We are helping another retailer to switch to our software.

The retailer has just discovered that their old software has blocked their access to their own business data when they upgraded to Window 10.

So what we are having to do to help them is manually go through their raw data, in an attempt to retrieve their data as they are totally locked out. What really is critical is their Gantt charts!

Once we will upgrade them to our system, at least they will be reassured that these actions do not happen with us.

Is it unethical in your view, you tell me? Is it legal, I doubt it?

Surely even if its argued it's a bug, they still have a responsibility for the damage they have created.

The other problem is that the retailer has been overcharged for years, but that is another issue.

We have seen this before, and I am sure we will see it again, of course its an appalling action by the software company and reflecting badly on them now and in the future.

Can a company that lies ever get the trust that people have in it back?

When you email statements to your clients, this is how you can add promotional and marketing material to your statements. As I explained here.

It's a great place to do it as statements have almost 100% open rate compared to spam (advertising) which has about a 6% open rate.

To do this

Firstly, have your advertment or marketing material on your computer. I suggest you make your own and save it in PDF format. If you think, this is a bit too hard and you cannot get one from somewhere else, we have access to a service that can design and make for you a professional hi-res 300dpi jpeg format one sided page flyer based on your instructions and specifications to promote and advertise your business for less then $10.

Once you have this file, go to statements here.

Now you are in statements

Now where I have marked with a red arrow "Email Statement", click that. A new option will appear which I have marked with a light-blue arrow "Include Attachment." Add your advertisement that you have put on your computer.

Now review everything just to be sure as if you make a mistake. there is no way of stopping so please double and triple check. There is a test statement option below which I suggest you use.

Now run and let me know how it goes.

Yesterday and this morning some XP computers reported issues.

Not unexpected as Microsoft has long since abandoned the XP system so leaving us with what the computer industry has called the XP-Apocalypse. Which stands expected of abundance of problems.

In this case, the problem did not come from the XP but from an old copy of. NET which came with XP. So updating. NET 3.5 solved the problem, although I do suggest that you do not do this for this reason unless something is wrong.

Interestingly the problem was not in the newer versions of XP but the older ones. It does, however, highlight the problems of running the old operating XP system.

The fact is the older the operating system the more vulnerable it is. Here is a chart from Kaspersky Lab that you can find here where I have highlighted the XP infection rates in green.

My advice to anyone running XP, who is using it on the Internet to start seriously considering moving to a newer operating system. If you insist on using XP, I suggest that you make sure your antivirus program is up to date. Unfortunately the Microsoft product MSE which is a very good product is no longer supported on XP, so I recommend now AVAST on XP. It is fast and has a top-notch detection capability. Recently, I have heard that the free Qihoo 360 Total Security is better, but I am reluctant to recommend something that three of the widely respected anti-virus testing companies - AV Test, AV-Comparatives and Virus Bulletin have stripped from their test results. When they get their ratings back with these companies, I will give you a report.

Furthermore, do not use Internet Explorer but switch to a better and more secure, web browser like Google Chrome, although Mozilla Firefox and Opera are solid alternatives too.

One way to boost your sales and profit, is to stop buying and stocking slow moving stock items. Clear the space out for something that sells.

Here is a lovely report that can help you find these items.

Go to Register reports > Stock > Slow moving Stock lines

Now call it up here

As you can see I am looking at the stationery department over the last twelve months for anything that I have sold less then $100 in that period and am now stocking something.

Now pops out a report in this case of 81 pages of detailed information of all the items that match this condition in this case, we have almost $80,000 worth of worthless stock.

Check it out.

Why not when you email statements to your clients add some promotional and marketing material to your statements.

The big advantage of doing this is that statements have very high open rates about 100% compared to email advertising which is often considered spam so you would be lucky to get a 1% open rate.

These emails should be considered an opportunity to engage your clients to cross-sell or up-sell to people that are already buying your products.

Come to the end of the day, you are tired and you want to make sure everything gets done the night before another day? Well you are lucky as our system has a customisable End-of-Day process, that allows you to specify the information you require to close the current day and reset the system for the next business day.

Now select the End of Day section on your main menu. Now out will pop pages of options and its worth while going though all the pages to capture the information you require. Here is page one.

As you can see you can define almost anything to appear in the End of Day, you can add additional steps to the process, select reporting preferences and configure it the way you require.

This ensures that your business procedures are completed in a consistent and timely manner.

