Point of Sale Software

Here are some Articles from the Blog Subject - management -

Discount vouchers

POS SOFTWARE

There are some Gift Cards / Vouchers that are excluded from the new changes. Note the part I have put a red box on.

I would think that our discount vouchers are part of our customer loyalty program. Our suggested customer loyalty program does collect names and email addresses and other details so it is a fact that a customer loyalty program exists.

Also, most of our clients do not use it all the time so for most, it is a temporary marketing promotion. However, if you run it all the time, I suggest that you frequently change the details eg frequently change the percentage and so the amounts so that it is not a *permanent* promotion eg Mothers Day season special X% off, St Patricks season special Y% off, etc.

Following discussions, we have had with several people, we are currently changing our software. This will be released in an emergency patch going out tonight that will allow you to make changes to make it clear to your clients that these vouchers are part of your customer loyalty program. Details will go out in our newsletter shortly.

 

Retail loyalty programs video

POS SOFTWARE

 

Many of the readers are aware of a loyalty program called "Discount voucher."

Its promoters make great claims for it. Its critics are not so sure. A detailed and I think a fair review is available here on this blog which has not been answered by it promoters using what is the best publicly available information about the scheme.

However, Discount Vouchers are far from the only loyalty program available to a retailer. They are certainly not necessarily the best way to go. With our point of sale system, you have lots of choices. I invite to check out this video on several other options here.

 

 

 

 

 

Cloud storage free

POS SOFTWARE

 

Telstra asked me to pass on an offer that they have for all Telstra clients, and that is 200GB free of cloud storage on OneDrive for all Telstra clients. Which is enough for backing up your point of sale backup. 

Overall there are three main suppliers of cloud storage which my clients use OneDrive, which is this one, Dropbox or Google Drive. I would say for ease of use, nothing is as easy to use as Dropbox which is the reason it comes with the biggest price. It does have one problem that if you do not use the Dropbox account for six months, they will delete your account, and you will never get your information back. Google Drive and OneDrive, I rate about the same, mainly because OneDrive is a lot better than it used to be. Furthermore, OneDrive is very good if you use Microsoft Office.

 

 

 
 

Replenish method of stock ordering

POS SOFTWARE

With most of our clients, a lot of capital is tied up in stock and not having enough stock will negatively impact customer loyalty. So you need an adequate safety stock level.

So one of the common used methods by our clients for stock reordering is replenishment, it is not my favourite, which is using the AI in our software (the Focus figure), but it is popular. What happens is that you get the computer to order so many days of sales. Its advantage is that it is conceptually simple, makes sense and is very easy to use.

Give it a try and see how you like it.

Old hard drives

POS SOFTWARE

Today almost everyone is concerned about their personal privacy with good reason as all of us have heard horror stories about someone buying a used computer, and the new owners found on the computer tons of their information on the old computer and soon the old owner got into big trouble.

What people want to know is what steps do we take to prevent their loss of personal data on their hard drives which I think is a reasonable for them to ask us, and we want you to know that we, at POS Solutions take very seriously the privacy of our customers.

It is a good idea for people before passing on their computers to others to delete all their personal and business information first to be as safe as possible. The program, I would recommend is ccleaner which I spoke about earlier here. If you want something more secure, then I would recommend beachbit. If the FBI could not crack Hillary Clinton computer after she used it, I am sure it should be good enough for our purposes.

Still no matter how thorough such as a wiping program is, the only way to be really certain that a hard-drive's data is unrecoverable is to destroy the hard drive. Many people suggest throwing hard drives into fire or throwing chemicals at them neither of which I recommend as there are lots of dangerous chemicals in these hard drives and you do not want to be breathing in the fumes. As they are metal, you cannot use a microwave machine despite what some people say. Dropping them is not a good idea as some of them, I have seen survive. Hard drives are pretty tough, and made to take a lot of punishment.

So I recommend a brute force method too, like pound them with a nail and hammer or using what we use, a drill.

However, regardless of whether or not you do this, we will take steps to protect your private information. After we receive hard drives for disposal what we do is here.

