If you have a pet shop, the following site by Microsoft may help you to try to identify rare dog breeds. What this site claim is from a photo can determine the breed of the dog. It has a downloadable app, so you can do it straight from your mobile too.

I tested it with some random dogs that I found on pet finder

Overall it seems to give good results. I was quite impressed.

Although it did have a few goofs. I clicked here.

I put in Lucas, who is a two-year-old. It's a hard test as the experts in pet finder were not sure but thinks its either a neutered Bouv Flandres or Labradoodle; they are not sure.

However, it is certainly not a poodle.

Still it may help you out.

What it also shows is the limitation of current image processing technology used in many of the modern security systems.

According to a study some 82% of all people will stop shopping if the queue takes too long.

I was reading a report about a study of shopper today can buy almost anything anywhere. The study pointed out that few people are willing to stand in a queue for a long time. Not only that but if they have to wait, they will remember it next time.

Which shows the key element to any point of sale systems is the speed which you can process sales.

So I decided to check the speed of our cash register in actual practice, so I went looking though the transactions on one of my clients sites to see what speeds they have been able to get.

Here is my first screen shot

On this cash register number, they are doing a transaction every three (3) seconds.

Here as you can see, they are doing transactions from two (2) seconds onwards.

On this page it was four (4) seconds onwards. Interestingly a $431.80 transaction that would have been for sure complex was done in about forty (40) seconds.

The actual speed of our cash register software is actually faster, but an operator cannot go that fast.

As you can see the operators were regularly doing transactions in seconds. Using our system your checkout times should speed up. Therefore, your queues will shrink considerably.

POS Solutions has always been engaged in continual development. This non-stop innovation and attention to details have placed us number one in our marketspace, making it the standard. To reflect our desire to strive for constant product innovation and excellent customer support, we regularly hold User Meetings. There our users can get a unique opportunity to share their ideas directly to our community, thus they participate in the growth and advancement of our software.

As such today we held a user meeting in Sydney. The meeting went very well today. We also arranged a link to our head office so many could talk to many of the developers interstate. At the meeting, we showed many of the new features and the coming up features of our software. People bounce ideas during the process and shared ideas. There were also a lot of questions most were answered immediately a few we will need to get back to people on.

Overall it was a very informative, practical and collaborative meeting, which allowed our users to provide constructive feedback on what issues were important to them.

One point that gets raised by our new users is how much more in control they are over their software compared to what they had. They can decide when they want to update, if they want to be updated and when they want to be updated.

Part of the reason for that is because the upgrades we did last year but much of it is because we have extensive notes that get distributed internally so they can see what the updates will be, and they know at all times what is happening.

You can see these update's notes by going into.

Cash register> reports > Automatic Updates > Automatic Updates Notes History

Select when you wish to know what the updates are for and out pops these detailed notes.

I think this control is important are people are not comfortable, unless they feel in control of their environment. There is far too much thoughtless software that forces people into unplanned interactions, confusing pathways, and surprising outcomes. By keeping people in the know, giving them this control and by explaining the reasons for the changes we give them that.

This control is a major point of difference for us.

Many people when they are thinking of upgrading their computer system decide to lease it interestingly even if they have the funds. Some reasons I hear is why spend big money, we are thinking of selling so let someone else pay it, and we want cash flow. The other advantage is that doing leasing smooths out your cash flow, and it allows you to keep your balance sheet free of depreciating assets.

Having said that there are two principal methods outside of overdraft that people use to finance computers systems are rental and chattel mortgage.

On say a loan of $6,000 over five years for rental the cost per month is currently $118.05 EXT GST. You would need to add another $11.81 to that for GST, but it could be argued that a business does not pay the GST as it comes straight back. Since its a rental, it's all tax deductible.

