Looking at google trends it does appear that there is a growing interest in Halloween by the Australian consumer.

This is a graph of October over the last four years, blue=2013, red=2014, yellow=2015, green=2016. As you can see its going up, I think it's because more schools now are making special activities for Halloween.

So while talking to our clients about how to get the reports to show them how to find the sales they did over this period last year, to find out possible good sellers for this holiday, which often tends to be sweets, treat bags, Halloween dolls, masks and capes, I started thinking about what sort of POS software could we offer some of the creatures of this night in their shops.

Dracula would need a good stock ordering and stocktake system to keep his bloodstock in order in his shop. We have plenty of pharmacists, so I am sure we would have little trouble in getting his stock system right.

Frankenstein certainly has an image problem, no-one wants to come near him, so he would require our email and SMS marketing system to attract people to come into his shop. We have what is considered the best VIP system in our market space, so he would have little problems in getting it going.

The Mummy wants time with this beautiful girl, so he needs a decent roistering system, so he can make sure he is in the shop when she is scheduled.

The Invisible Man could use a focus automatic ordering system because he is always losing his bandages, and he needs to keep spare bandages in stock.

And Zombies needs a retail traffic analysis report, so they can be there when the shop is busy.

PS If you are wondering who that picture is, it's actually me, done with an android app, The Walking Dead Dead Yourself which lets you take fun pictures of yourself as a zombie.

If you are looking into a cash drawer for your POS software, here are some more pointers.

1) Check how many times it is tested for opening, ours are rating at over a million opens. You will not do that many but its nice to know. Then check the sound it makes when you open it, some of them with their ding drive you batty. Furthermore, check how much power it has when opening, some seem to open sometimes only partly and require you to pull them out.

2) I really would not suggest looking at anything fancy, what you need is a good basic draw. Check that they are of heavy-duty metal construction, in point of sale usage, the draws will over time take quite a beating. The ones made of plastic often cannot take the punishment, plus they cannot handle the weight. You cannot put a monitor on them.

3) You need adjustable feet. Some have feet so bad that they just fall off if you try to adjust them.

4) I prefer a key lock, you never know when something goes wrong, and you need manually to open the draw, for example; a common problem is that if the receipt printer runs out of paper, the drawer will not open.

5) I also like a slip deposit slot, to slip in cheques so you do not have to open it. Make sure that they are a decent size, some are so narrow that you need to squash the cheques into it. In addition, check where the cheques go, I have seen draws where the cheques sometimes go under the drawer, and unless you take the tray out you will not see them.

6) I suggest that you make sure that it's compatible with Epson printers so you can use it on our system. Actually check with us first before buying.

7) Make sure it has a removable bill and coin trays with adjustable dividers that let you customise for what you need. It's also good for them to have some slits to let the dirt fall though.

8) I also do recommend bill clips to keep bills and notes securely in place.

I hope this helps.

Often with our clients, their pos system is in a dirty environment and as people are worried about cleaning it because they might accidentally damage it, so the equipment is just left and gets filthy.

Besides being an eye saw when you see the dust and grime in what is often a prime position, it's not good for the reliability of the equipment, your staffs personal hygiene and its unpleasant. How do you feel handling dirty keyboards or cashdraws? What about a person coming out of a bad flu, that uses that keyboard too? Do you like looking through a dirty screen? What do your clients think if they see this dirt? If it's in a resturant like this, it's even worse. Although it is tough to keep clean, these people have shown it can be done.

Dirt and grime is not good for your equipment, a dirty scanner will start misreading and having drop outs trying to read through a dirty screen. As the dust and dirt will slowly creep into the computer and its equipment, soon you will find that nothing inside that equipment likes dirt. It will also block the cooling fans and vents that dissipate heat, which means your equipment will be subjected to excessive heat, which shortens its operational life so instead of five years; you get four years of life.

The cure is simple; wonders can be done with a few quick wipes with a soft cloth done regularly.

If possible make sure the equipment is turned off and then wipe with a slightly moistened cloth but do not apply any liquid to the computer itself or use a soaking wet cloth. In case you have wondered why a computer looks so good after it comes back repaired from us fixed, the answer is AJAX. Cleaning the keyboard, mouse, and monitor keeps them performing well. Use a moistened cloth and compressed air to remove any dirt and grime on the keyboard. Wipe the mouse top and bottom with a moist cloth. Never spray anything.

Looking after your equipment is very important both for aesthetic, business and health reasons.

