Knowing where your business is going is essential. This is afterall 2020 (20/20 vision)

Now is an appropriate time to take a quick look find how well you went in 2019 and how you compared to previous years.

Go to register reports.

Now select the item marked "Sales Comparison for a Given period".

In shops today these sort of screens are now very popular with our clients partly because prices have dropped.

It is estimated that about 20% of all retail loses come from faulty and bad data entry. Here is one of the biggest item. Items that are no longer on sale but still marked as being on sale. If you visit the bargain hunters sites online, you will notice this is frequently what they are reporting. This sale is over but if you go here, you will find that these item although marked at $X will show on the till this 50 to 80% reduction.

This is said to be the most important KPI in stock control.

What it measures is how much did you actually make on an item? It is a difficult question to know by gut feel particularly when you have thousands of items that you handle. 

This is what the chart looks like in theory.

Next week, on 14/January/20 Windows 7 users will start getting pop up reminders from Microsoft like the above that this version of Windows is no longer supported and that its life is up. 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-7-end-of-life-support-information

Quite a few people have taken on the following offer which is ending soon so if you want to know more, you need to move quickly.

For tyro EFTPOS, however, there was a slight amendment on the offer which I doubt will affect anyone here but here is the latest offer.

PosBrowser integrates seamlessly with Tyro EFTPOS. Experience the integrated difference for your in-store payments today.

What happens is that when you go to your point of sale software and check your selling report to see how things are selling. You will find items that are selling well but are making little profit. The question often raised here, is even accepting that the item is not making much, is it drawing people into your shop who buy other products?

Well, we can help you somewhat. The reason I say somewhat will be explained here.  

Go to Register reports.

We all want to get the most out of our business.  

So a proposal was given to me by one of my clients about they making an eCommerce website and that they wanted to do it on the cheap, what they wanted are they looking at to make it work. It is a really hard question to answer as you do not know where to start so I decided to look at a commonly used one Shopify.

When I talked to one of my clients who was close to the fires, what did help a little was that their data was in the cloud. Years ago, we often saw in such emergencies merchant would stay in the shop and do a backup before running.  Nowadays although doing the onsite backup is a good idea, the urgency was not there. 

With us, unlike many other Point of Sale providers, cloud backup is free!  

With Windows 7 going, the question many are asking now is what they can do with their old computers?  

What do you do with them and no-one wants them!

What we used to use them a lot was as backup data storage units. Now almost all these and have been replaced by cloud backups which work better and cheaper — my costing of what in a point-of-sale environment, computer costs see here.

We are the only point of sale system. I know that has data mining so our users are lucky that can drive through their tons of data unaided for free. 

With margins so low now in retail, you need every help you can get to gain those few extra percentage points that make or break a business. 

Today business is about data and analysing.

It is an excellent marketing idea to create a sale on a specific theme. Doing so will make it easier for people to relate and grasp your promotion.

There are many, and they are all the time. Piggyback on holidays such as Mother’s Day, Father's Day, ANZAC day, etc as themes.

You should also consider piggybacking on *unofficial* holidays.

For example, I am a huge coffee drinker, so an advertisement like this, in a shop that sells coffee is something that I can relate too.

Perfectionism is defined by the dictionary as "refusal to accept any standard short of perfection."

It is considered as being a psychological condition as perfection, an impossibility in reality. What tends to happen is because nothing is perfect, people do nothing, procrastinate and get depressed as nothing is done. As such it becomes a fast track to unhappiness and often leads to depression.

This is our cash register. If you look at the screen, not the girl, it is from a publicity shot that we did what you will see is buttons all over the screen. Also, every one of them is user-definable. What this means is that you can change them, or move them to match exactly what you want it to look like.

Often a supplier will tell you the gross margin on their products. Do not believe it? Do you think you should check?

After all, this is a key indicator  in your shop

I have clients now that are on social media all day. Today any retail business that wants to reach a broader target audience and attract new customers needs to go on social media, particularly if it is not in a centre. A centre will drag people in for you.

That is why often you will see cashiers in small businesses on Facebook on the front counter typing away, answering customer enquires.

The problem is monitoring the security camera in s