A printer problem has appeared in the latest Windows 10 update. It certainly had its share of problems of late. The problem has been that hackers looking at Windows 11 have found security holes not fixed in Windows 10. So Microsoft has been fixing many security holes to make it as secure as Windows 11. Unfortunately, some of these updates are harmful.

The big problem now for us now is the printers.

If you have not done the Windows 10 update, hold off for a while, as I am sure a fix will come through soon. We notified Microsoft, but I am sure that we are not the only ones.

If you are running Windows 10 and have problems with your printer, please try the following.

Firstly verify that it is this problem and not another problem so:

- Check that everything is in order, the printer cables, that it is properly connected and paper is in. 

- Switch off everything and try again. This often seems to fix everything.

Still got a problem, give us a call.

Too often, my clients miss out on sales as they are not prepared. Don't be disheartened; okay, this year fizzled, but there are good reasons for attempting next year. 

In business, you need to be organised.

I suggest you go over your diary and write your business's critical retail marketing days. Put in a check date when you need to get your stock organised, a date when signage has to be up, and the marketing day date. Your POS sales reports can give you many good ideas about what you need to get.

Here are the important key retail dates that every retail should know and plan for: 

July 2022 (Now)

- EOFY Sales
- Stocktake sales 

September 2022

- 4th Fathers Day
- AFL Final season

October 2022

- 31st Halloween‍

November 2022

-1st Melbourne Cup
- 25th Black Friday sales‍
- Christmas season begins

December 2022

25 Dec Christmas Day 
26 Dec Boxing Day sales
31 Dec New Year's Eve

However do not stop here, go over your business and I am sure you have important sales dates for your market space too.

eg Fashion shops - Winter sales (now)

Card sellers - 30 July – Islamic New Year

etc

I was reading this article THE OVERSATURATION OF POINTS PROGRAMS: ARE YOU TOO LATE TO THE POINTS PARTY where this expert on loyalty programs answers states, "Therefore, the simple answer is, no, you're not too late. However, one mustn't neglect the core elements that make a loyalty program successful when designing a points-based program."

I agree with him. Retail loyalty is not exclusive; customers can sign up for many customer loyalty programs; no reason why you cannot be in their group. Customer loyalty programs are now a popular way to keep customers.

The core element of modern retailing is DATA, DATA and DATA! The industry standard is that this loyalty data is worth 1% of turnover to a business. This covers a loyalty program's cost as it increases customer frequency of purchases, basket sizes and retention rates.

The loyalty program's value today is access to your customers' email (and SMS) accounts. You can use this to market to your customers. Think of it, it costs nothing to send emails, and the returns can be high. When we measured a simple birthday offer, it had a success rate of 25%. 

What is the problem with telling customers that you exist frequently?

The first point is customer loyalty software. This is essential for running successful reward programs. Well, you have a really good one in your POS Software here. You have various options in choosing programs in your software.

Please give it a go, and let me know how you travel.

Maintaining a strong customer relationship can give your business a solid base.

In reviewing your stock shrinkage, first, consider the four major categories. In order from highest to lowest, they are:

Employee/internal theft
There are bad people everywhere. No one knows your control systems better than your staff, and some take advantage of you. Dishonest staff will sell goods without being recorded. If I bet with you that one of my clients this month would call us about a bad employee, I would probably win. 

Shoplifting
Some shoppers do steal. This is particularly true of small items.

Sales errors, administrative and paperwork errors
Unfortunately, errors do occur. People do enter the wrong figures as they get careless and make mistakes. With computers, one error in a system often remains for all time. A special discount wrongly entered can result in customers getting a bigger discount than they should.

Vendor fraud or error
Unfortunately, it happens. The supplier, either on purpose or in error, makes mistakes. It does not seem to matter whether they are big or small; it happens with all. Again once it gets into your system, there will be problems. This is getting worse as we move from manual to electronic systems problems; we lose the extra layer of security in manual entry. Today if a supplier makes an error, it can get imported into your system without review. 

 
Your first prevention strategy for stock shrinkage is to review locations.