On a chattel mortgage, over the same five years with a 20% balloon, the monthly repayments are $113.16, which are GST free. Which is slightly less! The other advantage is that the GST is rebated immediately so that on $6,000 you get $545.45 back up front which is almost five payments, so you get five months free. You would also be able to claim depreciation on the computers, as well as the interest component of the payments which would probably be higher than your payments. After five years, however, you would have an amount owing of $1,200.

Which one is better would depend on your circumstances?

Of course, I am not an accountant and always consult an accountant.

Often what happens is that stock items that sell well in the shop, but you just do not have stock.

Conversely, what happens is you will have distressed stock, which do not sell unless they are major discounted. So what happens is that they remain on the shelf, taking up valuable resources that could be used towards more profitable merchandise.

This can happen for many reasons, but the result is a serious threat to the livelihood of any business.

Some

We have two reports that can help you check your stock levels manually circled in green.

The second I put in here only for completeness but I will discuss it in a later post as filtering, macros, note taking and presonalisation of reports which are all too big a topic for this post.

In this example we select.

Cash register > reports > stock

Then Sales Trend for a 12 Month Period.

iness is

During the Anzac Day week end our week end and after hours support is running as usual both for urgent and standard calls.

To estimate this, I would use the following assumptions.

1) I would look at a three (3) year period, anything over that I would consider a bonus. Many SMB businesses will use, however, five (5) years. I am dubious of that as after three years to get effective use of your system it needs an update. At the very least, a new main computer (server) needs to be replaced otherwise the system is running to slow. This is particularly true if you are paying for time with staff.

2) Depreciation The ATO standard is a value drop of 25% a year for computers and a laptop of 33.33%. These figures I feel are realistic.

3) The cost of capital, I would recommend using as a starting point 8% but many of you will have it much lower than that. This is only an initial guess, for example, a rental over three (3) year of $6,000 is now about $1,800 a year, over five (5) years its about $1,500.

4) Maintenance costs As a rule, the best advice in a business environment is if it aint broken do not play with it. This is particularly true the better you are in computers. We frequently get big support calls after the clever nephew who knows this computer stuff helped out. This is partly because unfortunately the rule of not doing anything does not work as computers now do need monitoring and maintenance. Under the hood the operating system, the antivirus system, in fact, every bit of software today is all automatically updated. Seriously when the last time, you actually manually undated some software?

The other point is its is a difficult one to estimate as a general rule maintenance often tends to be big or zero. For example, a client split a cup of coke over the laptop. The laptop shorted out and it was a total loss.

Still computers are a mechanical device, that do get old. All will fail eventually. It's just a matter of time. In the first year, this is not an issue as we provide a complete hardware solution. Still people that budget tend to use about 15% of the purchase price on repairs and maintenance on year one with about a 20% increase a year after that.

5) Extras such as electricity. These charges do add up. Say your computer uses 350-400 watts, in a business environment. I would say you would be looking during the day between 250W and 310W/hour at say 20 cents a KW say for 12 hours a day, seven days a week or 365.25 days per annum, is (.250+.310)/2 x 0.20 x 12 x 365.25 = $245 a year of electricity.

So if I was looking at a computer of $6,000.

Annual value drop is 25% of $6,000 = $1,500 so for three years its 3 x $1,500 = $4,500.

The cost of capital is 8% of $6,000 = $480 a year so for three years, its about 3 x $480 or about $1,500.

Maintenance costs are for two years of 15% x $6000 = $1,800 (Note I have not put the increase in that)

Electricity 3 years at $250 = $750

As the cost of this computer at the end of three (3) years, is I would say $4,500+$1,500+$1,800+$750 = $8,550. Interestingly over half is depreciation, and all of these costs can be claimed on tax.

However, strictly speaking the computer worth based on this is still $1,500, so the cost is actually $7,050. This works out to $2,350 a year.

This of course as noted earlier does not take into account the time you are paying employees. Often what we find is that the costs of operating and maintaining the legacy system exceed the cost of modernization.

I hope all of this helps.

