What is happening is that the barcode extension of Vogue Australia still is incorrect! It is correct in the printed number so many have missed it but when you scan in the barcode, you will see that the bar code is incorrect.

This is what is happening.

This is the sales history by issue of Vogue Australia note almost everything is in May. The reason for this will be apparent shortly.

Now an October Vogue Australia is sold.

Here is now the history of the sale of Vogue Australia by issue.

See how it's gone into May; this is because of the errors in the barcode, see the yellow marking.

Besides mucking up your history, it may be mucking up your return figures.

I suggest that you check first your history of May's sales of Vogue Australia and then your returns.

Note this error would not occur if you use in house barcodes or magazines delivered.

What happened is a user of our software did not use the schedule and as such sent off an SMS to his client that a magazine had arrived in. This waked his client at a ridiculous hour in the morning. One of the staff members of the shop, a few hours later got an earful from the client.

Our client discussed this with us a few hours after that. I decided, firstly, to check whether our client had broken the law, and I believe that he had not (although I note here I am not lawyers) as the

ACMA states "...There are currently no requirements which dictate the timing for such alerts, as such it is not necessary that providers have systems in place to send the alerts at specific times. 

So unfortunately, if you wish to  receive usage alerts you may experience the alerts at inconvenient times...".

However, we all agreed that his client had a legitimate complaint and we decided to pass it on as a warning to others.

If you are using SMS messaging try sending it at a reasonable time, you may find this useful as a guide.

According to the Wikipedia

A card not present transaction (CNP, MO/TO, Mail Order / Telephone Order, MOTOEC) is a payment card transaction made where the cardholder does not or can not physically present the card for a merchant's visual examination at the time that an order is given and payment effected, such as for mail-order transactions by mail or fax, or over the telephone or Internet.Card not present transactions are a major route for credit card fraud, because it is difficult for a merchant to verify that the actual cardholder is indeed authorizing a purchase.

This issue has cropped up, and I confess at present we are only about 80% of understanding it.

Many of you offer a Western Union money service to your clients. Some of you are using your EFTpos to service this account to say debit a client's credit card for the payment. If you do use EFTpos in this way, essentially you are breaking your merchant service contract, which explicitly prevents merchants from accepting (motto) payments that are not in exchange for goods or services. In this case, the EFTpos terminal is accepting a card payment, for the funds to be redirected to Western Union.

If this is your standard business practise, then it should not be.

Customers who want to send money via Western Union should use cash.

A work around would be to do a cash out on the EFTpos and then do the Western Union transaction. However, you may need to check with your EFTpos provider over the fees for doing this. Note on Tyro EFTpos, cash outs are free. This may not be true on your system.

We are currently require a new helpdesk support person. We are for this position, particularly interested in someone who is a people's person who is good at handling calls. Details are available here.

Here is our video.

We offer free training to all our clients in our offices. Unlike others, to us, it’s all about making your training sessions as easy for you as possible. In our main offices, we have several training rooms, each station in the training room boasts a screen plus a large centre monitor so participants can easily see what they need to do at a glance. What we like to do is invite participants to bring their particular data to the session, so we can show them on their own data. It makes it more relevant to the participants.

For a successful session, we think it’s important that people feel comfortable and relaxed. So our training rooms have large windows to let natural light flow in. Overall it makes for a rather pleasant experience and its free.

To make a booking or find out more, please contract us.

Had a question come up about it was surprised when I discovered that one of our clients does not use it.

Visa payWave is the latest in contactless technology. What it allows you to do is for transactions under $100, for a customer to just wave their Visa card in front of an EFTPOS reader and go and there's no need for a signature or pin. Currently the supermarket group Coles reports that over half of all its credit-card transactions are now made using this contactless payment method. It must be really hurting EFTpos.

The advantages are

- It saves time at the counter because it is faster.
- It’s more convenient as people do not need to carry cash.
- The card doesn’t leave the clients hand at checkout.
- You don’t have separate papers for people to sign anything.

One point you should be aware of is that all PayWave/Pass goes through the Visa or Mastercard network and are treated as a credit transaction no matter what card is actually linked to. As such you the merchant is subject to Visa/Mastercard fees.

Since such a high percentage of customers are using it, I do suggest that you do look into it. I would suggest if you do not have it to check with your EFTpos supplier, here is a picture of what such a unit looks like from tyro.

Download tyro flyer Download

This problem is one we inherited rather than created. What happened is over the years, we have upgraded many people from other systems to ours, unfortunately one of our major competitors used Windows Server 2003. As such now we have many Windows Servers 2003. What Microsoft is going to dump like windows XP now, they will be stopping support on Windows Server 2003 next year. They will stop the stop security updates which besides creating several technical issues also creates a legal issue if data is breached.

They will also stop technical updates. Already we can see Windows XP is no longer a viable solution for mobile devices like tablets, smartphones, and notebooks. So will it be for Windows Server 2003.

You now need to consider seriously moving your business off of Windows Server 2003.

The following newspaper prices will be updated automatically by scripting for those on you that have to do it manually as you are on DOS, please note these.

The Monday to Friday edition of the Age will change from $2.30 to $2.50 GST inclusive scheduled from Monday 29th of September 
The Saturday edition of the Age will change from $3.30 to $3.50 GST inclusive scheduled from Saturday 4th of October 
The Sunday edition of the Age will change from $2.80 to $3.00 GST inclusive from Sunday 5th of October 
The Saturday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald will change from $3.30 to $3.50 GST inclusive from Saturday 4th of October 
The Monday to Friday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald will change from $2.30 to $2.50 GST inclusive from Monday 29th of September 
The Monday to Friday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald FNNSW will change from $2.50 to $2.70 GST inclusive from Monday 29th of September 
The Saturday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald FNNSW will change from $3.50 to $3.70 GST inclusive from Saturday 4th of October

There seems to be a lot of interest again in this newsagency case since Lexology, the major legal site for the world's leading commercial law firms, published a new article on this case Nextra Australia v Fletcher.