This is very easy to do in our POS system, almost trivial once you have done a stocktake. 

Go to the stock-taking section.

Now, look at the variances. 

Now review the places in the shop that have high values. 

A helpful practise here is to go to the area:

Now run through the stocklifting categories above. If it is in an area where only staff can go, warning bells should sound. 

Now imagine that you are a shoplifter. The fact is most shoplifters plan so:

*How would you do it? 
*Why pick this area? 
*Why were these goods picked? 

One client of ours had a relative come to the shop and act out being a shoplifter. It proved quite a useful idea.

Now consider moving items from there; moving mirrors, cameras, and shoplifting signs should be considered. 

Often minimal changes at no cost can result in dramatic reductions in stock losses.

Check out some of the cakes in the winners of the Cake Show.

What happened as we have many clients in cake and bakeries, as we can give them control over their bookings, production, stock management, components with formulas, product costs, and nutrition. So we got tickets to go to the Cake Bake Sweets Show. 

While there, I took some pictures of the cake finalist and just look at them. One of the big problems is that people are complaining about the prices of these cakes but look at the amount of work involved. 

Enjoy my pictures. 

This one came number two but I thought it was incredible, look at the detail.

This one came number one. Not exactly my taste but extremely impressive. 

Now you have reviewed your stock in your stocktake, why not put some aside to make a stocktaking sale. Other retailers now are doing that; why not you? If it works for them, why not you?

Now you can supplement these items with this fantastic report.

In the register reports > stock titled "Old Stock on hand by Date last received"

This will give you a listing of your old stock. 

The old stock did not do you much good. If it is old it is probably depreciating at about 30% a year, so after three years, it has just been written off. Of course the insurance, rental on the property, staff costs, etc. to keep it are not written off.

Was it better to count these old stock, than move it?

There is no excuse not to have a stocktaking sale to get rid of old stock now it's the annual season to do so.

Arbitrary coherence is a marketing technique used by some retailers. What happens is when people are faced with a product line they don't know will often select an arbitrary price to determine its value. A typical example is in gifts who knows what the price is of a gift item?

Now imagine in the shop there are two similar items:

1) $15 item

2) $20 item

Now you add a third item

3) $50 item

Studies show that by having the $50 item on display, sales go up as people buy more $15 and $20 items because the cost seems reasonable compared to the $50. This is true even if no $50 item is sold.

Works well even if the product is not in the shop for example when doing special orders. Start with the $50, then quickly mention the cheaper ones. 

Check out the video below if you want to think more about it and its business use.

Staying on top of your stock is critical to loss prevention. Hopefully, you have finalised your stocktake so we can calculate your retail shrinkage.

So why not do so now?

This is how you do it in less than four (4) minutes.

1) We need what your computer had for the value of your stock before the stocktake. If your point of sale is up to date, print out a report of your stock valuation before starting the stocktake. If you do not trust the figure in your point of sale software, then you can, or your accountant can give you an estimate. This is the (Perpetual stock value).

2) This comes from your stocktake and is the value of the stock you had after the stocktake. Your point of sale software will have this figure once you enter the stocktake figure in the stock valuation report. (Physically Counted Inventory Value)

3) What are the total sales of your shop less the non-stock items? E.g. if you sell touch gift cards, these are not stock items, so take them off your overall sales figure. Your total report should be able to give you this figure which is your (Sales of stock products)

4) Value of the damaged goods you counted. (Damaged stock value)

Now please do the following calculation.

Shrinkage% = ((Perpetual stock value)-(Physically Counted Inventory Value))/(Sales of stock product) x 100%

A familiar figure here is about 1.4%, but it varies generally between 0.1% and 6%.

Now what you may also want to look at is your damaged goods, these have a different story, and they can be a compelling story to tell too.

Damaged% = (Damaged stock value)/(Sales of stock product) x 100%

Once you get these figures, you will know how bad a problem you face. Now we know what we are looking at in my next post on this subject, I will discuss how to analyse further. To see how we can reduce this problem. It's a tradeoff as your loss prevention strategy must reduce loss without impacting the customer shopping experience.

