In the newsagency industry we are settling on the Xchangeit invoice file formats as the standard.

Last month we have been working with a newsagency supplier who was trying to provide electronically invoices to their clients. This is something that will save our clients many hours of work so of course we helped them. We supplied them with the specifications of the DDO and discussed it with them in some details. Later we tested it with them and it was fine. Almost immediately after that invoices were being sent electronically and everything is fine.

Today the supplier rings up. Some of their clients cannot import the invoice file but some can. Do we know what is happening?

Soon we find the problem. The supplier is no longer supplying DDO files but the newer invoice DD2 file formats. Now suddenly some of their clients with older software, say those without software maintenance, cannot accept the newer file formats.

So we told them go back to the older DDO file format and no matter what anyone tells them do not use the later DD2 because not everyone can import the DD2 version of the invoice. The problem was solved.

The reason I wrote this is to reminder everyone that DDO file formats is the standard invoicing in newsagencies. If it works don’t mess with it.

Now the change is done back to DDO the benefits will soon pass on to other newsagents who are not are clients too.

Let us consider the flow of magazines though the newsagency industry.

I am the magazine producer. I make the magazine. I have a pile of returned magazines. What do I do? Do I pulp the magazines get nothing or do I reissue them? Since I already have the magazines I don’t need to write or print anything. It costs me little to distributing them in comparison to the cover price magazine. So reissuing them as long as I get minimal sales is money for nothing. Reissuing will also give me the added advantage of boosting my circulation figures so helping me sell more advertising space. From a business view, what am I doing wrong?

Say I was the magazine distributor for example GG; I am getting paid to deliver them. My accountants have costed it out. My computers are monitoring them at all times. If they don’t sell later well I will get a fee from the magazine producer to pick up the unsold ones from the newsagent. So I am covered. About a month later I will credit the newsagent. I am doing what a distributor was made to do deal out magazines so from a business view, what am I doing wrong?

Say I was the newsagent. I get a pile of those reissued magazines. They are lousy seller. I pay for them immediately. They will take up valuable shelf room. I also need electricity to display them and staff to look after them. Even if they don’t sell unfortunately some will be shoplifted. Later when it is time to do returns, some are misplaced so I will miss a few returns too. I then get the credit for them in a month’s time.

So from a business view, which one is doing something wrong?

To me it is clear the bad businessperson here is the newsagent who either has not got computer system they need or they are not using it properly.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23156099-661,00.html

Reading this article in the Herald Sun. It looks like more delays and another major cost override for the Myki transport tickets in Victoria.

This delay, from my clients’ view considering the low margins offered by Myki is good.

As a taxpayer I think surely a billion dollars is a lot of money even for a state government today. What is really annoying is there was little reason to change!

All it needs is one person to press a wrong button and a computer could be issuing a newspaper delivery free forever.

Regularly we get clients from other systems and while our data entry people are retyping the information into our system, they find mistakes. They have a rule of the thumb that states for every 200 home delivery accounts, they expect to find an average of one (1) mistake. So if you are doing four hundred home deliveries a week, they expect to find 2 errors.

The expected yearly cost to the newsagency say servicing 400 home delivery clients = (2 errors) x (weekly home delivery paper charges x 75% + delivery costs) x (52 weeks a year)

It may pay you to do an audit of your accounts now!

I got a document issued by the government and notice it claimed that the newsagency industry is extremely competitive in world standards in recycling paper which is its core product.

Doing a quick net search, I discovered that newspaper recycling rate here has gone from 28% in 1990 to 75.4% in 2005. About 86% of Australian-made cardboard, 9% of tissue, 31% of newsprint, and 9.5% of printing and writing paper is from this material. Overall Australians are one of the highest reusers of recycled paper. Did you know that?

If you want to read some details on the newsprint and magazine recycle programme it is available on the pneb site

Yet I was shocked! No-one is telling anyone that newsagencies are green and so no-one knows about it even in the industry.

