On a recent point, I spoke when you issue a receipt to a customer you can either print it or send it by email or dongle.

A dongle is a relatively inexpensive device on the counter which when a customer waves their smartphone over it, the receipt goes straight into the smartphone.

Like everything, there are plus and minus to everything so it brought some questions.

The major point is that checkouts have to be fast. Customers do not like to be kept waiting. The secondary issue is saving money by supplying so saving paper and printing costs. In an effort to do both many of our clients either email receipts or use a dongle rather than print them and both work.

Here are some advantages to the smartphone.

1) Asking for email addresses annoys customers as most people are reluctant to give out their email address as they are now being bombarded with emails.
2) Email addresses given are frequently wrongly transcribed.
3) Getting an email address takes time on the checkout increasing the wait time for people in the queue.
4) Smartphone receipts are better.
5) Many prefer smartphone receipts.
6) Smartphone receipts are faster.

Here are some advantages to using email.

1) You have an email address for marketing e.g. newsletters.
2) Not everyone has a smartphone handy; I sometimes forget it, and often it just runs out of juice.
3) Not everyone is sufficiently technical to use smartphone receipts.
4) Many prefer email receipts.

I agree it is imperative to improve the customer experience in the check-out line since this is the relevant and lasting impression a customer will have of your shop.

The problem with Windows 10 is continuing, several people here have started getting messages like this one.

Now they are being asked to do an update or wait till tonight. It is an advance on the previous one that looked like this.

Readers here who do not want to do the update have NO excuses for getting these screens as we have told them several times how to stop it.

If now you are getting this message you have reasonably two choices, the first is to delay the update and then click here and carry out our instructions.

The other is to do the update. If so the best in the daytime when support staff both from Microsoft and us are readily available.

Under no circumstances abort the update if it starts or reverses it once its done. All you are going to do is make the problem much worse.

Here are some facts, I would like you to consider before you make your decision.

The Windows Update will not start unless it thinks it has all the drivers for your hardware so the hardware should not be a problem.

Many of the bugs have been worked out, and the problems that many had when doing the update is solved so there is a very good chance that this Windows update will go well.

Personally, I use Windows 10, love it, and it is great. Window 10 is better.

All Microsoft software and much of the rest are switching over to Windows 10, if you stay with what you got, you are going to be left behind very soon, you almost certainly will be locked out of many of the functions of Windows.

Lastly its not Microsoft fault, they have warned people repeatably; for example we prepared over a year ago and tested our software including old versions. All worked well on windows 10.

It is just time to move with the rest of the planet.

One of our clients, noticed that one customer billing details looked quite strange. They were sure that the details had been changed.

So I told them to call up the customer, press the Status marked with the red arrow.

Now see where it is marked in green when the Account was created and next to it, you can see when the account was last edited, last paid and so on.

Many of our clients last night, not using Windows 10 suddenly had the Windows 10 upgrades forced upon them by Microsoft. Luckily, our software is up-to-date and cutting edge and functions well under Windows 10. I feel sorry for those on some of our competitors' systems whose old versions cannot handle Windows 10 upgrades! Many of these people are going to have to show their credit card details as they are now locked out of their system and will not be able to use their tills!

Was it forced by Microsoft, I am not sure? The messages to upgrade to Windows 10 are not exactly clear so many people never realised that they were being asked to start to do a Windows 10 upgrade when they said yes. In any case, the update started. If this happened to you what I stronger recommend is NOT reversing the upgrade when its finished, this reversal is causing more problems, then the upgrade to Windows 10.

On the positive side, there is no future with the old version of windows, and it probably is as good a time as any to go to Windows 10. However I can tell you there will be problems. For example, a few weeks ago several of our users were locked out for almost an hour in the morning of their system when a massive windows upgrade of Windows 10 happened. It is a trip to the unknown.

On the negative side, many people are happy with the system they have. Many would feel that they don’t have a need for the new feature provided by Windows 10, they do not want to learn a new system, and as they are having few problems with their current system so this upgrade is unnecessary. So if you feel “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and you want to delay the Windows 10 upgrade, click here.

Update: Several people have asked me why is it happening now, well what happened is that Microsoft windows updater has done a check with your system and found that they have now all the correct drivers for your computer, it looked at the Australian timetable, it thinks it has your permission and said to itself, its all there so lets rock and roll.

What should you do if the install of Windows 10 starts?

The answer is do nothing, just let the Microsoft update to do its job; our windows point of sale system has been tested; it works under Windows 10 under its all versions and welcome to the 2016.

The latest copy of Artwrap catalogue file, is now available for download.

