Here is some interesting research released today by American Express that suggests that far from being spontaneous and uninhibited by routine, 85 per cent of Australians are pattern spenders and creatures of habit when spending their monthly disposable income. Most of them never shop beyond ten different stores or online shops and almost half (49%) admit to routinely visiting the same shopping strip or mall.

For details click here.

Although probably weighted against cash, it has a ring of truth to it.

This does suggest the importance in retail of loss leader, to get them to buy something

From Sunday, 5 April 2015 for Sunday newspapers

In NSW & ACT (excluding Far North Coast NSW)
The cover price of The Sun-Herald will increase from $2.80 to $3.00 (incl. GST). There is now about a 3% drop in margins and many of you will need to adjust your subagent rates.

Details here.

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In South East QLD & Far North NSW, the cover price of The Sun-Herald will increase from $3.00 to $3.20 (incl. GST) plus there is now a 3.3% drop in margin so you also will need to adjust your subagent rates.

Details here.

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We are making a patch to update the prices for everyone which will go out soon.

Here is my table of calculations

If your customer is in front of you, while you are processing their account why not slip for a second into the Status screen marked with the red arrow?

Now see where it is marked in green the Account Created day.

You now can say to this person, thank you for being a client of ours since 2004, we appreciate your support. I remember ....

Another reason why your retail works better with our software.

Just today, I was going over some figures with a client where data mining displayed excessive discounting. When we went over it what you could see was their discounts on products over the years were going up. This probably would not be so serious except the margins were not that outstanding. It looked actually better when we went over the details as it was the high-margin giftware items that were affected. Still it was causing a declining trend in their profit margins.

It turned out that much of the reason was buying excess stock from one giftware supplier whose products did not sell that well. It was not an error you expect to pick up but, which suddenly appears when your data mine.

What I suggest you do is run the following report to see whether you do have a discounting problem.

Press transaction enquiry as highlighed in red, now select the relevant options, it actually, a good idea to do it once and then do it again with different departments that appear and check out the results.

What this shows is that to effectively control your stock, with many items from many suppliers you need a sophisticated sales forecasting software like ours.

Firstly, you need to get an approximate estimate of your upload speed by using a testing site such testmy, ozspeedtest or mybroadband.

Now you need to know the size of file something you should be able to get from windows explorer.

I went to this site here and got some approximate speed estimate.

Here are my results for:

1 Gigabyte file on a 1. 544Mbps takes one Hr 32 minutes.

3 Gigabyte file on a 1. 544Mbps takes 4 hours 38 minutes.

5 Gigabyte file on a 1. 544Mbps takes 7 hours 43 minutes.

This is why few people wait for a backup to be done if they use cloud. What they do is set it up and go home.

If you are at say 1Mbps just add another 1/3 to these figures or get your own figures.

However, this should be considered to being an ideal figure as there are still other several factors to consider.

The speed of your Internet will vary greatly, and so these speeds are only a rough guide. They also do not take into account overhead; your system does not only transmit your file but also checking information to verify the line so you can add another 15%.

The more files you are backing up, the longer preparation time that is required for each one. One point one of my competitors has not picked up on is that they are backing up too many files so slowing down the backup unnecessarily.

Few people can afford high-grade commercial on the Internet because of the cost which was something that Turnbull correctly pointed out was a fraud in the proposed NBN in the debate during the last election. As such your backup over the hours will probably be interrupted and will need to resume. This will slow you down more. It will also give you misleading figures as most backup software says it's six hours the backup. It will start 10 minutes of six hours, then 15 minutes of six hours and so on, but if it falls over say after two hours, it now needs four hours more to complete and shows 10 minutes of 4 hours, then 15 minutes of 4 hours and so on. If it fell over after another 30 minutes, it would now start to show 10 minutes of 3.5 hours, then 15 minutes of 3.5 hours and so on. If you looked at it, then you would think it was only 3.5 hours to do the backup. I have had people fooled by that.

Furthermore, your Internet speed varies greatly depending how many people are using it at that exact time, sometimes they drop to a small percentage of their rated speed. For example, in my area at home the Internet speed at 6:00pm goes right down and does not shots up again until about 1:00am. Then I get a good speed until about 8:00am.