Times have changed, a few years ago, there were five newsagency software companies sponsoring these awards, today it appears that we are the only newsagency software company that can justify supporting Western Australian newsagent's awards and supporting the work of their association WANA, how times have changed.

Many people actually forget that above what we do, we do give much financial support to the industry and newsagency associations.

I am sure that WANA will put again in this year an excellent night.

About now, I think we all start to look at Christmas.

Talking to people it appears that most think that Christmas will be good this year, the economy is doing well and interest in Christmas is up from last year which is well up from five years ago which can be measured using Google Trends

The trend appears to be continuing that the selling season for Christmas is getting longer so it will probably be again from mid-December to late January. So we are talking about 6-7 weeks.

So now is the last time you have to get your stock ordering right for Christmas, which is a big job as you have potentially thousands of stock items in your shop to consider fortunately our point of sale software can help you with that.

This I tell people every year to do.

Check all your equipment work, your computer connections and power plugs that you require over Christmas are working? The odds are its going to get much busier. Many of you are now planning to bring in some of the old POS machines “out of the closet” to accommodate the rush period. Have you tested it to make sure it works? Some of it have not been used in almost a year, a lot can happen in a year even if its just in the shelf. Have you checked that you have all the cables? Do you have a connection into your network where you need it? Can this equipment link into your system? Does it all work if you plug it in? I suggest you try it now.

What is going to happen if you have extra staff and the computer register does not work? I have seen this happen all too often.

It is wise to test this now in advance to ensure they’re running properly.

The closer it gets to Christmas, the harder it gets to repair in time!

Preparing for the Christmas holidays is a fun time, but you need to use these next two months wisely to put your best face on your store.

One payment method that is not commonly used but should be by our clients at the point of sale is cashout. The important point here for many of our clients is that with Tyro, there is no charge to the business or the customer for purchases with cash-out through the Tyro terminals.

This is why we recommend that you use cashout where ever possible. What you will find when you process transactions and ask people many will want cashout.

If this is not an option then for Eftpos/credit consider the use of surcharge if you feel the fee is too high for you to absorb as the margins on that item are too small.

Recently we were involved in a test made for trials of supply of magazines in retail shops under the ACCC control. So our point of sale software was feeding information to Boston analytics who processed the information for the ACCC and the magazine distributors. At the time and now I still am personally upset as much of the background material was not released so making it impossible to understand exactly what was being measured. Still there conclusion was that the magazines' suppliers could reduce supplies of magazines so saving labour and cashflow but there would be a loss in retail sales.

However, since we were deeply involved we do have access to most of the data of people in the trial, and we decided to wrap it up and see approximately six months later as the dust had settled now what difference these trials made in shop sales.

So we took five years of sales data in a few shops in the trials and analysed them with over three million calculations. We took out seasonality. What we found was very disturbing.

Here is a graph of magazine sales in a retail shop over five years. The figures are in blue but in red what you will see is the long-term trend taking out the days of the week, the season throughout the year, etc.

The trials showed nothing, a big ZERO.

So we do not believe that if the magazines' suppliers did reduce the supplies of magazines so saving labour and cashflow that there would be a loss in retail sales.

Here are some graphs for one shop.

When you look at the average unit sale per day here. The blue are the actual for the days, and the red is the long-term trend taking out the seasons.

You will see a slight drop but effectively nothing; the average sale in magazines has not changed in five years. Since the margins have not changed either, the long-term effect is zero for profitability, however...

If you look the number of sales, they are dropping so resulting in a fall in profit. Again, the blue are the actual for the days, and the red is the long-term trend taking out the seasons.

The red line shows it's going down, in less than ten years if nothing changes and the trend continues it will be zero.The actual formula the computer came up with was

Daily Profit = 318.15202249808 + 225*Summer + 224.856057910723*Saturday + 54.5292224195555*Autumn - 0.125207 x (Number of days since 01/10/2011)

The retailer we showed this too, has already reduced his magazine pockets from 900 to six hundred and has asked us to look further.

If you wish us to look at your information, please let us know.

As the Pet Shop Software experts POS Solutions is showing its latest software at the Pet Expo in Melbourne now including our ecommerce website on stand 100. If you are at the show please come and see us as we also have technical people at the stand to answer your questions plus I am there too.

Here are some pictures of days show.

The highlight was the dog grooming

There was I felt plenty of products some quite new on offer for pet retailers.

Here is our stand open for business.

One point about animals is they are unpredictable.

