Well its getting to the time of year when we have to prepare for the 2016 Back to School Promotion File

We have here on our website the latest Ancol 2016 BACK TO SCHOOL PROMOTION

For this and other supplier files please visit here

If you have any queries about this please contact

Kevin Mulhall
ANCOL (SA)
Telephone: (08) 8346 7745

Sometimes what happens is you print off a big report and all you want is one small piece of information.

An example might be here; the user wants to find the amount they charged for a "Red rose on heart."

As you can see here marked with a red arrow the report they printed was 13,533 pages long.

What they do not want to do is search 13,533 pages to find that one item!

So they press the search marked with a brown arrow.

Up pops a box shown with a blue arrow.

They enter in "heart" and "Find next"

Out pops instantly what they are looking for in a red box on page 312.

It's wonderful how our software has useful benefits like this.

Today I was hit with several questions from my users about our accountancy link, which is a free product with no cost to them. The next question I was asked was which accounting software was the best.

Well honestly, it has to be said is that if you are small, you can do this on a spreadsheet. You do not need an accounting program. Simply have one sheet for expenses and another for income. When I first started in business, in a bedroom in my flat, this is what I used for many years. In many ways, it was better than using an accounting package. What I particularly liked was that I could make my own reports as I liked, it's only now with recent developments of our software, the sole one in our market space with this capability that I have seen this flexibility returned.

However, when you start to get bigger, you quickly see that you need more and an accounting software becomes a critical tool in any business to effectively operate.

As Australian accounting standards have not changed much since GST came in, and they did not change much before that either. So it should be said that any accounting software package released since GST should do the job. For example, I have seen multi-million dollar companies using ten-year old accounting packages.

If you have not got an accountancy system and want to try one out free, you will find most packages have a free trial period. If you want to try some totally free ones, two that I think are extremely good are GNUCash.
and Money Plus

I used Money Plus for many years for my personal accounting and was extremely impressed with it. What happened is that Microsoft took on Quickbooks and although they made an awesome program, they could not beat Quickbooks and stopped work on it and released this free version.

Both of these accounting programs are extremely powerful, both come with bank reconciling, profit and loss, budget planning and detailed report generation. Many SME business run fine with either of them.

There is also a free accounting software offered by the ATO too but compared to these two its extremely limited in its use, so I do not recommend it.

If you are prepared to pay, the two most popular by far in our market space is MYOB (50%) and Quickbooks (35%). The main attraction of these two over the free ones above is that our clients have integration. This saves them about an hour or two of work a month. The big problem with integration is when something goes wrong, and you can spend ages trying to find out why and there is always problems, for example, the tip roll at the end of day does not balance exactly with the banking. It's for this reason some do not like integration even though its free.

Of the two, I think you will find Quickbooks easier to use, the problem most people have with MYOB who don't actually know how to use it, is that without a basic grasp of bookkeeping it is a struggle. Once you get used to MYOB though, its fine.

Still from what I have seen, they are all fairly similar. They do the equivalent things. They use the same principals, etc. There are points that I like in one and points that I like in another.

Whatever way you do go, I would recommend that before you start you buy a book on basic bookkeeping using the software you intend to use. Work though it and then start.

In my order of my preference.

Quickbooks
Money Plus
GNUCash
MYOB

The cost varies, one of my clients who uses the full system of MYOB gave me his breakdown of costs per year.

MYOB AccountRight Plus AU 2008 $439.00
2009 $459.00
2010 $493.05
2011 He was not sure.
2012 $714.00
2013 $780.00
2014 $840.00

Take out payroll and his costs would be much less.

PS One point I do recommend is, use your accounting program with dropbox or onedrive from Microsoft so you can get the benefits of being able to use it online for free, anywhere in the world. That way if say you are in your accountant's office, and they need some figures, you can get it from the cloud instantly.
 

Our position with Windows 10 is unchanged that its best to consider doing this update in Feburary after it has been tested some more. It took about a year to get most of the problems out of Windows 7 and 8, and I doubt it will take much less with a more ambitious product like Windows 10.