For this and other supplier files please visit here

There is a saying that a picture (graph) is worth a thousand words, and many graphs are better still. The problem is few people feel comfortable looking at rows of numbers on a graph you can see patterns and trends much easier and its not that hard to create millions of different types of graphs with our point-of-sale system.

I will do a simple one here as an example.

I decide I want to look at the department sale of Tobacco.

So I go into reports and select "Dissection Monthly Sales Trend (Graph), and I get a graph but say I wanted to do MORE. Say I want to experiment with many different scenarios; I wanted much more than a graph. This is of course where the power of our point of sale is shown. It's not just a static one-dimensional reporting tool. It can give you the flexibility to make your own reports and graphs.

So we pick the item above it the "Dissection Monthly Sales Summary"

Since for this example, I will be working in whole financial years, I pick this range of five years.

After the report comes out, I press the green button to export it to excel or openoffice which is free and very good

I do whatever I want there but in this example......

I highlight the Tobacco department.

Press insert (green), Line (red) and for this case, I will use the fourth one but there are millions of different graphs available there.

And out pops my graph.

Which shows me the last five years of history. You can see its going down, down, down.

Have a shot, you will find it most useful...

Here is a tip one point many people should but do not is check is how the software looks and behaves. Ask yourself when seeing it. How easy is it to use when you do not have that technical person showing you? This is of course where our software shines as I will show.

Overall, I think software should be easy to operate, if people cannot determine how it application works or where to go all that is going to happen is people get confused and frustrated. You should check how a software looks and behaves. It is easy to be fooled when you have a technical person showing you who understands, but once he leaves now what. This is of course where our software shines, as this example will demonstrate. You should also look at the behavior. It should be the same everywhere, how many times do I see in software a button that does this and then in another part the same button does something different. The next point is that it should work fast; this is not just software speed but the user interaction. Why should someone have to press 10 key strokes to get something to happen?The less keystrokes the better! For example, in our cash register, you can do over 90% of the transactions with no keystrokes. Lastly, it should be forgiving; people do make mistakes, and sometimes they can be costly. That is why I love our undo functions.

Here is a sample of what I am talking about.

Everyone has their favourite report. Something that they need to run often. So how do we make it easy so that they can select it and run it as worry-free as possible. What we do is have a favourite section which you will find in the report section. I will show you how to use it.

Say this report "Traffic Analysis by Trading Hour," is one I wish to run often. Actually, it is a very popular report well worth looking into. (see the green arrow).

I now put the mouse on it and right click; of course, you can do this too on any report that you like.

It then shows a message to add it to favourites. If I go YES and now in my menu under favourites is this report. Next time, I want it all I have to do is go to the favourites which I am going often for my other reports and select it to run. As you can see here.

Now OOPS let us say, I made a mistake. I did not want that report but the one underneath, or just after reflection, I decide that I do not want it as a favourite as maybe I found something better or its not doing what I thought I needed. Okay so I need to undo it, not a problem, I right click on the item, and a message comes up, do I wish to remove it from favourites. If I press YES, it is out of the favourites.

Wow!!!!

Now what do you think of my comments, I’d love to read your thoughts.

Leading up to the end of the Financial Year, we thought we would highlight some of the most common EOFY questions and answers.

Part 1 - Stock Take

Many of our clients will be undergoing a stock take for the End of the Financial Year. This can often involve costly outside help or inaccurate results. Use PosBrowser to stock take many of your departments, the benefits are amazing:

• You can do it yourself with your staff
• You can do it while the shop is trading
• You can do it over multiple days
• Accurate stock on-hand figures can be used later on for ordering and more!

Have a look at this document for more information on how to Stock Take with PosBrowser:

Stock Taking With PosBrowser

Now we recommend all our clients use cloud back up as a secondary and last emergency service. At the moment, we are finding cloud back up to be the best defence against ransomware viruses.



Although hopefully, you have your own internal backup system, which is your first call if a disaster takes place, and we do not suggest that you change that yet.

Cloud backup is very good, but it has problems too a cloud effectively is somone elses computer and nothing is 100%. For example one of our clients had a laptop that was stolen. They could not restore the information from the cloud, and it ended out in an argument with their cloud supplier as to who was responsible.



Still for many of you that use Telstra, there is currently a good offer for you to try a cloud backup free.

Onedrive works well with cloud backup and your systems and even the 5GB offer that onedrive has free for anyone is probably enough for most people. At the very least, it's a great way of testing cloud backups free of charge, and if you decide to pay for it, it is $1.99/month or if not you are still free to look elsewhere.



Here is an information sheet on how to set up and use cloud backs with onedrive and our system.