One point that comes up a lot in retail is a top seller today will be a good seller tomorrow.Technically its called the decay. Typically in retail, what you expect to see is that an item that sells 50 today will sell about 66% of 50 or about 30 tomorrow and day after that 66% of 30 and so on. What you need to do is identify today what is selling well to check you have adequate stock for tomorrow.

And its easy in our point-of-sale system.

Go to Register reports

Now select "Top N Stock Sales for a Given Period"

Now the following pops up.

I selected a day, normally you would put in today

Out comes a report with the top sellers for today.

Now these need to be checked that you have enough stock.

Give it a shot and see how you go.

Furthermore, there are many other reports there too to help our clients do better.

What often happens in a shop is that as you are dealing with many suppliers all with a changing agenda suddenly, they no longer get stock of some items. Because they are small, they do not notice it.

Any example recently was with magazine retailers when on the 31/March/2016 Network magazine's contracted out its distribution. Soon what happened to many stores was that many magazines suddenly did not come. When you add it up this became a considerable amount as I will show by this example here.

Fortunately, our clients had not problems picking it up as our point-of-sale system had a report exactly for situations like this, to monitor the situation.

In Cash register reports > Stock

There is a report "Stock Sold During Period (a) Not Sold in Period (b) report"

So we can now run a report for.

Period A - 1/10/2015 - 31/3/2016 (the six months leading up to Network's closure)
Period B - 1/4/2016 - 30/9/2016 (the six months since Network's closure)

That gives us items that the shop was selling in the six months before their closure and then the following six months.

As you can see I entered in this here.

Now when I press "View report", I get this.

Look at the first line, almost $20,000 worth of stock with a profit of over $6,000 lost in sales over six months. Much of it, I am sure due to issues in the change over. Although some are noticeable, most of them are quite small so few would notice two to four magazines not sold in six months without this report?

Still together there certainly much here that should be in the shop selling! Once you have the list, its time to investigate.

Another example of the practical and useful advantages of our POS software available.

Knowing exactly what is moving and the trends in your business on everything is vital in retail today, and it takes just a few moments to do so in your point of sale software. What you need to do is make excellent fact-based decisions that help you to grow your business.

Go to register reports and select it marked in green.

Now select the Monthly Sales Summary

Now I would suggest that you work in financial years for formal reporting so you are inline with your accountant's figures, no point in duplicating the wheel. So here I selected two years to give you a comparison. Note you can use more if you like as the choice is yours. I tend to think too many years are confusing and prefer to keep it simple.

Now pops out a detailed report among which you will see a breakdown by dissection and month the sales this year to last year.

For example I can see quickly in Nov 2011 to 2012, books and cards went up while confectionery and drinks went down.

Here you can easily see, which is changing in your sales.

The information we supply in your POS software has been precisely planned to help you optimise your business. This allows you to reduce your costs, increase your profits and grow your business more every day putting an end to guessing in business.

Contactless payments where a person can just swipes the reader is now the dominate form of transaction in Eftpos today in retail as you can see here by days.

The chip cards readers may have made the payment more secure, but in practice, they have also significantly slowed down the checkout process. What the modern consumer and retailer wants is speed. As a result, we have seen the percentage of contactless payments has been steadily growing over the past few years.

Which accounts for why contactless payments are more popular during the morning, but average out to 60% of all transactions by the end of the day.

Today for contactless payments, the average spend is about $30 per transaction, and this seems to be consistent across all business types and interestingly too for every day of the week.

For those that want to know more, I suggest you read this report here by the Reserve Bank of Australia from 2013 on contactless payments that is still fairly accurate for an industry-wide understanding, in particular, see page 18.

Most important with integration retail businesses today with our system can integrate so easing the arduous processes of daily reconciliation and address bank errors that may arise from oversight.

We will have an important announcement about contactless payments, next week.

Over time, plenty of people can have access to your computer system in the shop such as staff, ISP support staff and computer engineers.

So what happened today was one of my clients discovered that some rather personal information was known to one their staff. They were angry and embarrassed. It certainly did not make them feel good. When they investigated as to how did the information get out, what they discovered was it was sitting on an old computer that they had taken from home and used at work. Although they thought that they had deleted everything on the computer, quite a bit was still in a document directory of an old word processor that they had forgotten about.

This is a common problem, once you buy a new computer, what do you do with the old one?

One of the unique functions of our system is that it can run on old computers. To many its probably one of the few uses they have for such computers.