Although our software works fine under windows 10, there is much more than our software involved. Everyday we are getting support calls from people that have upgraded to Windows 10, and they discover that something is not working.

Sometimes its user error, Windows 10 does not work like previous versions, and many do not know how to get something to work. I spent doing my upgrade several hours before the computer was back the way I liked it.

Often it's more than that, for example, we have seen programs disappear and need to be reinstalled. Many badly written programs no longer work and require a new registration. Antivirus programs sometimes work but should be reinstalled anyway.

Then there are hardware issues like the region in windows often has changed. Worse still printers that used to work but no longer do and often there is nothing we can do about that as many printers do not have a Windows 10 driver. Another popular problem is computers that can no longer access the network. The list is endless.

If you intend to do the update now make sure that you do it during business hours so if something goes wrong you can get someone to help you.

Furthermore, if something goes wrong, do not try to revert it back despite some claims, doing a rollback often makes it worse. I suggest you do not do any rollbacks.

We have some useful report that can help you in our point-of-sale system, although they are labeled magazine, they actually work for all products.

Go to the Main Menu / Stock Systems / Supply Report

The first step is to check the Over Supply Report.

Put 100% in the box.

Select the option to show all

Select option Returns

Now click Show Report

These are all the products you have received and never sold in the period chosen. I would suggest these are the first ones to cull.

Now if you need more room, select the Magazine Supply Report.

I suggest you do it by supplier because you will see an overall pattern by suppliers, and you find when you cull you need to see the pattern across a supplier's range.

Now select the supplier and period and then click Get Data.

Now on the reports, you will see a listing of the items sold by numbers. Note the bottom selling items.

Actually its surprising how much can be culled with little effect on sales.

I have been studying the latest research on shoplifting from the US as I am always looking for ideas to make our software better, and I came across this idea, although it's not software, I thought I would pass it on.

Proper anti-theft signs can do much to dissuade potential shoplifters. Here is a sample. Pay attention to the people's eyes which I marked with a blue arrow.

The image of those eyes has been shown by research to double the effectiveness of the sign as it psychologically reminds people that are being watched. Interestingly which makes sense is that the effect is greater when there are less people in the room. For a discussion of the formal reasons why it works click here.

Here are some more tips on where to place your sign.

1) The sign can be high up where cameras normally are as the potential shoplifter is scanning your security, So you do not need to waste valuable space.

2) Place near the entrance, a lot of potential shoplifters do not go deep into the shop.

3) The sign should be in red.

I think many of you will find this from the US interesting. It's going viral on youtube. What it shows is a woman captured on video teaching a young girl how to steal a large bottle of tequila from a store.

It is available here.

A customer receipt can be more than a legal document proof of purchase and a record for taxation, as it can be an advertisement for your shop. Unfortunately, what happens is most people just throw out your receipt shortly after they get it. What our point of sale allows you to do is add notes specific to the goods being sold. This is commonly done by our garden supply centres and are called propagation notes but there is no reason why any retailer cannot use them.

What you do is add some information that people who buy a certain product will find useful, if they find it useful, they will not throw it out and keep it for study. While studying it, they will see your banner on the receipt.

If you are interested in doing this go to your top-selling items, it rarely takes many to get over 50% of your sales.
Now call up the items in stock maintenance, see the arrow here in green, press the box notes and put in a note in the box starting with "^", This will make it print on the receipt when the item is sold.

In this case, the retailer has added an advertisement.

Just another example of how our software can be used to drive sales.

Here is how you can quickly set up the minimum and maximum qualities for stock ordering.

Open the Side Menu, then choose Stock Systems > Stock Ordering.

Select the “Make a Blank Form” option, and the supplier who supplies the items that you wish to set values for. Click “Generate Order”

Leave the Quantity at 1, and scan each item you wish to set values for. (You can also look up items here by name).

Once finished, go back to the top, and click in the quantity field of the first item, and press F5. You can now adjust the Min and Max values for that item.