If your computer or networks are being used by other processes, the backup time will be increased. Many people have their computers doing anti-virus sweeps, communication between them and suppliers, program updates, etc.

Lastly and this cannot be stressed too highly many cloud backup solutions, have limits and slow down your backups if you back up too much in a month. They may say that give you 30 GB but in practice, it is so slow that it is unusable. You need to check this before deciding on a cloud backup.

Possibly because the delivery fee increase this time around was so small, many newsagents did not bother to change their rates. It was 20c per day, and it went to 20.5c per day which works out to 3.5c per week for Metropolitan agents, the country was a touch better from 25c per day to 25.63c per day or 4.41c per week.

Still as a result they are undercharging their seven day and multiple delivery customers.

The information sheet on how to change it is here.

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Every year the Global Retail Theft Barometer is released which is the largest and most authoritian report in the world on this subject. Currently it is collected from 222 retailers world wide with total sales over $700 billion US dollars. It makes fasinating reading.

Currently according to the report in 2013, the global cost of retail crime stood at $180.38 billion. This translates into a $63.56 US per person tax, imposed on honest people by retail crimi­nals. It is probably the biggest crime in the world today.

Globally the loss rates for shoftlifting range from about 1% to 1.7%. The average rate is now globally about 1.29% which is a slight drop from 1.36% last year. In Australia they record about 1.06% .

I have always said if you do not know your shop lifting figure assume about 1% as a starting point. Also you can add to that worldwide of 0.80%. which is the spend on loss prevention. So on a 75% margin, based on this I would say an Australian retailer is looking at a loss of about 1.6% in Australia.

World wide the biggest losses were recorded by pharmacies at 2.65%, stationers/office supply stores came in at 1.60% and pet shops were 1.4%. The report stated that it believes one of the reasons for the higher rates was that these types of stores have a lot of small, easily concealed items that are often on open display, they have a high re-sale value and can also be for personal use.

The worst periods of the year for shoplifting in Australia was during Christmas/end-of-year holidays.
If you accept the US figures as similar to Australia of the total shoplifting you can expect

• Dishonest employees will be about 42.9%
• Public 37.4%
• Administrative (accounting mistakes, pricing errors and process failures) about 10.8%
• Supplier fraud (no delivering what they said) 8.9%

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

The report states that “the implementation of CCTV cameras in Australia aided shrinkage reduction in 2013–2014” something I would agree with.

If you want your own copy of the report which is extremely detailed please contact

Juliet Chan
Marketing Specialist
Checkpoint Systems (AUST/NZ) Pty Ltd
[email protected]
www.checkpointsystems.com

In line with our goal of delivering more value to our clients, we are pleased to announce another value-adding initiative for our clients.

For our clients who prefer to log support calls over the phone, rather than email, here is good news for you.

We are now routing our telephones from our local offices and our main support base in Melbourne into one telephone system so currently for support, please call the following local number for support.

• Melbourne (03) 9597 7222

• Sydney (02) 9035 6666

• Perth (08) 6160 3301

• Brisbane (07) 3087 5304

This means phone charges will become cheaper for our clients as you now can call local numbers for national support.

For our contact details please click here.

Many people today want to backup to the cloud.

The problem is that with the growing amount of information being created now everyday, its getting harder to store an emergency copy of their information. The problem of course is if they lose this information, they have no business.

There are several advantages to using cloud. The one I like most is that it can be done by an automatic “set and forget it” model so resulting in less operational and administrative management for data backup. I no longer have the problem of everyday going home with a tape.

Users of ours have two main alternatives for cloud, and I am not recommending either until our current trials are completed. The first is to use a commercial company like Microsoft onedrive which is $2/month,
There are of course many other excellent providers of cloud backup too that our clients use.

The other solution is to create your own cloud of which several good programs allow you to do. Two that I recommend you look at are.

goodsync

and

allwaysync

Both solutions automatically, whenever a file change in your backup directory put a copy of that file in a safe location which can be a wide range of devices.

Now when I come home from work, every evening I have the latest copy plus old copies of my information waiting for me.

Our smart software means Life is BETTER :-)

I reckon almost every client I have, would have had employee theft at the cash register. It is very tempting for many as they see large volumes of cash freely available right in front of them.