 

 

 

 

Then we dispose of these hard drives.

Last warning for the instant tax write off this year

POS SOFTWARE

If you want to take advantage of the instant assets write off this year, tomorrow is the last day.

Here is an explanation of how it works, but let me first start off by saying I am not an accountant, and I do suggest you contact your accountant to discuss it.

If say you were to buy a computer system for $8,195 inc GST. The first point it does not cost $8,195 as 10% of this is GST which they will be getting straight back so the proposed cost is $7,375.50.

 

Under the old system

- 15% of this would be allowed as depreciation, which works out to $1,106.33.
- As the company tax rate was 30%, which means the business would get back $331.90 in income tax credits.
- This means the business needs to fund the purchase which needs to be arranged in the first year $7,043.60.

 

Under the new scheme

- 100% of this would be allowed as depreciation, which works out here to $7,375.50.
- The company tax rate under this scheme is 27.5%, which means the business will get back $2,028.63 in income tax credit.
- Which means that the business needs $1,696.36 less to fund the purchase which will be to it $5,347.24.

A fairly substantial saving.

 

 

Right now, we are getting a lot of interest in the rental of our software. The reason is people who need to upgrade soon have suddenly been realising that the End of the Financial Year is tomorrow. They want to take advantage of the accelerated depreciation of the equipment and as there is no time to prepare a lease, our rental is quick and easy to set up, so they are jumping on rental to not lose the tax benefits on the computers.

It you do not want to miss out, you need to contact us now.

Tyro free offer

POS SOFTWARE

Tyro compare

Tyro is offering those people that switch to them a saving of 10% on their EFTPOS bill and 6 months free terminal rental! Ask for a calculator showing the exact savings.

This offer ends on the 30 June.

Our Delivery Point of Sale System

POS SOFTWARE

 

Delivery, the latest study by Paypal stated that 63% of Australians would be enticed by next-day delivery; however, the figure dropped to 28% for a shop that offered 4-7 days. 46% of Australian businesses had plans for a 24-hour delivery, plus I can guarantee you quick delivery will be a key part of Amazon's marketing strategy in Australia. So if you have not already, its time to start thinking about 24-hour delivery and thinking about the same day is even better.

One point about our point of sale software, is that it has a very powerful delivery system built into it, which was designed in it from day one.

It is currently being used by many businesses that do deliveries and require a point of sale software that is fast-paced in a high volume ordering environment. Our POS software can quickly and easily process customer orders to meet the unique needs of delivery based companies. It allows entry of customer's name, phone number and address. Operators can input additional notes for the deliveries such as driving directions and delivery instructions. They can also add any applicable delivery charge fees.

Want to know more, please click here.

 

 

 

 

What is your NPS score?

POS SOFTWARE

This has been called the ultimate question in business, and I am sure that you have at one stage answered this question.

What it is, is a very simple, objective and powerful tool to measure your client satisfaction. What it gives you is a number that is easy to understand. Since it is widely used, the results can be benchmarked. It can also be tracked over time. That is why we have used in for many years.

The implementation itself is simple, all you do is ask 30+ people this question exactly as above written here. Now this is important, do not change this question in any way, there are sound and long involved reasons why it is written like this. Just ask AS IS.

Once you have enough responses now collate the answers by the number of people who answered for each number.

Now add the number that answered 0,1,2,3,4, etc.

After that enter your responses into an NPS calculator, many are available online
The ones who answered from 0-6 are called Detractors, that is why they are marked in red. These people are considered unhappy customers who can spread negative word-of-mouth points about you. They clearly are not particularly happy.

7-8 these are called Passives. They are in yellow. They are considered to being satisfied, but they are not particularly enthusiastic for your goods and services. They probably will not say anything negative about you but are not going to promote you either.

9-10 are called Promoters. They are in green. They like you. They probably buy much from you and push you to other potential customers. We all want more of those.

Now what is your score?

I have seen companies with negatives; it is clearly not a good position to have!

Most companies get a Net Promoter Score of about 5 to 10. What it means is that they have almost as many unhappy customers as happy customers. If you are getting that, then you need to pull your act up.