Now If this is what you intend to do, I suggest that you wipe all the information off first before putting this computer in a public place. This will guarantee that no one can get your personal information.

Now as this case shows just deleting is not enough, it's too easy to miss something. What I suggest is a program that will wipe out the entire drive. The program, I recommend is Disk Wipe,

which is free and very easy to use.

It will wipe everything. Then I would suggest you format the harddrive.

Once this is done you can release your old POS computer safely and as an added bonus, you know it is clean of viruses and malware.

One of the key business rules today is that in the brick and mortar physical world, a shop with a bad website it is better off then a shop with *NO* website. This is because no-one today uses the yellow pages to find you, if they want a product a service say Indian Coffee(KAAPI), a greeting card, perfume or a dog wash, they google it. For example, if they live in a suburb of St Kilda, and they want Indian coffee, they google "Indian coffee St Kilda". If you do not have a website, you are going to be low down in the google list. So they are not going to ring you, they are not going to come to you, they are going to ignore you because they do not know you exist. Test your self with a few products and see how you go.

Even if you hate the internet, no website equals missed opportunities. For a modern physical shop, a website is imperative today.

You can blend the online and physical brick and mortar shop together and see how you can get some of this growing e-commerce traffic.
 

We have been approached by the Australian Taxation Office to advise on how our clients will be affected by the new compliance requirements for GST. This may also affect our users who use our system directly and those that use our links into many other accountancy software packages, mainly MYOB and Quickbooks to do their GST.

We run a large computer hardware department, the largest in our market space, so I can tell you why so many Point of Sales systems ours and others fail.

By far, the biggest problem is all this software that people keep putting on software some of it is quite good, but it's just too big for their computers. Then some people have gone down the path of tweaking their system to try to get what is a best marginal performance boost, but often they have done harm to their system. Then add some slow antivirus software, which is designed for a modern computer which there is not. Now add the spyware and viruses which all of us pick up and which no antivirus software can stop all of them. Then over time their files become fragmented. Soon their system is running real slow, and sometimes they have to call us.

The fact is that most current software is designed for the latest computers, as most of the buyers use these computers. If your computer is not reasonably modern and fast, what you are doing is putting on a problem. Removing it often does not work 100% as they repeatedly leave a residue behind. Most good software like ours is designed to juggle threads and optimisation and you are not going to pick up much speed there.

Finally few decent point of sale systems are off-the-shelf packages; they have been carefully crafted to run as you require so playing around with them is often dangerous too.

If you want to read more about it click here.

now if you notice they are curved everywhere part of the reason for this is to prevent skimming hardware from being attached on top of this unit. Still you cannot be too careful.

Three tips that I do recommend you consider is

1) Use a highlighter and writing something like "Property of West Footscray Gift Shop" around on the EFTPOS unit. It just makes it harder for the skimmer to put his unit on top of yours as they need to duplicate your writing too.

2) Run your hand around the unit and make sure that there is nothing on it. I do that before I put any card on a terminal.

3) If you have an old EFTPOS unit, get it replaced, Tyro users can do this free of charge. They are just too dangerous these old units.

I was thrilled that the Cake Matters franchise selected us for their point of sale. They make absolutely lovely cakes. Here are some scenes

Here is Zac, the director of POS Solutions with some of the staff at the Chelsea Heights store.

Zac and Phil our support manager inspecting the shop, note they have a touch screen on the counter which are now gaining rapidly in popularity.

A customer looking at some of the range.

They use much of our system including our loyalty system in their shops and it works well.

Its a simple point system, spend a $1 and you get a point.

Each point is worth 10 cents.

So for a $20 cake you need 200 points.

And its works.

If you want some good cakes, I certainly recommend them.

In relation to the problems that occured recently with their stock files and the confusion that it generated with our clients, on behalf of our clients we complained both to VANA and Blueshyft.

VANA have assured us that they are aware of the problem and have addressed it.

Blueshyft replied too with the following email.

Hi Bernard,

Thank you for your email.

XChange-IT was supposed to have distributed the barcode files to the POS providers prior to our email to the network, which we believed they had, however we were informed after the email was sent that it actually hadn't happened yet.

We are immensely sorry for the miscommunication, and for the inconvenience caused.

Kind regards,

Zoe Archer
Operations Manager
1800 817 483
blueshyft.com.au
Blueshyft
Pier 8/9
Level 4, 23 Hickson Rd.
Millers Point, NSW 2000

We hope it will not happen again.