Proceed down the list until you have set each item’s Min and Max. You can then cancel out of the order, and the Min/Max values will be saved.

This rapid approach is just an additional example of how POS Solutions has better software.

If you are a supported client of ours, POS Solutions can create an extensive B2B mailing list for your location FREE up to 1000 names. If you are just a reader but not our client but want such a list, it's five cents a lead. It will be created and designed to your specifications to help you boost your business and generate profits.

Email and SMS lists are available too.

These are not rental lists that you have to keep paying for to use but once off buys.

As always, we offer you a quality marketing list that will help you maximize your business success. With our vast experience and expertise over many years, our company can only guarantee you a comprehensive database that you can use for your business. Furthermore, it worries free as we offer a money-back guarantee.

We believe that it is essential to create good software and help you use it to make the most of your software.

This is the difference delivered by POS Solutions.

If you need help with email text, consider using a virtual service.

If a shop does not have enough staff, many of the customers will leave. What is even worse they go immediately to a competitor and find that they offer better service as they have people that are on hand available to answer questions and show their stock?

Most of this can be avoided by using our point of sale with its unsurpassed reports to aid you in determining how many people you need. It is available in register reports.

Select the dates from a previous year that match the dates you are looking for in this year and among other particulars which go over 10 pages, it gives hourly sales reporting statistics which gives you knowledge as to when you need more people in the shop and when you require just a skeleton team

It is colour coded too to show extremely busy periods.

Using your information, you will be able to build control within your shop and so propel your business better.

A supplier representative for the goods marked above with a red arrow is coming to see you soon; well, how much of their stuff do you actually move now? The problem here is that these products may come through several of your suppliers

Well, it's simple to find out; we use the manufacturer.

Go to reports; look here

Look at the Manufacturer Stock Sale report pointed out by the red arrow, call up a supplier for the exercise, put in the last 12 months and follow my example below.

Now click the item marked with the red arrow.

Now select a supplier. I picked WAY, but you can select anyone more relevant to you, and you will see what you have sold for them in the last 12 months.

A solar company is under investigation currently for posting five-star "reviews" on a website productreview.com.au with the ACCC. This is not the first time an organisation has been charged with doing this. There is an interesting discussion on the whirlpool forum about it, which is worth reading if you have a website, or you are thinking of doing this and I suggest you read the ACCC guidelines here.

We had something similar happen to us here. Readers may recall a character Jack and Nelson, who kept writing negative reviews on our posts and discussions. It turned out to be a person in a competitor company of ours.

He got caught because he was stupid, as he accidentally posted under a name that stood out, then he was ignorant as clearly, he did not realise that almost all browsers have a trackable and unique fingerprint and because he was careless and exposed his IP address. One point led to another and another, and he was caught. Once notified and told what a ~@!#@ he was for doing this. He stopped immediately, maybe we should have gone to the ACCC too?

At the time, I was I confess hurt and just happy he stopped.

Update: 30/Nov/2015 As a result of this action by the ACCC, we have updated our website by putting in terms of use here. As far as comments people have made in other forums about this jack, please give no credence to their comments.

Formally, this is not the first time that there has been a problem with data in a DD2 file in this case it was with Harper’s Bazaar where the barcode in the invoice does not match the printed copy, and I am sure it will not be the last time. So several of our users have expressed concern.

It should not be a problem to our users. Just in case I checked with several of them that asked, and the barcode scans correctly. However, if you are concerned, try it and see.

The reason why it is not an issue with our users is because it happened before as you can see so years ago we changed our software to accommodate this error that just keeps coming back.

Luckily this time the barcode extension is right. Thus when it is scanned in the register and in returns, the sales and returns will be recorded against the December 2015 edition, and the sales history and return forms will have the proper information. It may cause problems with Network and XchangeIT but it is their mistake, and they have to live with it.

I often get asked this question what printer should we get?

It is a difficult one to answer because they are not exact the same.

As a general rule laser printers cost more than inkjet printers, but the printing cost a page is less on a laser printer so what you need to do is consider when purchasing:

1) How much printing you estimate you will do?