This was an interesting result; I found when I was seeing how the magazine ACCC trials were going for their shop. It's been a year, so it's about time to see what big data has to say. This is the number of magazines purchased at the shop over the last eight years. If you look carefully, you can see a slight reduction over time.

The next step is to look at the average price; a slight reduction is acceptable if the average sale is up. Overtime, there is a minor increase as you can see here.

However, the bottom line is showing a drop, so what is the cause of this drop.

This is where you use big data.

What did it find???

Tobacco sales are dropping, as you can see here.

In fact, the tobacco department is now at a stage where it is barely paying its own way. The problem though was that a typical tobacco sale also included about $4.76 of magazine sales. So fewer tobacco customers have resulted in fewer magazine sales. The big drop in tobacco sales was caused when the tobacco had to be hidden from the public. The holiday public (this is a holiday area) did not know that this shop had tobacco, but they knew the supermarket had tobacco so many went to the supermarket, as such they lost much of their tobacco sales about 11 a day at the summer.

It's another example of how SMB businesses are affected differently to larger businesses by the same legislation. I estimate that it has costed them per annum already about $30,000 in profits in magazines. The problem now is if tobacco goes, you can write off in this shop another $8,000 worth of profit in magazines as well.

For those that want to know the actual equation that big data came up with, it is for each day.

Magazine_Profit = 32 + (Number of book sales) + 4.5*(Number of tobacco sales) + 2.6*(Number of confectionery items) + 2.3*(Number of toy items) + 0.01*(Average magazine price)*(Value of the newspapers sold) - 49.3*(on sunday)*(average newspaper price)

On ANZAC Day, the Financial Review will not be published between Monday 25th of April and Monday 25th of April inclusive. As such a patch has been created to automatically stop the Financial Review on those days.

Our software users gathered in our Melbourne Office today for another round to discuss our software. The good experience from a previous meeting led to this meeting. The purpose today was to gather our software users for a knowledge interchange. The theme for the event was to increase the amount of your software investment. As I stated, ”Our software will continue to help our clients to increase their productivity and the more you help us, the better it can do that." So we discussed many of the points in running our software. Plus some points about cash register security were discussed including the Caloundra bug which showed what can happen if passwords are not changed frequently. We also discussed the website integration, big data analysis and retail change in general.

I felt that these meetings have proven to be a great opportunity for us to get feed-back from our users so letting us know what is good with our products and what we can improve. The discussion was intensive and much will probably continue long time after the meeting, and I think we all learnt plenty.

Next week Sydney meeting!

Talking with your staff about your shops is a rewarding and useful exercise and can provide you with valuable observations.

It takes a lot of study to make sense of a row of figures say of GMROI and stock turns. Without that study, they do not mean much to anyone. Besides in this case, its part of the activity that the staff have little to do, this information is more relevant for a discussion with senior management or financial consultant.

Typical measurements that are more meaning full to staff would be the average basket size and amount, the number of customers during the day, when they come, what sort of items get sold during the day and so on. This important you tend to find in the sales and rostering systems.

Then what is important is that the information needs to be produced in a graphical form so that it is easy to understand and digest. This is why our point of sale has so much of its information available visually. Unlike others, we provide all this to our users free.
In this example, one report that I do recommend is the traffic analysis by the hour which you will find marked with a green arrow below.

Among the detailed output produced; you will find a colour coded analysis from blank to red, which shows how active the shop was divided into four groups with red the busy period.

This report anyone working in the shop can discuss. When we are busy and when we are not.

There are others in that section there that would be equally productive to discuss, which give traffic analysis by sales, turnover and trend all with graphic. I am sure discussing these measurements can highlight possibilities for improvement.

Today we’re excited to announce our latest, completely integrated point of sale system that fully joins our point-of-sale system to a retail website so closing the gap between your physical shop and online shop.

This means you do not need to learn a new system.

As you can manage your shop and website from your existing point of sale system.