Recently on our company blog, I published an expanded guide on properly handling software license transfers when a business changes ownership. 

This initial article provided a high-level overview of why licenses don't automatically transfer to new owners - and how oversights can lead to issues. But many readers requested more details on smoothly navigating this process.

So in the new comprehensive version, I dig deeper into topics and added a FAQ with commonly asked questions: 

Whether you are selling your current business or acquiring a new one, I encourage you to read this updated guide. 

You can find the full article with all the details here:

Let me know if you have any other questions as doing this right from the start saves immense time and trouble later on.

What is often a revelation to our new clients is how much they can save time and money from our rostering system. Unlike many, it unifies rostering into a single platform, permitting you to see your shop’s retail performance as you have never seen it before. It allows you to ensure there are enough employees on-site. What it does is it comes with a forecasting tool that helps you to organise accurate schedules. This ensures you have skilled employees available and shows you when they need to be at work. As it is centralised, it is easy to see who is working at any given time.

One report that I recommend you study while creating a roster is the traffic analysis report by the hour of your shop, which you will find above.

You can find it here.

Put in dates from a previous period that you feel will give you typical results for the roster you are trying to create. Now, you will get a colour-coded analysis showing the activity in the shop divided into four groups with red for the busy period. This graphically shows you when you can expect to be busy.

Why wait? Give it a try now.

The Only Way Is Forward

Today is the start of the new financial year. The business clock begins again. Now you will have figures for last year, making it the ideal opportunity to set your business objectives for this year as you can use the figures you have from the previous year.

Here are a few focuses, I recommend that you do

1) Reflect on how your year 2021/22 has gone - write a few points down. Measure the performance of your business with our accurate and efficient data reports. See what has worked out and what has not worked out.

2) Make a preliminary financial budget for the following year. Make it sensible and reachable as if it isn't; in my experience, it is futile.

3) Do a SWOT examination on your business? It takes five minutes to learn. I find it better to do it once and then come back a few days later to complete it. My mind seems to work on it, even though I do not think about it. You can examine what your Strengths, Weaknesses, your Opportunities and your Threats are. If there is enough interest, I am happy to do a webinar on how this works in retail.

4) Combining your preliminary financial budget and SWOT can help you set reasonable targets for this year. Write them down.

The more you plan, the better.

Although it is not required for our system, many will store a backup tonight that has their financial data for this year. They never know when this might be required.

I do not do this what I do is run my financial reports and store them by emailing my personal accounts these reports.

These reports will be

1) Debitors.

2) Creditors

3) Stock

4) Payroll reports.

Then I archive them in my personal email account where they will sit there for years just in case. You never know when you need them.

Shoplifting and anti-theft signs are proven methods of reducing shoplifting. The big plus is that they are low-cost. What they do is show that you are aware and alert and that they will face the consequences of shoplifting.

Here are some interesting statistics

-one survey found that 84% of customers noticed security signage
-70% believed the words on the signs.
-50% of shoplifters indicated that they would either go to another store or not steal anything if surveillance signs were in the area.

Here are some tips on antitheft signs.

1) Instead of wasting marketing space on your shelf or floor space with your shoplifting signs, place them up high where shoplifters will most likely check for surveillance cameras
2) Place near the entrance, many potential shoplifters will see when entering besides many do not go deep into the shop anyway.
3) The sign should be in red.
4) Putting a pair of human eyes on your sign dramatically reduces theft. This sign reduced theft of bikes by 62%

For a discussion of the formal reasons why eyes work, click here.

5) Put signs in places shoplifters might believe is a blind spot in the shop; to remind them just because they can't see you does not mean that you can't see them.

Of course, for a well-rounded security plan, you should combine security signage with other security and protection measures.

We’re in the final two days of this current financial year so you don't have much longer if you want to claim your tax deduction this year. Currently, there is another problem with price rises coming soon, it is unlikely that soon we can get you these items at these prices soon. 

