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

A few days ago, a person was working at a shop in the early morning, while she was in the back office unknown to her, a person came in the shop, took the cables off the main computer, grabbed the computer with her USB backup in it and ran off. It left them w no backup and no server. Because she has insurance, the computer and the setup will be covered but the data is lost - everything is gone. If they had a backup in the cloud, it would have been okay. When I spoke to her and told them that a backup in the cloud costs nothing to have, and if we had one, we would be right, they replied that they know this now but its happened and what can we do now?

Another example is a close call that happened to me this morning to me.

I received this email.

Now as it happened, we do deal with a company Global Knowledge, and we did recently enquire about a subscription with them. So I thought to myself what is going on, we should not be billed yet and clicked the attachment. Lucky for me, when I clicked the attachment it came up with an error as it was a virus. I double checked my computer just in case and its clean. It is, however, quite possible that if I had imported this virus, I could have lost everything on my computer. In a sense, I am not worried as I do have a cloud backup and there was nothing on that computer that could not be replaced although it would be a lot of bother.

Information on setting up a free cloud backup with our point of sale is available here.

Hi Bernard

As the owner of a combined Lisc. Post Office, Tattslotto, Sub Newsagent, I know that customers only complain when things go wrong.
They rarely offer praise during the millions of times and transactions, that things go right.

There is many software versions for small business POS systems.

The best thing about POS solutions software is the dynamic Crystal reporting sets, that appear so quickly on my screen no matter what criteria I am seeking.

As well as the attention I get from my designated Help Desk person (Rob) who knows how I’m set up rather than me being a number on a customer database.

So I just wanted to congratulate your team on the quick & prompt attention last week when my POS system failed to boot up in the morning.

A call to the help desk quickly revealed that it was an electrical issue and Shaun from your team was able to swap an electrical box within hours. That didn’t solve the problem, so he suggested a few ways to operate my store manually until he could get the PC unit back to the workshop and look deeper into the problem, even though he had prior jobs scheduled that day.

First thing next morning Shaun? rang to advise that the motherboard was fried, and that a new PC could be ordered but would take a few days to arrive.
Not to be deterred he was able to provide a refurb. Machine that same day with a quick swap of the hard disk and I could be up & running within an hour.

So within 24 hours of a total melt down, POS solutions had reinstalled and provided a PC so that I was all set up to continue trading with minimal loss..

My business was only effected for a single day, and because I had taken backups, all was restored as if nothing had happened.

So Thanks to Shaun and your team for a job well done when its was really needed.

Greg Lanyon
Mackie Rd Post Lotto News, East Bentleigh

Unfortunately, we have had to change the times and date of the proposed Melbourne user meeting. 8:00am start I think everyone will agree is a ridiculous. As we will be holding them from 9:30am to 1:00pm with two small breaks. I am a great believer that no session should be over an hour. So we will be providing two breaks with some light refreshments and biscuits all free.

The agenda will be:

The first hour will be on 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.

The next hour will be on our new technology, including the web integration that we have released recently which will change much in retail. 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.

The final hour will be open to general questions.

Tentitively the user meeting will be on 19 April in Victoria.

The NSW meeting is still scheduled on the 26th April.

We will be open on Labour Day Public Holiday on Monday. What we will be doing is routing our support services though are NSW offices so you will experience no change is our support as all our after hours support and weekend support services will be unchanged.

Almost all my clients use their own computer (desktop) for accounting. A few do use cloud, including Xero.

A while ago, we received ten vouchers for people to try Xero free for two months to see if they liked it. We gave them out to our clients, NO-ONE who we gave a voucher too eventually took on Xero. The main reason when I asked them why the lack of interest in Xero was cost, most had been using desktop accountancy solutions and all found desktops solutions cheaper.

As background information now, I would say in order of use by my clients MYOB would as a quick guess have about 50% of them, Quickbooks would have 35%, the rest are a range of products like Money Plus, GNUCash and Xero.

As Australian accountancy standards do not change much, in fact, they have not changed much since GST came in any of these accounting software package versions released since GST are able to handle most of my clients needs with one exception payroll. Some may do it better than others; they look prettier; they have extra features; they may work better the way you feel, etc., but they can all can do the job. Which system would be best for you is one that you will need to investigate? For example, my main gribe with MYOB is that it behaves like it was coded by accountants who are amateur programmers who think they know better because they have a "background in the field."