My suggestion is that we should as an industry looks into this AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

I like this new promotion from HWT. If you buy or get a sun today in Victoria you can get a free compact fluorescent bulb (CFL) at your retail newsagent. Politically it is at a great time as now everyone is thinking about the environment. In my shopping centre today there were all these Australian conservationists out there today in force.

In my own home, I have replaced several regular light bulbs with these compact fluorescent bulbs. I am not only saving energy but also time and frustration as I don’t have to replace the light so often.

It will be interesting to see how this offer goes as if a person wants a compact bulb it’s worthwhile for them to get a SUN newspaper now. I just wish there had been more promotion about the offer with glossy posters for newsagents to show off.

The newsagency involved contacted me and asked us not to talk in public about the case so I am now removing all the articles.

If you want to read the full 40 pages of the current judgment it is available now online.

I have organized new sections for our users for the automatic automation of newspapers. They deal with connect and HWT subscriptions.

These are available on our website.
 

News corp want all newsagents to send each week their subscription data which includes the stops and starts.

The information to do so is available now

If you have posbrowser please set this up ASAP.

I know that many of our clients will be affected as Labor advance on their policy on plastic bags. They have not decided yet whether they are going to phased them out or a levy put on them.

I know that many of our clients have found it extremely difficult to come up with an alternative although one newsagent supplier Kahoots is already advertising an alternative bag. Probably what will happen soon is that many retailers are going to have to decide either to pay more for bags or lose some sales. One things for sure overall the consumer is not going to pay for them.

A new study says that on average, more than half of the ink from inkjet cartridges is wasted when users toss them in the garbage. Why is that? Because users are tossing the cartridges when their printers are telling them they're out of ink, when they are not!

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070618-study-inkjet-printers-are…

Almost everyone that comes to POS Solutions tells me we are Mr Fix IT. Certainly this year we did something right.

I would like to think it was the careful preparation and planning that we did for the Season and New Year break that paid off. This period we know from experience the situation changes. People often don’t know how to handle it. So problems start up. Unfortunately suppliers in the industry don’t help by vanishing now. We however did not allow ourselves to be sidetracked into other issues. I took detailed notes last year of what happened. Then well in advance I had some software changes done in both the DOS and windows to reduce some of the issues that came up. I also contacted the major newspapers to ask them for what was happening. We carefully made sure we had much documentation in place. We also went over the CRM reports for last year to identified newsagencies that had problems. From that we made a list of potential problem sites. We then contacted each of these sites personally. Then we explained to them exactly what was needed!

The result was a 45% drop in support calls compared to last year.

Clearly we had a big advantage this year as we planned well our business strategy. This planning showed up many possible problems and situations that we resolved before they even came into being. Since these plans are not cast in concrete and can be amended, next year I hope we do better.

Note having said all of this we did get badly caught with the Fairfax changing the dates at the last-minute. In the industry like newsagencies where so much can be planned this last-minute change is inexcusable. I think that newsagents should get at least a few weeks warning of any change. If this could be done we could write scripts for newsagents and automatically update our clients programs so they don’t have to do it.

There is an interesting article here in the dispute over commissions in the Herald about the new Victorian public transport smartcards.

NEWSAGENTS are refusing to sell the new public transport smartcard, saying the commission being offered by the State Government

....
Clayton Newsagency owner Simon Richards, a third-generation newsagent, said he told the TTA he would not be selling the ticket, despite his long history selling Metcard.
"I won't be taking up their offer," Mr Richards said.
"They are just making it economically unviable."

Simon Richards is right. We have been involved in this since Bill Express pulled out. Then we stated the proposed commissions offered were too low. A retailer needs at least 3% commission just to handle money that does not include anything else. So unless you are a tiny agent with the Transport Ticketing Authority doing say $400 a week than with this commission structure you will lose.

It is no wonder so few retailers have joined up. As what the article states are that "more than 100 retailers have already signed up to be agents for myki." When I spoke to them in October the only major retailer that interested was 7-11. 7-11 has about 366 outlets Australia wide. I would estimate that a quarter would be in Victoria. So almost no-one has signed up since I spoke to them. I don’t wonder why!