Thinking of a touch screen, a three-in-all unit, a new computer, etc? Check it out now here as this is a great time to grab new tech products that are on sale.

If you are not doing much in EFTPOS and need an EFTPOS as a service to your customers without it costing you, you could look at this plan. 

What you do is put a surcharge of 1.8% on all your electronic transactions, then you need not worry about the type of card, e.g. Dinners cards, etc.

This is now a regular and acknowledged method in Australia today.

For example, if I go to my local cafe and buy an espresso. When it is rung, I see a little extra charge added to the bill for the EFTPOS fees to take care of its EFTPOS costs. What they are doing here is passing on all these costs to their clients so giving them Zero Cost EFTPOS.

Some of our clients can save thousands of dollars a year by zeroing out their EFTPOS fees. 

There is no obligation, no contract, you are free to cancel and leave anytime. 

If you want to learn more about this Zero Cost EFTPOS arrangement, click here.

This weekend or next is when most stocktakes will be done, so here are some last-minute tips to help you have a smooth and successful stocktake.

1) Set up a problem area where items that have issues, e.g. damaged goods, can be determined later. The idea is to move on as much as possible.
2) When you come across items where the label is missing, or you cannot scan the barcode, move it to the problem area where it can identify and labelled correctly later. These items will need to be counted at the end of the stocktake as a separate count batch.
3) Carry out the count of a department in one hit if you can.
4) Teams work faster than individuals. One team of two people is better than two individuals, I find three is the ideal counting team.
5) Make a formal decision on how you will count. You will have fewer problems if you count from bottom to top, left to right.
6) Have place markers to mark what has been counted. It is easy to miss a section or accidentally count the same area twice.
7) While counting, check the pricing too?
8) You can clean too while items are being removed and counted.
9) Check that the items match the barcode, product description and quantity. Do not assume that the label is correct.
10) Do backup frequently. If something goes wrong, you may not lose all your work.
11) Have a backup at the end. We have had people enter everything in everything, then someone, not knowing what to do, pressed the wrong button and wiped the figures. This stocktake had to be redone.
12) If possible, count everything but be aware that sometimes you will need to estimate. Once, I counted a pile of underwear. I got 50, my co-worker said 55, so we wrote down 52.

Happy stocktaking

I know we have been waiting about months for them to come yet presently they are here. 

These have a customer-facing screen that faces customers at the point of sale. Most large retailers use them.  Often in a three-in-one unit like this one.

These ones are available in two sizes, a 15-inch and 17 inches. A major addition is that you get a touchscreen included.

Here are some benefits that it gives you

-Touch screens
-Look extremely modern.
-Made for retail environments so they are tougher than most screens.
-It helps build customer trust, as the customer can see what you have put in while you are doing it.
-It speeds up the queue as the customer will have many of their queries answered on the screen, eg the price of a product or whether a markdown was applied. 
-It gives you an aura of professionalism. 

Want to know more, let us know.

While having a customer loyalty program is beneficial to your business. You should be aware that somebody will always be looking to take advantage of the perks in your system. Often they do this without realising that their actions count as fraud. So if you run a loyalty program, you should know that it is not immune to fraud.

There are two types of loyalty systems we actively support:

Points: Where someone gets points for each purchase, and they can use these points to get benefits in your store. I have never heard of this fraud in our system. I would know as many of our clients are small to medium businesses who know their regular customers and would report if something goes wrong with these points. It is much harder to commit fraud if customers are verified and their purchases tracked.

Note: It would be highly worrisome if it happened as it would need to be internal as our system is secure using SQL used by banks.

Yet if you buy a business, I cannot emphasise enough how important it is that you address the issue of unused loyalty points with the previous owner.

Discount vouchers: they get an instant credit on their next purchase, say $2 off on their next buy for a $25 purchase.

Now, this I know has caused problems.

A customer leaves the shop and often throws the receipt in a bin nearby. Another person comes along, grabs the receipt, shows up in the shop, and buys a $3 item claiming the $2 discount voucher. One quick fix is to put the receipt in the bag. The problem is that the retailer wants the shopper to see the voucher to encourage them to buy more instantly, so they give it to them in hand. If you question it, his friend, acquaintance, etc., gave it to them.