The section in our software that is used to monitor and control appointments for you has been improved again.

If you need to edit, for example, say the person that does invoices is not available you can remove that task from an existing appointment. You can also add a task to the appointment if required.

It can now handle more than one task (service) to an appointment. You can at this moment in time add a range of tasks onto on appointment, for example, order, pack, invoice and send another example might be wash and groom a dog when you create an appointment. What happens is when you make an appointment you can select from multiple tasks from the drop-down box which has a range to select from.

This all makes it even better for project management as well as managing daily tasks.

We have kicked off our 2016 round of User meetings, they will start at 9:30am to 1:00pm although participants are welcome to stay longer if they want.

The agenda

1) Cash register and the new advanced security for money.

Since the Caloudra bug hit, the security issue in a point of sale needs to be discussed. Unlike so many bugs, the Caloudra bug can close a business. To combat it, we have made a lot of changes in the security which needs to be explained. Check here for details.

2) New technology, including the web integration that we have released recently.

Currently, what has happened is that while there are website content systems out there like Wix, Wordpress, Magento and Shopify to name a few, these options our users find in practice are often limited to simple functions, plus the integration is messy and poor compared to our software solution.

3) General questions.

Where you can ask anything, you like.

The Melbourne meeting will be on 19 April and there are spaces available.

Location: POS Solutions Australia Pty. Ltd.
Fiveways Business Centre
2 Keysborough Close
Keysborough Victoria 3173

The NSW meeting, is full. As it is there will be standing room only. We are going to have another one in Sydney soon for those that missed out on this one.

Please if you wish to come reservations are essential, so please call or email me.

Other user meetings will be announced soon, if you are interested in your area in having such a meeting, please let me know.

Regards Bernard

Monitoring your online reputation is big today.

Not surprising as it is estimated that having a bad online reputation can lose you 10% of your business conversely, the rewards of a good reputation are huge.

In a survey, I saw recently 89% of the public stated that they do check organisations and people online before doing business with them. For example, with me, before doing a major extension to my house, we checked the builder we were thinking of using online. Even for some minor purchases, I check online. Yesterday, as an illustration, we wanted to buy a pizza for lunch. As its Easter, we knew that the pizza café nearby that we liked was closed so I searched online to find ones that are close that were open. Then I read a few reviews before I selected the place before going. After eating the pizza, I added my review.

Now today with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media, good and bad reviews go out instantly. Not only that but it does not go away. An injurious review can live for many years against you, and you need a lot of good reviews to cover up a bad one.

So what you need to be is aware of what people currently are saying about you and your business online. Even if they are not legitimate, you need to address it and please do not imagine that all these reviewers do not have an agenda. For example, you will find some of your competitors, and we all have them in business that has an active agenda. For example, I have a competitor that constantly complaining that I am too cheap, I do give them credit for being inventive with their reasons to justify their higher prices, but if I do not address it, online readers will read these bad remarks and think they are truly the reason we are too cheaper is ....

However, most of your reviewers you will find are legit and remember that most of your dissatisfied customers (95%) will not complain, they just never show up again, so it is critical to engage the ones who do complain to determine what the issues are with your business, so hopefully, you can address it. In the worst case, you prove to your online readers, that you tried, that there is a second side to the story, and you did try to fix it.

So how do you know what people are saying about it? Well, the quickest and easiest way to do this is by doing what your clients do. Go to google, bing, Facebook and then Twitter in that order and do a search with your company name and see what pops up. If you have not done it, you will get a surprise to discover what people find when they search for you.

I do suggest you do this every quarter but the problem is, that it is not practical to do it every day or week. Now there are very sophisticated tools to do exactly that. However few of us can justify the expense.

So what I do suggest is that you set up a free Google Alert.

As Google is the main search engine in Australia, which has about 80% of the market so they are going to catch most of it. It allows you automatically to check your business, your products and your service. You will find it simple to set up and use. Once it is set up, you can forget about it. As Google discovers something new about you, Google will send you emails about it. Most people actually will set up a few google alerts. I suggest that you set it up to email you once a week.

TIP: What I do is I have a newsletter folder in my inbox, and I set up a rule which redirects my Google Alert emails and sends it to that folder, so when I feel like it, I can examine them. It also gives me a paper trail of what is happening online with me.