I think that if this goes ahead with the existing commission the only solution for newsagents who want metcards is to get a myki machine. This box then handles the tickets and the money. In exchange for looking after this box newsagents would get a fee. From my discussions with myki, I suspect on this they would agree.

It appears that POS solutions clients are lucky already this year.

Woodlands Newsagency sold a $1.4 million lotto ticket.

Pelican Waters Newsagency also a $1.4 million lotto ticket. The owner Bernie Pigg reported that the woman was shaking when she entered the store.

Then there is Willows Newsagency with a $1.6 million ticket.

Good on them!

Some newsagents have expressed concerns the variations for the newsagents have not credited to their clients’ accounts because their clients have not had a full week of deliveries. Before reversing these credits please check with the newspaper as often they do not issue the rebate as it is not a full week. That is why the variations are so designed.

I feel like the driver at the road here must have felt. All I want to do is make my clients live a bit easier by working out what is happening over the holiday season so I can give my clients clear and concise instructions on what to do. Is that such a big ask?

Attached below is the Christmas Reference Guide for information regarding Queensland Newspapers products over the holiday period including the New Year.

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Just yesterday I was happy about the Australian Financial Reviews. This paper is a problem every year. I was determined that this year it would not be. So I made everyone make a special effort. Once told by Fairfax of what was happening with the Australian Financial Review, we tested a procedure for handling it. We then wrote out documentation on how to handle it. We then sent it off to our clients. I even got people to ring up people who mucked it up last year just so they would not call this year. We talked them though. It was clear sailing.

Today Fairfax announced that they are sincerely sorry but they have changed their minds. The sudden lateness of the announcement is breathtakingly appalling. Now we are trying to figure out a procedure to clear out the damage done as it is not easy to reverse what is done. It is a shame that all of us will not be able to charge Fairfax for this.

By now everyone should have received the documentation by email for handling of the bumper edition of the Australia Financial Review over the season break.

If not please let us know.

Category analysis in retail is when you group similar stock items together into categories so they can be compared against each other. It is the main retail management tool used today.

The idea is that many customers come into a shop with a certain category of product in mind for example they want a comic or a birthday card but they don't know exactly. They don't care who the supplier of the card is John Sands, Hallmark, Artwrap etc.

What you need to do is identify what the customer is looking for so you can satisfy them.

Once you do buy something they often will buy something else too.

That is all well and good but category analysis has been hampered by the lack of data. Since most of our clients have too large a range of stock to do the job themselves with the resources. Even putting this aside, it is very hard to do it since many products are not advertised by the retailer.

That is why they look at the suppliers to do it. Unfortunately too many suppliers have been unable or unwilling to supply these categories.

Still magazine suppliers did come together to put their products into category system called MPA. It was done originally for advertisers but it was snapped up by retailers too. Those that use it have found that their sales went up if only as it made the display more organized.

Following the success in the magazine companies, we have been attempting to reestablish this in the card industry. Since in many shops the cards are not integrated now, we think it would have a better effect here then what we have seen in magazine sections.

For this reason we have had numerous telephone calls, emails and meeting between us and many of the card companies in an attempt to get them all to use an integrated system too.

In the current integrated card category system, the cards are divided up into the following categories

A -Anniversary
B1-Special Birth
B2-Female
B3-Male
B4-Juvenile
B5-Birthday
BC-Birth
C -Convalescent or Get Well
E -Easter
EC-Engagement
FD-Father
GB–Gift Bags/Boxes
M -Greeting Card
MD-Mother
RB-Ribbon or Bow
S -Sympathy
ST–Stationery
V -Valentines
W -Wedding
WR–Wrapping Paper
XC-Calendar
XG-Xmas
XS-Christmas Special
-Others

The following card companies have now adopted this category system for their card range.

Artwrap
Browntrout
Card and paper house
Charity cards
Henderson Greetings Barcodes
John Sands
Katcards
Max Publishing
Simson Cards
Spirit publishing

So as you can see this project has made quite a lot of progress. Obviously, there are some that we would like to join. If you have card suppliers not on this list, please ask them why not?

For this and other supplier files, please visit here

Note if you are on POS DOS please reindex before importing the files.