A pass is considered to being 20, and a score of around 30-40 is seen as good.

There are some companies that get scores in the 50 to 80 but in my experience many claim this are just making it up. Be honest with yourself.

It can be useful to plot over time, your NPS scores.

Here is a clipping from Australia Post to show you how they do it.

 

As you can see they were very average with an NPS of 10.8 in 2013. They have steadily improved and they are now 15, which is better but clearly not a pass here although they seem happy with that score, I know though I would not be happy with that score.

 

Have a shot, if you want to discuss it please let me know. Overall it should take you a few hours tops to do and I am sure you will find it most useful.

EFTPOS Tyro latest offer

POS SOFTWARE

 

About now is the time of the year, I have noticed when many companies with shareholders come up with their best deals as now is when they want figures. So here is a heads-up on what is a very good deal.

Tyro will announce an EOFY campaign. The offer is that Tyro will, to new customers, provide savings of 10% in merchant service fees and provide a free terminal rental period of six months. In order to qualify for this offer, you must submit an application to Tyro between now and the 30 June.

 

 

Cash Register cameras

POS SOFTWARE

All cash registers should be observed by a camera always as its one of the few pieces of evidence the courts do accept. If possible, this cash register camera should be behind the cashier on the wall, so it is out of immediate reach. It needs to display all the activities taking place at the cash register, including transactions, money counting and refunds. Too much information is never a problem.

If it cannot be done with one camera consider having more than one camera.

Here is a video of such a system.

Note you can if you want to put the text on the screen from our point of sale software too. This is something I do suggest as it makes it much faster and easier to match up the computer records to the video.

Managing Customer Accounts flexibility

POS SOFTWARE

One problem we all have is that customers, accountants, bankers, etc call all the time, demand information about their accounts on a range of dates such as current account information, last financial year, the financial year before last, last month, three months earlier, two weeks ago, it can be anything. Not only that but they often change their mind, they say this date, and once you give it to them, they can say oh no, I meant the date a week earlier.

So what our clients need from their POS Software is the ability to find out at any time what a client or the total clients owed on this nominated date.

So go to main menu.

Register reports

Now normally, I would recommend using Trial Balance(excel) but for this example, I just wish it to be simple, so I selected Trial Balance.

Now select the date that the client or whoever requested, just to show you the power of our system, I picked a random date five years ago.

I also selected by order by Surname as I think it makes it easier to find, and I ignored the "More Criteria" because I do want to keep it simple, but I urge you to experiment later with these options.

Now out pops among other details a page like this one below Although for security reasons, I blanked out the names, you can see all the relevant information is here.

A Grand total will be printed at the end for say a banker or accountant.

Security basics: Is your point-of-sale being used as a seedbox?

POS SOFTWARE

As from today, several well known pirate sites - The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt and SolarMovies are being blocked in Australia.

 

 

Currently it is laughably easy to bypass these blocks as the ISPs are only doing the minimum but its early days.

What I have noticed is that these blocks, do not seem to be enforced on many business accounts. Which means that many people have discovered that using their business Internet, they have a free seedbox. All they need is a smartphone which most people have, the WIFI codes that most employees are given and a free torrent app.

This causes, however, several problems for the business.

1) Much of the bandwidth of their Internet is being used by these programs, and their Internet runs slow.

2) Then their plan limits are exceeded so they get extra charges or get put on slow.

3) And the big one, is they could get involved in a major legal problem.

The quickest way to see if your pos system is being used as a seedbox, which should catch most of them is to go to this site here.

If you come up, then I suggest you investigate. About 4% of my clients are finding something.

I find it very good, using it we caught an accountant who was doing a job here on behalf of one of our clients, downloading torrents from her laptop while she was working here.

 

 

EFTPOS Skimming

POS SOFTWARE

 

Your EFTPOS unit can be skimmed in seconds, I have seen a video of two people skimming a unit in less time then it took you to read this, they skimmed a unit. If they had succeeded everyone who in that shop uses their EFTPOS on that unit will have their card details and pin numbers recorded by the thieves. The merchant would have probably spent the next few years in court and it would be expensive. Studies show most small businesses do not survive long a major skim.