There are of course many other excellent providers of cloud back up too that our clients use, which have their own backup systems, and I am certainly not suggesting that there is anything wrong with these.

 

Everyone has the right to ask for all the personal information you hold about them. You, however, do not necessarily have to release this information, and if you do you may be able to charge for the work required to produce the information required. What the Australian government has done is created a flowchart to help you make these decisions.

There were no surprises this quarter as the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures show more of the same slide for the print circulation both in newspapers and magazines.

Note how Herald Sun and Mercury are amazingly less than the rest.

It is however, fair to say print newpaper sales are losing sales fairly consistently no matter what the publisher or region. Digital has certainly not made up the difference as you can read here.

Weekly magazines are dropping even faster as you can read here

If you are thinking of doing a rewards program in your store, these are the KPIs that are generally used. I suggest getting these figures before starting to use as a benchmark, then over time track and measure your progress against this benchmark.

The first point to note, is that such programs do involve a lot of work, and they can be risky. Once your customers get used to the benefits of your program, they will be upset if they lose these benefits.

1) How many customers are IN your program? As a rule, most reward programs are looking for about 30% of all customers to join although 10% to 40% are acceptable.

2) How many are USING your program? The greatest program that is not being used is useless. What you need to know is what is the ratio of (customers in your progam)/(customers outside your program)

3) Now compare that ratio of the (transaction in your program)/(Overall transactions) by value or profit.

For example, I would be happy if 15% of my customers use the reward program, and the transaction ratio was 30% by profit. I would be upset if it had 15% of my customers on the reward program, and the transaction ratio was 15% by profit as I am doing a lot of work for nothing.

4) The average basket value and/or profit of people in your program compared to the rest. Is there an increase?

5) How much does it cost you to run the program, including discounts, overheads, etc.? The (cost for the program)/(turnover) as a rule is less than 1%, although I have seen people go to 2% with suppliers help.

These KPIs will give you a clear idea of whether or not your loyalty program is working.

Our direct receipt function is when a customer waves a smartphone over a dongle on your register and through the smartphone gets a copy of the receipt plus an advertising coupon if you wish to add it. This means your customer no longer has to get a receipt and the coupon as it is stored in their smartphone, which is accessible in a smartphone app. As the coupon is also stored in the cloud (Microsoft Azure) you can set it to be marked as redeemed once used so it cannot be claimed twice.

Two points that many customers like is that doing this is much faster and unlike an email, they can keep their anonymity intact as no email address is required.

This function has currently been included to allow you to do instant customer satisfaction surveys, after filing it out you can now drill down to the exact transaction, so you can know when and who actually served that customer.

If you want to print, then all, you need to do is print a QR code that identifies the transaction. If that QR code is scanned by a mobile, it will display on the screen instantly that receipt. This receipt is available anytime, and you do not have to do anything more. This will save you a fair bit of printing work.

The other advantage is that since the receipt is virtual, you can make it as big as you like so allowing you to put a few offers in there. Okay the 5% offer off a bike did not appeal but maybe an offer of a bike pump or a new bike seat will appeal to them. It cost nothing to add a heap of coupons.

Finally, all the customers now have to do is press your logo on the receipt, and the smartphone will go to your website or Facebook page.

If you want to know more, please contact us.

Today evernote is the ultimate personal note-taking tool in business! Many of my clients and myself use the integration into evernotes from our point-of-sale system but also as well to create notes todo list, store business cards, contacts, shop receipts, make reminders, record images, integrate into Google's calendar, write notes, etc. Since evernote works across devices so that a business-changing idea can instantly be shared to anyone with a smartphone, computer or tablet, it makes it a great tool for running an organisation.

I use it many times every day both for business and personal use.

What you will find is that connecting Evernote to our point-of-sale system in has been dramatically improved in the next version so it will be much easier now to store the information from our reports into evernotes.

For an example of how evernote can be used in business, take a look at this youtube here. What I do suggest is you check out the part in the video of storing receipt, it's literally mind blowing.

The advantage our users have is that they can import their information from their point of sale into evernotes. This is just another example of have often we come up with solutions and go beyond a regular point of sale system.

If you are interested in using evernotes, I do suggest you look at the premium version because it can read images. If you are interested from the affiliate program, we can get our readers here a free trial and a discount if they wish to purchase a copy.

You have potentially thousands of stock items in your shop. Keeping track of all these stock items is in practice unworkable as it is too much work. In an effort to reduce the workload many people try pick the top selling items and essentially ignore the rest.

The point is that it is unnecessary, the best way to control your stock is to use your point of sale system. By all means watch the big sellers but for the majority of stock let your point of sale software do it.
Let me show you an example, here is an example of a stock item.