As a result not only do we have many reports and an advanced security system in our system, but we also offer individual cash drawer control to further protect against employee theft. On the same cash register, we can offer you a method where each employee will have their own personal cash draw. Our system then tracks each of these cash drawers separately.

As each cash draw is tied to a specific employee, t makes the close-of-day less time-consuming for you while also providing employee accountability and financial security.

If you want further security, it can use blind closeout method too with our system.

When we were pleased when we were contacted yesterday about the proposal by the ACCC to investigate oversupply of magazines, a problem that is costing unnecessary much in small business particularly in cash flow, labour and freight.

ACCC proposes to authorise magazine pilot program

12 March 2015
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission proposes to authorise the Association of Magazine Publishers of Australia (MPA) to run a pilot program over 3-6 months with 20 newsagents. This program will test the effectiveness of a proposed approach to address longstanding problems with the oversupply of magazines to newsagents.
The pilot program will involve an agreement between publisher members of the MPA, and distributors Gordon & Gotch, and Network Services, to limit the supply of magazines to newsagents participating in the pilot in a number of ways, including minimum sales efficiencies, ceasing to distribute titles after an agreed number of consecutive nil sales, reducing requirements for full copy returns, and limiting redistributions.
The pilot will test whether the proposed arrangements will address longstanding problems for newsagents from the oversupply of magazines,” ACCC Deputy Chair Dr Michael Schaper said.
Most newsagents are small businesses which bear significant costs in dealing with a large volume of magazines that they can’t sell. These arrangements are a first step towards addressing these issues.
Newsagents have complained of problems caused by the oversupply of magazines for many years. Publishers have an incentive to oversupply newsagents to avoid losing display space to competing publishers’ titles, and distributors have an incentive to oversupply because they have been paid on a per-copy basis. Newsagents have generally been required to accept less popular magazines in order to also get the bestselling ‘masthead’ titles which every newsagent needs to stock.
The ACCC invites submissions on its draft determination before making a final decision.
Authorisation provides immunity from court action for conduct that might otherwise raise concerns under the competition provisions of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010. Broadly, the ACCC may grant authorisation when it is satisfied that the public benefit from the conduct outweighs any public detriment.
Further information about the application and granting of interim authorisation is available on the public register
Release number:MR 30/15
Media enquiries:
Media team - 1300 138 917

For more details please click here.

For those of you still doing manual backups, please note the following. When a computer writes to a USB key or any other drive what the computer does is write to the cache which is its memory. Next it reports to itself that it has done this successfully and only then it writes to the USB key. This is what is being reported when you can see a light flash on and off.

Sometimes I have heard of it taking up to ten minutes from when the computer starts the backup, and the lights stop flashing. During this period, the computer can appear to be frozen. If you try to do anything during this time, there is a significant chance that the system will overload and lock up. So do not do anything with this computer.

On a network, this means that all machines maybe knocked out. There is nothing anyone can do but wait until the green light on the front appears. As soon as the light goes out, the system will have finished writing.

Do not like one has done today pull out the USB key early.

Using outpost you have access anywhere, anytime. You do not even need a cloud. It is used when you do not have an Internet or cable connection to a register. Often it is used in stall at a fair, or while you are on the road. You can be in the customer's house, do an invoice on your laptop and accept the payment while you are there. Then when you are back in the shop automatically import the sales.

Outpost facility = Expanding Possibilities.

It allows the full spectrum of functionality, including point of sale, inventory management, loyalty programs, marketing, business intelligence and logistics.

It is now starting to go public about a faulty price adjustment for magazines by a competitor to us. I am not going to name anybody.

What happened is a magazine distributor issued a price adjustment, a software supplier trying to do the right thing made an advice sheet; however, it is being claimed now that this advice was faulty for their software so the claim is that they did not test it properly. As such their users had a mucked up magazine price. However, the software supplier probably quite rightly stated that it was their users who mucked it up not them. The fact that many of their users did not have a problem suggests that this is true.

Neither situation can happen with our system as we do use automatic price adjustments so our price adjustments are done automatically. If like us, this company had used automatic prices rises their users like ours would have had no problems, in fact, few of our users probably knew a price adjustment had occurred until they started to sell the magazine.

I would strongly suggest that if you are looking to purchase a software system, make sure they have automatic price adjustments like ours does.