In any case what you use is not an issue to our point of sale, which is very flexible.

One point to watch as I stated is payroll you will need to determine exactly what you need here before you look and remember much of the cost in accounting programs is in the payroll section. My advice to save money, consider running a separate payroll system. They are generally much better at payroll too.

If you ask me my advice, I tell you to try Money Plus, which is free and see how it goes for you. If it does not work, then you will have at least a better idea of what you do need. You will also not lose much work either as most systems can import Money Plus files as it uses Quickbook formats.

Now I do not recommend anymore going to your accountant. This is because accountants partly tend to pick the one, they know and also as they get special deals and in my experience, their advice is often is based on this. Your accountant requirements are simple a Profit and Loss statement and the Balance sheet, which are standard documents and any of these systems. here can supply that. If the accountant wants more, which is generally purely if they find something that looks wrong, all the systems can provide full audit trials, which again are all very standard.

What you need to consider is if you need help, MYOB and Quickbooks have the best help both internally and with external consultants everywhere. The others from what I hear, help ranges from poor to almost zero

Now you should be able to get a costing.

One point to check while costing is that a cloud solution has no value once you stop paying; a desktop version will have value years after you purchased it.

What are the additional costs?

Now you have tentatively decided on an accountancy solution. You need to do an estimate on what after buying this software what are additional fees. This is particularly important if you want integration.

If you intend to manually enter in the information, then there are no additional charges. Integration will cause more problems, but it will save time. There are two types, the first is from the bank to you, this depending on your selected system and if available is free.

The other from your point of sale to you generally costs although with us, this link is free for MYOB and Quickbook. However, some point-of-sale companies charge about $1,000, so you need to check if it is not us.

The next point, is do you have a current maintenance contract with your point of sale provider Well with our accountancy link, you do not need one but some point-of-sale companies demand you do have one and will lock you out of integration if you do not have one. If you intend to take maintenance contracts every year, this is not a problem, but if you did want to option not to take it, well it will be a problem.

The next point is the monthly fee. With us its free, but some point-of-sale companies will charge about $35/month. Again if you stop paying, you are locked out of the integration.

Final note!

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.

Probably the best site on the net, to learn about the mechanics of shoplifting is here. <Link removed>

This is a site for professional shoplifters where you will find many discussions on shoplifting. How to do it, what to take, what to do if you are caught, fencing and so on.

Note what they say that they are a "wonderful community of allegedly corrupt and soulless individuals."

I wrote an article here at the VANA Expo

about an allegedly buggy competitors software that when people upgraded to Windows 10 suddenly stopped working, and that they were locked out of their software until they contacted the software companies accounting department

Suddenly, another company responded claiming that this total anonymous post which does not mention them, is an attack on them, even though on the previous post I said that there were four newsagency software companies who came to the VANA show and they produced this.

Note there is nothing here to state why they should consider this an attack by them and not the two other companies.

So this attack by them on me, quickly produced a stream of justifiable complaints by people against them, so they stopped, but they did NOT print a retraction. Soon I got a lot of emails, including copies of this company's newsletters showing that there had been problems with their software and Windows 10. Here is one such article in their OWN newsletter about their software and Windows 10.

So if you read their attack on me, it states that their software works with Windows 10. Now that might be true in the current versions but the earlier versions which would have been around when I related what happened clearly had problems. Nor was it a one off thing as it states in the article quite bluntly that this is not the first warning.

The second claim is also false, clearly users in their software were locked out some clearly for some time. Clearly, their user running old versions of their software would be locked out and forced to ring their accountancy department to gain access to their system.

Which leads to the next claim, if any user is locked out and they have to ring their software accountancy department, can it be called RANSOMWARE, you tell me???

The last two points, are actually totally irrelevant to either my post, any of the issues and the subject so I wonder why they are there. However for the record, I am not aware of us ever inhibiting access to our users for any reason, and on the last claim, I can say truthfully that we have switched 100s of newsagents and many other users, including people in the Pet Industry from them to POS Solutions.

Please consider if you are making judgement on this, that the best way to assess a company is to see how they interact with their customers and the world.

From a business point of view as there is much interest with the public over the environment so it's been a major business movement over the past year. Firms are now advertising that they are green. It is something that consumers are paying attention.