It's a worry, in a recent discussion that I attended, we talked about this matter of EFTPOS security. I could not get an overall answer as few EFTPOS providers handle the units themselves as this is generally subcontracted. You really need to talk to your EFTPOS provider to find out, however, I could get an answer out of Tyro because they do not subcontract this out.

There is a series of systems in place to protect against these attacks although they do occur.

Sometimes they can be detected by the terminals. Tyro has a system of tamper resistance built-in. In the event the unit detects any hardware tampering; they will refuse to perform any transactions.

Depending on the type of attack, the terminals if it picks it up will display one of several messages, but generally, you would get something like this.

 

If this happens, the unit will no longer work and will need to be replaced.

 
The main unit used is a Yomani
 
 
 

now if you notice they are curved everywhere part of the reason for this is to prevent skimming hardware from being attached on top of this unit. Still you cannot be too careful.

Three tips that I do recommend you consider is

1) Use a highlighter and writing something like "Property of West Footscray Gift Shop" around on the EFTPOS unit. It just makes it harder for the skimmer to put his unit on top of yours as they need to duplicate your writing too.

2) Run your hand around the unit and make sure that there is nothing on it. I do that before I put any card on a terminal.

3) If you have an old EFTPOS unit, get it replaced, Tyro users can do this free of charge. They are just too dangerous these old units.

 

 

 

What is the best retail loyalty programs?

POS SOFTWARE

I was reading today about the Bauer program here on Reader Rewards, which is a loyalty marketing program to increase sales of their products. 



According to the article, it lifted sales by 1.6%, which is believable for a loyalty program but as the article makes clear it is not primarily a loyalty program but a data collection program. This is the point of all good retail loyalty programs, that extra percent or two you can pick up by getting the customer's information to market to these people. That way, they buy more by either making bigger purchases or buying more often depending how you structure the program. This is what justifies the cost of the program, and it is what your program aim.

And they do buy more if it's done properly. You can see it on the Average Daily Sale value, Units Per Transaction, Margin on Goods sold compared to the non-member customers.



What is also important is that not only do they buy more, but as they are happy that they get others to join such as friends and family.

In my experience, the biggest mistake retailers make when launching such a program is that they do not communicate enough to the members; you should not be waiting till they come into the shop, if you do that many of the members of your program will just forget you. You need to communicate with them online.

 

Protecting credit card numbers on your point of sale system

POS SOFTWARE

One software company, I know well has recently released a statement that because they do not hold credit card numbers in their software that their clients have tranquillity about their customer credit card details and fraud. Well, it might get them off the hook if a potential court case starts, but it is certainly not the *whole* truth.

Firstly let's start off by saying that such data breaches are extremely serious as I wrote here of a study by Experian, showed that 60% of small to medium business closed down within six months after such a data breach. Much of this, I think must be because the banks, MasterCard and Visa looking into recovering their monies go for the retailer and then there are fines and legal costs too.

Now what is happening is a relatively new class of viruses called PoS RAM Scraper Malware has been created by hackers to specifically target retail shops and its huge. The reason why retail shops are simple, there is a lot of credit card details going through the POS system.

Here is a map of PunkeyPOS found by a well-known antivirus company in June this year. What it shows is the places where they found it.

 

You can read more details here on what they found here.

What can be done?
 

You may want to have a chat with your credit card provider however here are some tips, I would recommend.

1) Be careful where you and your staff go on the net. If you must go to these sites, use a computer that is not on your POS system.

2) Make sure you have a virus protector that is maintained. Let me warn you here that there is no best antivirus out there, they all have pluses and minuses. Note the window defender in windows 10, I think is very good and its free to all businesses.

3) Update your windows software with the latest patches.

4) A firewall would be good. I would recommend setting up your firewall on the machine that does EFTPOS to stop access to almost all the net. The other advantage to doing this is that your employees will surf less on your time. I think the free Windows firewall is good. Fairly easy to use. It passes all inbound tests (both stealth and open port) and does not have any popup alerts which can be a real pain. Also, it is not likely to conflict with your other programs. Plus most techs know it.