The article is available here in the orginal, but I noticed that it is widely circulated in such publications like the Franchise Bulletin here. This is actually where most newsagents are reading it.

What the is saying is that if you do run a social media even in only personally it may have a *commercial* character and as such breach Australian Consumer Law. If you do have a personal Facebook page, blog or twitter account, or if you are thinking about starting one, it is worth reading this article.
 

The Lottery Retailer of the Year was also our client Nightingales Pharmacy & Newsagency, website is here.

Its nice when people write to say this to you.

Hi Bernard,

Thank you for your email. We were very excited to be the Lotterywest winner here in W.A..

We appreciate the role that POS solutions has in our business and the effort that your team put in to ensure that our system is running smoothly (and to answer our many queries). Phil is my contact when I have questions and he fantastic, and I know that the other members of the support team are excellent, too.

Kind Regards,

Simone Jackson

Nightingales Pharmacy and Newsagency - Kalamunda

 

 

 

 

 

Say you want to add a comment that will print on the receipt on the sale of specific stock items, you can do it.

In stock maintenance, pressing the Notes button (near bottom right), for a stock item. This will bring up the stock notes box. Put a note in here starting with "^" and it will appear on the receipt.

For example, say you put in ^Next week, this item will not be available. This message will appear at the bottom of the receipt.

In what was apparently a very good night at the ANF WA Newsagent of the Year Awards at the Pan Pacific Hotel Perth, several of our clients took at the top awards.

We were pleased that out of three awards open to our clients, POS Solution clients took two, note we may have got all three but we are not sure.

Central News Bunburg was the winner of the Retail Newsagent of the Year, face book site is here to wish them congratulations.

The Lottery Retailer of the Year was also our client Nightingales Pharmacy & Newsagency, website is here.

I think the judges picked well as both of these are well run businesses with proactive change-embracing people backed by a team of high quality employees who support the business and its goals. Recognition for their good work is well deserved in each situation.

If you still one of those that are having problems with importing Hallmark invoices using XChangeIT, please follow these steps to set it up.

1. From the Main Menu, go to Stock Systems
2. Then select XChangeIT.
3. Click on the Advanced tab.
4. In the Service Provider drop down box, select XChangeIT.
5. In the Supplier drop down box, select Hallmark.
6. Click the Find button.
7. In the Partner Code box put in HM
8. Click OK.

If you have some queries about your GST and you want to check it, why it does not seem to be right, what you can do is audit the figures on a daily, weekly, monthly or whatever is required to try to find where the error.

You will find it in here

Cash register> Register reports > Sales > GST Summary for a given period

This is an extremely detailed report showing the GST information based on the selected period.

What I find it particularly useful is in tracking down errors. For example, say I see a GST figure in the BAS that looks off. Using this report I can break it down to two sections of one and a half months each, then see which one looks wrong. Then I take that one that looks wrong and split it into two sections, check them and so on till I find the day of the error.

Give it a shot and see how you go.

Also, there are many other reports there too to help our clients do better.

Years ago we first introduced to our clients the ability to SMS their clients' messages. It works well, when a client orders say a particular magazine, when the magazine arrives in the store an SMS is sent to the client that it is now available for pickup. The SMS costs are fairly small, depending on the quantity purchased 7.5 to 10 cents an SMS. What I have noticed is that over the years, interest in SMS has fallen as email has become more important as a messaging tool. Still, many of our clients have continued with SMS although it is dearer for a combination of reasons such as it is faster to get the message across, people tend to read their messages much more than email and an SMS does not get lost in spam filters. So there is still a need for it.

I contacted our current supplier recently to see if I could get a cheaper SMS for my clients and was bluntly told that the deal our clients have now is a pretty good deal AS IS and that it was probably about the cheapest out considering the volumes they purchase. However, another SMS provider offered to give our clients cheaper an SMS, if we could supply them with an order of 10,000 a month. What I would like to know who would like to join such an offer? So I said we will see how much interest there is in cheaper SMS?

If you are interested, please let me know the quantity per month you would like?

At present XChangeIT have started to test in a limited test with some of our clients the feasibility of sending newspaper invoices. For the time being they are sending on a limited scale only Telegraph and Australians special offers. I will report how it goes soon.

I am sorry but there will be some delay on the issue of the latest Collins Debden catalogue from our website. There are just a few things we are checking on. We expect it up on Monday.

There are also many other catalogue files on our website here

I really do not know why but several people have email addresses over 70 characters long; it must be very inconvenient to pass on such a lengthy email address. Anyway, our clients are having trouble entering such big email addresses, into their system so from software version 1.1.71.8; you will have over 80 characters for an email address.

A few days ago, I spoke about measuring the number of people entering a shop. I was asked today what sort of figure one could expect of how many people enter a shop compared to sales. This figure is called the conversion rate, and it depends on many factors, for example, is your shop a walk through, does the average person generally come in as part of a family or as an individual, the products you sell, the weather (if it rains you know the people coming in are keen to purchase), etc. So the figure does vary greatly between shops. As a rough estimate, our clients are looking at about 8%.

If you have further questions on this let me know.

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

For this and other supplier files please visit here