You do not need a patchwork of systems.

If you want to run an online shop out of your shop, we know you’re going to love it.

Click here for our latest website.

The sales, transaction processing, the end of day it links into, the works... You can add stock items or update a stock item in the point of sale, and it automatically updates in the website seamlessly. All these items are using our full stock synchronization coming out of our point of sale software.

A few of the many functions include:

* Automatic image upload from your point of sale

* Control your website site from your point-of-sale system.

* The web shop can be your design totally; you do not need to use standard themes. You can make your online shop, follow yourv existing designs

* Automatic stock upload from your point of sale

* Sales alerts to your point of sale.

* Automatic order control

* Live stock quantities

* Linked into your existing loyalty marketing system

* You have an online reporting system.

* Link to google analytics

We are now closer to reaching our goal of making your online shop better.

Check the site out here.

And if you want to know more, let us know or stayed tuned here.

We decided to upgrade our old Point of Sale system and look for something that we could pull reports, track sales and stock and also be able to more utilise our customer data base.

POS offered all of that and much more, we especially loved that POS was so feature rich without the add on price tags.

The process of implementing an new system can be quite daunting but with the support right there to walk you through all the initial set ups and learning process made the transition very easy.

Having Craig as our assigned support member is great, because you know he’s just a phone call away he is very knowledgeable of the programme and can fix or answer your questions in a jiffy.

Already we have seen and used features to increase sales and profit margins and not only that POS are proactive in looking to improve their product, therefore are willing to listen to what your needs are and help achieve your requirements.

Implementing POS has been a definite highlight and asset to Cooma Pet Shop this year. I would highly recommend it.

Yours truly

Sandra Brabon
Owner

Cooma Pet Shop

Just a short note to say how much we appreciate your staff attending to our virus problem this week . It's nice to deal with people who care as much about our business as we do . Brock was very helpful .

Regards

Gary & Jan Hewes
Budgewoi newspower

A really fine POS system like ours has features that allow you to see, at a glance, how you are handling your stock.

The reality is we all try the best we can in getting the stock in on time at a reasonable cost. Sometimes for various reasons, we fall short and fail. As such we do not have enough stock on some items.

What is often a good idea is when you have time to review what stock you did run out of? Maybe by investigating you can put in place systems to correct it?

So go to the following item on the menu.

Please select the selling out report which is highlighted above in grey.

Now select the department that you wish to look at, in this case, I am picking the drink department. I also picked a long period to look through partly for illustration purposes but also because I do believe in taking a long view.

Now I got a report that looks like that. Obviously, part of the problem is that stock quantities are incorrect. What they are also highlighting is that they are good sellers, and I better check what is happening with them.

It is just another instance of how we give our clients the means to make better business results.

The importance of Telco's products like so many other products varies from shop to shop and so ranges from small to large, to some its now one of their largest departments.

Touch systems have given me some figures for some of our clients which I think you will find interesting reading.

These listings show their products are worth to these clients of mine over a month over $1.1 million in sales; they sold over 35 thousand items, and they get more then $43 thousand in profit.

When I studied these figures in detail what I discovered is much of what people say about these products, I was surprised to find out is not true. What I was told was that more and more people are buying online, that they are buying on the mobile, and they were switching to plans. As a result, the market is declining. Well, people may be doing that but the market is not declining.

This is a graph over the last 34 months of gross sales.

The market is actually growing by about 8% a year.



Now there are two provisors to this, the first is that the number of shops selling these products is going up. How many I do not know but the number switching to integrated systems though our software is growing rapidly. The main reason for this is that margins are better as by reviewing the rates of different suppliers a smart retailer can make about 30% more profit, plus they can to a greater degree take advantages of special offers. The other point is that it's much more efficient and easier, and this becomes particularly important if you start increasing your range and sales.

The first provisor is that the margins are dropping.