Some of my clients do almost none.

2) How much do the cartridges cost you?

3) How long will the cartridges last?

However, you also need to take into account a few other factors.

1) What do you require to print?

If it is photos and/or you really do need to make it professional looking often an inkjet is better. This is particular true if a supplier sets a standard quality that you need to abide by. If the printer cannot do what you need, anything you spend is too much.

2) How often do you print?

Ink jets if they are not used regularly tend to clog up, and it gets messy to use them. Laser can often be left for long periods of time unused. This is actually the biggest problem I face with inkjet. At home, it can be months before someone needs it and then the inkjet does not work because it has not been used for so long.

Sometimes the best solution is to buy both a cheap inkjet and good laser.

Having personally used both types of printers for years, I have found laser to be better and prefer to go to a professional for my photo printing.

I have been in touch with both the Sales Director of Vodafone and the Sales Manager of Touch, and I doubt that there is an answer to whether Touch will have Vodafone soon, I suspect probably not even for many months if at all. It appears to be a legal issue. I will let you know more as soon as I have more information.

So if you sell Telco products, the big problem now is that Vodafone is *NOT* available on Touch, as such we are currently recomending to all our clients that they get our integrated epay system which we support on our system so you can process Vodafone. There is no point in trying to ignore Vodafone, and I strongly suggest that you do not as they have over 5 million clients Australia wide. Whatever you think, *NOW* epay is a must.

Having said that I do recommend that you do get both as they do not have the same products and the margins on offer on some products vary substantially. One of the great advantages of our system is you can use both together to get max benefit.

Here are five retail tips, which I hope are of use.

1) Customers are more attracted to stock in the middle of a shelf, then they the tend to look at the right side and lastly on the left side.

So put your best sellers in the middle of the shelf, make your way to the right and then fill up the left with the losers.

2) People aren’t very good at judging changes in size so when you make something bigger, people underestimate how much more it is. This happens because, when we estimate the size of an object, we tend to add instead of multiplying the changes in size.

Read more here.
So make the stock longer or taller rather than rounded.

3) Cooler temperatures indoors leads people to making more emotional decisions.

This could explain why expensive shops always seem to have their air-conditioning turned up.

4) People spend more money in shops with blue interiors over shops with orange.

Read more here.

The article also goes into soft lighting, which can help too.

5) Merchandise behind glass or in hard-to-reach places do not sell as well as stock, which is more accessible. People like to touch.

Read more here.
This, however, will be a real problem if that stock item is frequently stolen.

As I said, I hope this help.

Every year the Global Retail Theft Barometer is released, which is the largest and most authoritian report in the world on shop theft. According to the report, the cost was $123.39 billion US for retailers globally, which means the cost increased from 0.94 percent during 2013-2014 to 1.42 percent during 2014-2015. This means it is the biggest crime in the world today.

Australia went down from 1.00% to 0.96%, so you probably did not see the drop. This is in line with what we have always said here if you do not know your shop lifting figure assume about 1% as a starting point.

Although it has to be said with some retailers like a pharmacy the figure is much higher. Their rate of theft is 2.22%, which is up from 2013-2014 by 0.59%. No surprises there if you follow the news - drugs!

Added on top of that is that it is costing the retailer is about 0.79% in loss prevention spend. So assuming a 30% margin 1% x 70% + 0.79% = the cost of shop theft is 1.49% of total sales.

The worst period of the year for shoplifting in Australia was during the summer probably due to the big traffic during Christmas/End-of-year holidays.

The percentage breakdown in Australia by type.

• Dishonest employees will be about 25%
• External - shoplifting (39%)
• Administrative (accounting mistakes, pricing errors and process failures) about 23%
• Supplier fraud (no delivering what they said) 13%

The last two, in particular, show the importance of a good computer system.

One point I will say about supplier fraud, it may be the smallest but often if it happens its huge, for example, right now, we are working on an investigation where it is calculated that the figure lost in one newsagent is over $191,000+

One of the best tools to determine shop theft is stock takes. 39% of the respondents did one at least every month; 21% did it quarterly and most of the rest yearly. Despite what some people advice, we strongly advise that a retailer should do a stocktake at least once a year.