Not surprisingly as studies do show that most consumers when asked were willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to improving the environmental impact. Interestingly enough studies are reporting that employees were more likely to be satisfied with their jobs to working in places that were environmentally friendly. Clearly, there are some commercial benefits to going green.

Most industries, many suppliers are doing something, why not tell people that?

It does not have to be big, a little sign on the front window. It does not have to be much either. I have some that advertise they have cut back on some waste, some tell people they have switched to a product which requires less energy, some COULD tell people that all unsold newspapers and magazines are recycled, or some say that they have turned to LED Eco Lighting to save energy.

We actually have done something too. We installed eco-lights and cut down on electricity at night; we switched to a waste pickup service that does recycling too, and we installed installation to reduce cooling and heating charges.

PS I should say that I was one of the first people actively involved in Earth hour in Australia. I do confess that now I am really upset how some have hijacked it often by political extremist with their own agenda. I actually told one of the senior organisers that too when she talked to me today.

Update: As a result of this post, VANA thought this idea was interesting for newsagents and started to investigate. One problem maybe that its too short notice as Earth Hour is next week.

While I was at the VANA show, several newsagents who were with a different computer software provider told me of an amazing story.

What happened is that their software was supposed to be able to work on Windows 10. They had been told that it did. Then when people did the upgrade to Windows 10, they were blocked from access to their software. I am not sure whether it was a lock or barrier that blocked access to their software.

When they rang the support department of this software, they were told that it was a bug in the software that occurred while doing a Windows upgrade, and they had to ring the accountancy department of this software company. Why the accountancy department? This is very strange. Then they discovered the accountancy department was closed as it only worked business hours. Which meant of course that they were locked out of their software some for quite awhile. Then finally only after accounting department allowed it, was their software unlocked. In the meantime, they were totally locked out.

I suppose those that owed money had no choice but to pay so they could use their software. Ransomware????

POS Solutions does not do this; we do not lock people out of their software.

Do you think such action by a software company is ethical?

If you are considering POS software, please ask:

Will the software stop working or my access be impeded in any way if I do not pay support? And give them the benefit of the doubt and ask them if their software properly tested in Windows because if what they say is true, it was not appropriately tested?

And get the answer in writing, on letterhead, from a director.

There have been some dramatic improvements to the stock search in the cash register.

Press on the search button in the Cash register (see red arrow)

What you will see on the bottom is ? [search text], I will explain it.

Say you do not know what the title is, you know or your client knows that in the title, it has the word "roof" in it. So I am looking for a book that has the word "roof" in the title.

So its

?B ROOF

? to say its a wild-card search, B as its a book and ROOF because that is what I know is in the title.

Now look what happens.

As you can see all titles, with the added details like the on hand and the retail price, etc. is displayed. All I have to do is click on the one I want.

I often find this faster to search, even if I do know the item's title because it's quicker to search then it is to type.

At our stand in todays VANA Expo we were extremely busy with a constant stream of visitors by the end of the day, I just crashed on the chair exhausted. Many were existing clients coming for a friendly talk but others were people looking to upgrade their software. Our stand featured our latest developments, including our newest reporting tools and the feel of the increased speed of our system.

What I thought was an wonderful idea was for VANA to supply free lunch and refreshments, as such people tended to stay much longer.

Here are some scenes from the VANA show.

While I was there I was thinking how years ago there were four newsagency software companies displaying their products, then over the years the four became two and now only us. Today we are the sole newsagency software company supporting Victorian newsagents by supporting the work of their association VANA. 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.

Another benefit was that we also got to meet with many industry suppliers. It made it much easier as the experts were there for example I used the opportunity to resolve the touch problem that many face today.

We thank VANA for putting on an excellent expo; we certainly look forward to the next VANA Expo.

The POS Solutions team is excited to be headed to VANA Expo tomorrow for the 2016 Expo, and we hope to see you there! Before you head out the door, I have put together a list of helpful tips and ideas for things to do, so you can make the most of your time at the Expo.

How to find us

Stop by stand 007 (easy to remember think James Bond) to chat with our team.

Check Your Packing List

) Bring business cards as there will be opportunities to connect with people in the industry.

) Make sure your battery charged.

) Wear practical clothes and shoes as the Crown centre is huge and you could be walking on your feet all day.

) Come with a bag as you will need to have something to store the goodies.

Make the most of the discussions

There will be some interesting discusions that are worth listening too.