A similar problem is when a person comes to the shop to buy two things. They buy the first item, collect the discount voucher and use that voucher to buy the second item. This is interesting as it's questionable whether it's fraud or the retailer's stupidity.

Loyalty programs are a great way to build brand loyalty and encourage customers to return to your business but must be reviewed. Check your shop information for suspicious behaviour.

A standard measure is that a loyalty program should cost the retailer about 1% of turnover, although I have seen 2% used. On a million-dollar turnover, you are looking at $10,000 to $20,000, it is worth checking. Also if you are over that, it's certainly time to review what is happening without supplier support, I doubt it's worth it. 

Retail Security: How To Prevent Shoplifting

For stocklifting, we usually expect about 1.33% on turnover. A rule of thumb is that a higher cost of living, will drive this up but how much we do not know yet. Also the increased idle time many in our community have, the reduced staff in shops and the wearing of masks have created a boom in shoplifting.

The reason it is now in the minds of retailers is that after a stocktake; they know they can determine their shoplifting figures.

Once done, our POS System will give them three figures: quantity, cost and totals. All tell a story.

Tips for what can be done?

Here are some thoughts for a webinar that I attended on this subject recently:

1) Quantity will give you a hint of how many such incidents occurred.

Cost is how much it costs you.

Totals will tell you how valuable this is to the thief.

So reviewing these figures will highlight departments and goods that are most at risk.

It will also give you an idea of what is being taken.

2) What I do suggest you do is map your shoplifting figures see here. It does not take long and will graphically show the current danger points in the shop.

3) Consider mirrors and cameras. An old mirror placed in a blind spot was shown to reduce theft dramatically there. That cost the retailer nothing. Shoplifters are looking for these details.

4) Greet people that come to the shop. As well as being good customer service, it shows that you are watching.

It is hard to identify people in advance. In a survey, 75% of shoplifters said they had no intention of committing it before entering the shop. Very few fit any profile.

Yet here this is an interesting idea from the webinar. Have grandmother greet everyone that comes into the shop. Besides showing that you care, it has been known to do wonders. Grandmother has been proven to be very effective in identifying dubious people, such as people who often come without buying. She is also excellent for shaming people thinking of stealing. She is also a great witness if things go legal.

5) Have enough staff. Much of the current problem with shoplifting is that many retailers have reduced staff. No one is monitoring the stock yet there is a lot of money there. Having a staff member go to a suspicious customer and ask, “How can I help you?” can do wonders. 

6) Show a security monitor in the front of the shop where customers can see it before entering. This shows that you are monitoring.

7) Good signage. This issue I will discuss in a future post after I go to the next webinar.

8) Review the shoplifting figures this will give you an idea of the size of the problem and allow you to make a shoplifting budget. in the future.

9) Do not display highly desirable and/or expensive items close to the shop's exit.  

It is too big a temptation for someone to grab and run and it is very hard to stop such actions particularly if you pile high-value items together.

Shoplifting prevention and detection security prevention retail loss shoplifting are all important in order to keep your business safe and protected from losses.

We need to be ready to hit the ground running as preparing a business for the End Of the Financial Year (EOFY) can be daunting.

As a minimum, you need to do the tax stuff, but while doing this, you can do the management reporting too. This can be time-consuming, but luckily much of the information required is built into your POS Software. Before you go to the accountant, it is worthwhile to go to this webinar to review what reports our Point of Sale Software can produce. This will give you a feel of what you can supply to the accountant.

Here's a checklist of reports that you will need.

Sales reports
Stock Valuation (you will need to do this after your stocktake)
Customers Outstanding
Creditors Outstanding (if you are running creditors)
Subagents Outstanding (use only if applicable)

Click here for a webinar on the End of the Financial year reporting. It discusses in detail what reports our system can produce. 

Although not required from our software, I do recommend that you do make a special End of Year Backup to store in case you need to refer to it. The 30/of June this year is Thursday.