Automatic adjustments = Work smart + Work fast.

Tyro EFTpos are so confident in their product that they are now offering a month free to test against your existing system, there is No obligation, No contract and No cancellation fees.

For details on the offer please click here

Here are what people have said about their system.

Tyro Testimonials:

"I can’t speak highly enough of your system. Franchisees are very happy with the speed and POS integration." - Mike Kentros, MD of The Lucky Charm Group

"Every Tower Systems newsagent should have Tyro. It just makes sense." - Jonathan Tay, Tower Systems

"...An EFTPOS transaction with Tyro is nearly as fast as cash. It takes between 2.5 and 4 seconds to complete. It is unbelievable." - Dianela Newsagency

"We like Tyro’s speed and simplicity. We recommend it!" - Ray Pigdon, Carramar NewsXpress

"I use Tyro and I love it! It has reduced my costs and improved my EFTPOS service!" - Bruce Demerry, Manning Mall Newsagency

"The terminal makes it easy to swipe cards. We don’t have to enter the sale amounts." - Joseph Cost, Oaks Flats Newsagency

Metadata is the information that the telcos, Internet companies and google/Microsoft know about you. Now the police, security and other government agencies want this information too.

If like most Australians, you use Android, this metadata includes information about your location, for those of you that use gmail, to see what it looks like go into your gmail account and then cut and paste this URL into the address bar.

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/1/

If you use an iPhone go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services > Frequent Locations to see it.

Here is what mine looks like about six months ago on the 20th October 2014.

What you are seeing it my mobile's location plotted on a map every 45 seconds of the day.

Click on the above picture for more detail.

It's pretty awesome!

The potential applications are mind boggling. Shoplifters could be identified. You could track employee movements during the day, did he really try to pick up the parcel or did he stop at the pub for much of the morning.

With Big Data, all kinds of correlations and interconnections could be made like what sort of clients come into your shop. Where else do they shop? How and when did they get to your shop?How they go through the shop. The information could be very useful to you, your suppliers and your competitors..

Every now and then we get a support from someone that although the till balances they think something is wrong. So what can they check.

One item that we recommend is checking in transaction enquiry, see green arrow to get there.

Note the two questions marked in red. This is because a popular method of taking money out of the till is using on cash transactions discounts and voiding transactions. You can stop them altogether, but some business require these two facilities. Often it's not even money but simply a staff member giving a friend a special concession like one case we had recently, we found a $60.00 book had a discount of $58 making the sale price $2.00.

If you have any doubts try this.

POS Solution's smart software works.

With POS Solutions, what you get is advanced inventory management, to get there click the green arrow, then after selecting your supplier and period make your way to where the red arrow is pointed.

• This report will immediately identify dead and excess stocks.
• You can see stock supple and sales, which are not justified by demand, demand variability, or historical supply needs.
• You can also see stock that you are not getting enough of undersupply is as big a problem as oversupply ensuring you have the right product in your store, so when the customer wants it, you have it.
• You also get a ranking which helps with stock placement plus a detailed analysis of the sales.

This report is another way POS Solutions helps retailers grow.

A lot of people were impressed with the recent improvements in our lay-by section, lay-bys are an example of how our software has been helping retailers increase sales.

What is worthwhile for those using the lay-by section is to examine the layby dashboard which you can find under lay-by analysis. To get there click the green arrow. If you require more analysis check out the pages in the detailed report which is available where the red arrow is pointed,

If you want a good lay-by system, check out POS Solutions here.

Getting a sophisticated stock control system like ours going may seem a big and intimidating task but consider what it can give you. Here are some points.

1) It will protect your business and give you among other thing's tranquility knowing that much staff and customer fraud can be detected.

2) Once you do it; you get actual real-time stock data that you can access anywhere through the cloud in the Internet. There you can access current stock levels, existing sales figures, forecast figures for next week's sales and historical trends.

With stock control though our point-of-sale system you can make many more informed decisions.

3) You can track historical trends.

4) Probably most importantly it will give you the forecast figure - FOCUS. Using this in ordering can reduce almost all those empty shelves, excess stock and disappointed customers. By automating the process, it means less work to you.

Our staff are ready to help you to do it too. You will find it is not difficult.