Google Alerts is an ethical way to stay on top of what is happening to you online in the news articles, blogs, videos, groups, etc. Besides your business reputation, it can also help you keep on top of what is happening in your industry, what others in your industry are doing and any topic that you think is relevant to you.

Click here for a video that explains how to set up Google Alerts.

Dear Valued Customer

Please be advised of upcoming public holidays occurring on March 25 (Good Friday), March 26 (Saturday before Easter Sunday), March 27 (Easter Sunday) and March 28 (Easter Monday) our after hour and weekend support continues as normal throughout the break.

Of course If you have any issues, questions or concerns, you are more than welcome to call me direct as I will be at work though most of the holidays or Michael Varger on 0419553901.

Thank you

Regards,

Bernard

AFL footy cards, with the season is just starting up. Here we have what will probably be a terrific product, BUT there is no barcode. Our system can handle them as a department sale which is fine for inhouse sales so our users are okay although many do not like it but many shops (subbies in particular) are refusing to accept them. As such many of my clients are sitting on large numbers of stock they cannot distribute.

How did this happen?

Products today must have barcodes.

Employees are not equal to the business, some do their task much better then others. Some are very good and some not so good that is why you always have to check on the performance of each employee. A performance report will help you keep an eye on the performance level of different people in the shop.

What it enables you to do is give you an objective evaluation for everyone on regular basis. I believe that all businesses/organisations should run such evaluations regularly not just for the employees but also yourself. Please see a discussion on the Wikipedia here on this topic.

What our system does is produce a "Performance Indicator Management Report" for all the people in the business. It displays each employee, and then this allows you to compare their performance over a range of KPIs to others. Here is the opening page of the report. In this report, you will see that I am there as I stated you should be checking yourself as what you learn about others can be useful to learn about yourself too.

As you can see on the opening page that it shows as you can see a wealth of information on employee's performance.

Here you can see a list of the number of items the employee range up, the discounts they gave, the sales they put in and so on.

This makes it incredibly useful in a retail or many other businesses both for monitoring performance and checking security.

You will find the report in cash register reports > Staff > Sales (Detailed) for a Given Period.

How often should you run this Performance Indicator Management Report? The government standards state an employee performance report should be done twice a year, but I know companies that do it once a quarter.

With the support of the performance report, your business can run better and smoother and actively manage it and its another example of technology from POS Solutions.

I am going to talk about the five of the KPIs that I consider to being the most important retail and how they are used. Today I will discuss the KPI, *Days of Supply*.

Days of Supply is defined as how long you expect to have stock of an item.

It is a key statistic as the following example will show.

Now look at this item in ordering. I have two (2) on hand. My focus figure is four (4) sales a week. So I can say it is likely that I have only two (2) Days of Supply before I run out.

If I usually order in a few day's time, my supplier and they take two days to send me the item, then its quite likely that I will run out of it before fresh stock arrive. What I need to do is put an order in ASAP.

However, if the supplier takes a week to deliver the order, well I need to do something more extreme as I am going to run out of the item soon. Maybe move the item from a high quality selling position and put it somewhere else and use that position for items that I have stock I can sell and only sell this item to people that request it.

If, on the other hand, I had nine (9) on hand, well I have two weeks supply, and I do not have to order for a while.

If I had forty (40) on hand, well I am badly overstocked and need to consider how to move the product faster.

This analysis of course assumes that the sales continue at the same rate as recent sales, and we know that this may not be true for seasonal items or high selling seasons where the sales rate often changes dramatically in which case you will need to adjust although focus can take much of this into account.

Our point-of-sale system shows you this information, so you can reduce lost sales.

This section is used to control appointments for a business, for example, a dog groomer, a bike shop, a lawyer's office, etc.

Recently, we have made almost a complete overhaul of the appointment book section.

It can now handle in the appointment book, the ability.

1) Change the discount at the end, in case something goes wrong.

2) Better searching as you can now look by customer, email, phone or address.

3) It will also show more details of the client selected to confirm their account.

4) Shows the history and the upcoming appointments for service, price, client, date or staff with the ability to press a link and go to them directly.

5) The detailed report on appointments for a customer has extra details.

6) Send reminder email or SMSs to customers

If you have people that work by appointments, then its worth looking into although it's probably overkill if you are looking just to replace your diary.

I was not too happy with a review that a competitor recently made about us, here are the facts.

A person came into a shop and decided that the existing system needed upgrading.

