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.

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.