If you want your own copy of the report which is extremely detailed, please contact them here.

With Australian shoppers currently spending an estimated $37.8 billion online over the last financial year an increase of 9.7 per cent compared with the year to June 2014 many retailers are now thinking of creating a website to sell their goods. So one frequent question I get by retailers “How much would a website cost?” Unfortunately, there’s no quick answer to this question.

The first point is to figure what you need. For example, if a retailer wants to get rid of a pile of dead stock, a cheap and very efficient method is eBay. Yes, you pay some high fees but eBay has plenty of traffic and a good reputation. Because they have so much stock there already you can very quickly get a feel of what price you can get, you then can crunch the figures, do a few trial runs and see how it goes. Unfortunately if you do start to sell heaps these costs do mount up. That is partly why so many power sellers on eBay do complain so much. Plus it should be said that there are major limitations on what you can do on the eBay site.

So the next step is your own site.

One of the great attractions that people see is that many of the costs in retail like, salaries, warehousing, rent, etc. will disappear. Actually, they do not magically vanish just because you sell online. The figures change, some new costs get introduced but much continues. For example, the rent is cheaper but web-designers time costs and there are ongoing costs as a website needed to be updated partly to reflect the changes online but also to adjust to your changing requirements. Still overall its a great place to do business online as their David can compete with Goliath as David's website can be just as good as Goliaths.

And you get a sales representative that works seven days a week, 24 hours a day, every day of the year selling your products that can help generate extra sales for your business.

There are many possibilities on how to set up a website, the cheapest some say is to use some free software. The problem here is often you need programmers and web designers to set it up. For example, Magento CE, a free online shop software is being actively marketed in our market space. Say you decide to install just 30 of its extensions, which is less than half and each extension takes about 2 to three hours to install. We are looking at 60 to 90 hours of work say 70 hours. Assuming a web designer is somewhere between $80 and $160 an hour, we are looking at $5,500 to $12,000. Then on top of that they need to adjust the system. Also you the user has to be trained how to use it. We are not talking a simple program here. Then there are going to be a lot more fees just to run it plus maintenance fees. The final bill could be double on a complex site.

Another possibility is to use a hosted ecommerce solution. One point I do recommend here, is make sure that the hosted computer is in Australia not just for legal reasons. It's hard to get support if you are dealing with a US company based in India, I know I have been there. The problem here is like most prewritten solutions, which are not written for you, there will be limitations. The odds too is that they will have monthly fees, transaction fees, setup fees, excess storage charges, bandwidth limitations and support fees. You will probably find the costs are much higher than you are quoted.

Lastly for a comparable cost what you can get your own online shop written, which is often what our clients do. Since its made for specifications, you can get the advantage of integration into our software, and you get much more control.

Overall, all solutions are good, and it depends what you require.

Please give us a call to discuss further.

Answer you buy too much or not enough.

With the use of our smart phone app where ever you are, you can check your stock quantities. Here is how it works.

Say you are in a supplier's warehouse or at a trade show, you may have at best a computer generated order report based on yesterday or this mornings figure. You know of course a lot can happen in a few hours in retail. So you may add to the order in your head how you think the stock is going, taking into account any unusual customer behavior, and other vital forecasting tools. Now you come across an item which looks hot, but you are not sure whether you handle it and if you do know you handle just how many you have in the store?

The is a typical example of when really need your real-time data the most.

So you go to your smart phone, which has our app Mobile Stock.

Once you select it, out appears this screen.

You take a picture of the barcode using the smart phone camera and if the product is in your database, out pops the following.

This tells you straight away a real-time stock figure, and you know you have this product and you have 12 in stock. We include the description so you can check that its not a duplicate barcode unfortunately, they still happen.

People using it tell me that using this app has been invaluable.

The other use is you can discreetly scan the item in a competitor's shop and quickly compare their price to yours to see whether your pricing is correct, which is very handy too.