Although they were not upset with their existing system, they did have two problems with it that were particularly worrying to them. The first was that the labels were not showing the correct quantities, so they could not use the labels to count their stock, which meant a lot of work for them. The other problem was that cheque payments were incorrect on the end of day report which meant sometimes they had to scribble remarks on these reports. As they were scribbled on, they could not use the computer data for storage of the end of day reports but had to have a box to store them. Actually, this last point was something that infuriated them as they wanted to use the computer to store end of days, not have to use a box. As these problems had been there for ages with the old owner and had never been fixed, this annoyed them too.

However, their computer and software were old and both needed upgrading. So they invited a few submissions, including from us to see about an upgrade. During the submission, they made it quite clear they had only a small budget, and as they were only new in the shop, they doubted they could get a lease which they did not want anyway as they did not want to take on more debt.

Now lucky for us, what we have a few computers that have been sitting in our store room for a few years. They are NOT second hand. Clearly though we wanted to get rid of them, so we offered one of them to them at a super price. Although its old, as it NEW they come with a supplier's a return to base manufacturer’s warranty. As well we are so confident on their quality, that we offered them from us a 12 month on-site warranty. They have a Intel quad core 2.70 GHz processor, 8GB RAM and a 1TB SATA HDD which is more reasonable today. Not surprising as they were a top of the line computer a few years ago.

After reviewing all the submissions, they decided to switch to us for various reasons which I will not go into here.

So while replacing their existing system, we took the new computer, and as it was the best computer in the shop and made it a server. We upgraded it to windows 10 computer. Put a lot of software on it, including open office which our software works with, which is probably why our competitor thought it was second hand which it was not.

They are now very happy about their decision to come to us.

A good solution does not need to be expensive.

What I have noticed is many using social media like Facebook or twitter make is a common mistake of placing their advertisements and articles at the wrong dates and times. The point is not be post when it's convenient for the shop owner but when actually the customers of the shop will most likely to see the information. What is the point of posting if by the time their customers start to look, there are hundreds of items ahead of them, their message is lost and the opportunity, the effort and money they put into it is lost!

A useful trick is to examine similar companies to yours and see what they do. That will give you an idea.

Then once you get going you need to use some of the tools available to you to determine the correct days and times. This is not so easy to determine as everyone’s best times to advertise can be different. What you need to do is experiments to try to find the correct time.

Once again, The Australian Financial Review will publish a special weekend bumper edition over the Easter long weekend, on sale for 5 days. A patach is now being prepared that will automatically update your system to handle it for our clients.

Recent events have shown dramatically the importance of having secure passwords.

There is nothing like a data breach to get a company’s name in the news these days, you do not have to be big as this report shows to get into the news.

http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/02/09/19/48/queensland-newsagency…

Few companies like it as its not just the loss of money, in this case $36,000 but also losses that cannot be measured internally such as their pride, and their customers trust in them. There is the added cost that a company might find itself liable for the damage as court cases by EFTpos and lottos organisations against some quite small storekeepers have shown in Australia.

However, much of computer security today is only as secure as your weakest password.

Here are some common mistakes that people should do in business with their passwords.

1) They should change all their passwords frequently. Many companies today require a mandatory password changes every 90 days because it's considered a security * practice*. Yearly should be the absolute minimum.

Worst case consider every year something like this

In 2015, - Charlie...2015 becomes next year - Charlie,,2016

2) Systematically review who has access to what in your system. If you go over the security levels, you may be surprised to discover just who can get where in your system. In one newsagency, they discovered that employees that left years ago still had unlimited access as no-one had been taking them out.

3) Please do not put passwords on a sticky note stuck on a monitor or the board where anyone can see them. All passwords if stored should be in a hidden place, e.g. in an obscure page in your diary with no indication to anyone that it's a password.

4) Try to force people to make a password that are a bit of a challenge, e.g. Tom should not use a password Tom.

5) If you find people are sharing a password, make them stop. This is hard as sometimes they have to share passwords but if this happens, get them to change the password immediately afterwards.

If your team can avoid these simple and common mistakes, you are already ahead of many organisations in protecting your information.

It took these guys just over a minute to put a skimmer on the shop's cash register terminal, note the person serving right in front of the terminal did not see a thing.

Click here to see the youtube.

The lastest copy of the Henderson Greetings barcode file is now available.

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

For this and other supplier files please visit here