I calculate that the margin drop is about 10 cents a year. Still an average profit is about $1.25 a sale which is not bad for simply ringing up an item.

It could be argued that it's an easier sale now but although the market is getting bigger, the number of shops selling the product is going up, and the margins are dropping.


This certainly affects the shop profits, which is showing the better shops are doing better vs the poorer ones. The average shop profits in this department are declining about $13 a year.

However, the number of people coming into the shop is almost unchanged. It is in an average shop bring in about 120 people a month

And that is the main reason many handle these products. When you look at your basket reports, you will see that these people tend to be good customers with high addons.

Where I think, this market is going is into giftcards and software, which should see margins going up but this will be a subject for another post.

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

Today we had a user meeting in Melbourne which became a source of much discussion here. One point that I was going to discuss was that what our system has is ad-hoc reporting but somehow it did not come up.

What this means is a person using our system can create almost any type of report they like limited only by their imagination, for example, say you wanted to investigate customers who have not purchased off you recently but used to, with ad-hoc reporting you could create a report of those customers that purchased a significant amount in the last two years but not in the last three months.

Many people supply single dimensional reports in their systems that do their standard reports while ours allows you to go way beyond that to what you need now.

However, to make ad-hoc reporting, what you need is an office suite such as Microsoft Office. The problem is that many people cannot justify the purchase or even the subscription to Microsoft Office. A common problem is when people need ad-hoc reporting on many computers.

So for these people what we allow is an alternative Apache OpenOffice which is free.

It has a word processor (Writer) which is roughly equivalent to Microsoft Word, a spreadsheet (Calc) which is similar to Excel, a presentation editor (Impress) comparable to PowerPoint and some other programs.

OpenOffice can be loaded onto any computer in minutes from here.

In use it regularly as it is a hassle even if like me, you have a copy of Microsoft Office, to get the disk to install it on a new computer.

In my view OpenOffice it is not as good as Microsoft Office, but it is still is a fine office suite as long as you really do not need to do too much. As it is fairly close to Microsoft Office, if you know one, it is not hard to use the other. As I said, I regularly use both with few problems.

Best of all OpenOffice integrates directly into our point of sale so allowing you to do ad-hoc reporting, and since it is free, you can do ad-hoc reporting on any computer.

Enjoy the flexibility of ad-hoc reporting.

Gross Margin Return on Investment, (GMROI) is the most important KPI in retail. What it measures is for every dollar invested, how many dollars did you get back?

An example say you purchased $160 of stock and sold it all in the same year for $260, your profit would be $100. Your GMOI would be profit/cost. For this example, the GMOI would be $100/$160 x 100%= 62.5%.

Now it can be quickly showed that GMROI depends very much on stock turns.

Say we make two turns so you buy for $100 a stock line, then sell if for $260, you buy another $100 and sell it at $260. So for this example, $100 has resulted in two lots of $260 sales, so the profit is 2 x $260 - $100 = $420, so the GMOI is now $420/$100 x 100%= 420%

If your Turns go up, your average stock holding is lower and your return is greater.

To get the GMOI

Go to reports and select "Sales by Return On Investment (GMROI) see the red arrow.

Now put in the required options, here I picked stationery department. I do suggest that you do this by department.

When my report comes up here, I further suggest that you export it to excel. If you do not have excel, use openoffice which is free which our software can integrate into too.

Then I got this.

As a general rule in retail increasing your GMOI is your goal.

Our system will if you press the address button show you a google map and from there you can get a street view.

However sometimes people looking at this street view, get confused as it does not look right. A typical question, I get is but that place is not there. Well they are not our images even though they appear in our system but google and the most likely reason for what is happening is that it is an old picture. The question still remains if so how can I see that it is an old photo and not an error either in the address we put in or the google system? Well it is easily to do.

See here a typical street view. Now see where the green arrow is pointing to on the status bar. That is the capture month and year of that image. From that you will be able to tell if it is an old image or there is something else is probabily wrong.