If you look at the stock item above, they have two (2) on hand. The expected sale for this week (focus quantity) is four (4) sales a week. So I can say it is likely that they have only half a week of supply before they run out. So if they order weekly they need to put in an order ASAP. Now multiple these calculations by thousands of stock items in your stop over which needs to order to almost all your suppliers weekly,and you can see the amount of work involved.

Our point-of-sale system not only shows you this information, but it can act on it to help you reduce lost sales.

All you need to do is set up standard operating procedures for ordering. Make sure that these standard operating procedures are clearly explained to your employees because even the best stock control system won’t be effective if your employees fail to use it correctly.

If you need any help, or you are looking to get an automated stock control system going in your shop, please contact us.

If you look at our report screen what you will notice is that many of them use excel.

[Image removed]

The main reason for this is that it allows ad-hoc reporting.

Conventional reports are standard reports written based on standard requirements. The biggest problem with this is that people rarely need these reports. What they generally do is print out a long report, search for the small piece of information that they require and then trash the report.

It is time-consuming and messy. In an effort to overcome this problem, what some systems do is create reports with heaps and heaps of options. So in some systems, when you go to print a simple report, you need to go through a page or two of options just to get the information you require. What you have to do is run through all these options first.

Not with us, as our system has many different ad-hoc reporting systems available.

What I am going to talk about here is one of these. Instead of looking through a 100-page report for the information you require, what you can do is use these excel reports to do the searching plus if required you can make your own reports to be exactly what you want.

Now the big problem here is that few people have excel. Not to worry as our point-of-sale system can use a free office suite - OpenOffice.

The main reason we picked OpenOffice is that after Microsoft, it is the leading office suite. It is extremely powerful. It has a large support group with heaps of documentation.

The licence is both free and open source.

You can get it from their website here: http://www.openoffice.org/

What you will find is that it has four applications of which two most of you will find, I am sure very useful.

1. A word processor that can handle nearly all formats available. It is similar to Microsoft Office 2003.
2. A spreadsheet that can integrate into our system and almost nearly all other spreadsheets.

Load it up, have a play with it. I will discuss here how to produce ad-hoc reports with it in a later post. Then you will see part of the power of our software.

On Wednesday, 10 April 2013, I wrote this table to show how rapidly our rewards program in the Lucky Charm group was growing. It was impressive then.

This is the latest update

It is now three (3) times bigger.

What is particularly interesting is that the basket size is growing year by year.

If you are seriously planning to upgrade your computer system soon, it would be a serious loss not to take advantage of this year, of the immediate $20,000 tax write-off which ends next year. If so you are running out of time, for this year's deduction. I would suggest that if you are in a position to take advantage of this concession, you should do so.

What this allows businesses to do is 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.

As a minumum, consider getting a new server with the latest windows software with an SSD drive. These servers will run considerably faster then your current one so saving you a lot of time.

It’s a great opportunity to spend on something that will help you work smarter and more efficiently, improve your shop and allow you to offer better customer service. We are currently sending out some good offers for our clients.

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

This came up in a recent user meeting of what you can write on a receipt so that its not defined as false advertising or deceptive advertising.

This was highlighted today by me when I read this article on US retailers here.

When it stated

'the company was sued in New York federal court for allegedly deceiving customers in a “systematic scheme of false and misleading advertising, marketing and sales practices” on its J.Crew Factory website, according to the complaint. The plaintiff, Joesph D’Aversa, maintains that the “valued at” price displayed alongside each item — which supposedly indicates the true retail price of a product — was misleading given that J.Crew Factory’s merchandise was always on sale.'

So I made some enquires, basically any claim made should be truthful, accurate, substantiated, and not deceptive.

Say, for example, you say the RRP is $XXX and our price is $YYYY, so you save $ZZZ. It is strongly advised that you have a copy somewhere where it states the RRP. If you say that this large business price is $XXXX, then you should have a copy of the catalogue or their website showing this.

Furthermore, an item has to actually on offer of a price for a substantial amount of time before you can say we reduced our price for it not to be considered deceptive.

It also advised that what you say should be written clearly, in plain English, so it is unambiguous and easy to understand partly because who knows what a lawyer can construe.

I am not a lawyer, but I hope this helps when you are making a note on your receipts.

Our point of software makes it easy for you to print Special stock item notes on receipts and never worry about you forgetting to add it to the receipt.

Say you sold someone a printer paper, why not tell them that you have a great selection for ink cartridges?

Call up the item in stock maintenance, see the arrow in green, press the box notes. Now when putting in the note start it with a "^". When you sell this item and print a receipt this note will appear.