiency, we are for it. So we got many of our clients to join these pilot programs. Overall those that did have mixed reactions to the program, but all found it overall positive.

Our readers will find nothing to amaze them as the conclusions are what I reported earlier here. Not surprising as much of the data comes from us. The only difference is that I used five years of history and worked on departments, while the magazine companies worked on a few months and used actual stock items. Nevertheless, the conclusions are basically the same that a substantial increase in efficiency (20%) can be achieved in magazine distribution within the current models using existing technology and marketing support. That 20% will be a big help to those clients of ours that distribute magazines.

Overall, I think it's been a great success, and I want to thank all our clients, the MPA, Network, GG, the ANF and of course our own technical staff that helped in this pilot.

The interim report is available here for you to read and hopefully soon the full report will be available.

Sometimes customers may want an A4 receipt. This is especially true of business customers. This is very simple in PosBrowser. Simply click on the "Receipts" button, find the receipt you would like to print, then press the "A4 Print" button:

You will then get an A4 receipt:

Note, this feature will print to the printer set as default on each machine.