If all of this does not work at least you can have a good argument in court that you did try your best.

Privacy flowchart

POS SOFTWARE

Everyone has the right to ask for all the personal information you hold about them. You, however, do not necessarily have to release this information, and if you do you may be able to charge for the work required to produce the information required. What the Australian government has done is created a flowchart to help you make these decisions.

 

 

 

Mistakes people are doing with passwords

POS SOFTWARE

Recent events have shown dramatically the importance of having secure passwords.

There is nothing like a data breach to get a company’s name in the news these days, you do not have to be big as this report shows to get into the news.

http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/02/09/19/48/queensland-newsagency…

Few companies like it as its not just the loss of money, in this case $36,000 but also losses that cannot be measured internally such as their pride, and their customers trust in them. There is the added cost that a company might find itself liable for the damage as court cases by EFTpos and lottos organisations against some quite small storekeepers have shown in Australia.

 

However, much of computer security today is only as secure as your weakest password.

Here are some common mistakes that people should do in business with their passwords.

1) They should change all their passwords frequently. Many companies today require a mandatory password changes every 90 days because it's considered a security * practice*. Yearly should be the absolute minimum.

Worst case consider every year something like this

In 2015, - Charlie...2015 becomes next year - Charlie,,2016

2) Systematically review who has access to what in your system. If you go over the security levels, you may be surprised to discover just who can get where in your system. In one newsagency, they discovered that employees that left years ago still had unlimited access as no-one had been taking them out.

3) Please do not put passwords on a sticky note stuck on a monitor or the board where anyone can see them. All passwords if stored should be in a hidden place, e.g. in an obscure page in your diary with no indication to anyone that it's a password.

4) Try to force people to make a password that are a bit of a challenge, e.g. Tom should not use a password Tom.

5) If you find people are sharing a password, make them stop. This is hard as sometimes they have to share passwords but if this happens, get them to change the password immediately afterwards.

If your team can avoid these simple and common mistakes, you are already ahead of many organisations in protecting your information.

 

 

Its time to review you and your staff passwords

POS SOFTWARE

Hacking passwords is very simple and most point-of-sale systems because they process credit cards, virtual products, and they are on the Internet are desirable targets. You probably read a few days ago that The Park Hyatt Sydney and Melbourne systems were cracked. You only heard it because Hyatt is famous. Many more stores have been hacked. In our market space, one of our competitors has admitted several times that their sites been hacked.

The reason security comes up every year about now is because a list is produced of the worst passwords for the previous year. Here is the start of the list.

Here is a free book by them on the subject which is worth a read.

 

If your password is on their list, then I suggest you change it.

All a hacker would have to do if he had access to your system, is try these passwords in your system and they would have a reasonable chance of cracking your system. Its not hard to do.

Their are other methods commonly used too. Here are some of them.

The easiest way is to ask, listen or read. Someone in your shop simply asks or is told the password. I have gone to shops and seen passwords written down hanging on the wall. Almost anyone can read them.

As a rule you should never write down your passwords.

 

Another popular way is guessing, people that are close to you often know much about you, your maiden name, your old address, etc. People often reuse passwords, if I know your password on one site, it may open your system to me.

Hackers often use two other methods, the first is simply try every word in the dictionary.

As a rule never use a word in the dictionary.

 

If that fails a hacker will try every combination of letters, words and punctuation.

Here is some times how long it would take a hacker to crack your password if they have access to your desktop based on a site howsecureismypassword.

 

Common words
Karen - Instantly
maiden - Instantly

Every combination
television - 8 hours
infomation - 10 days

Note the longer the password the harder it is to crack.

Finally do not check only yourself, what about your staff?

Furthermore as a rule regularly change your passwords.

A simple way to do this is add the first and last character of last year premiership team at the end of the password. For some more tips on how to make good passwords click here.

A quick business guide to Facebook

POS SOFTWARE

I strongly believe that every serious business and organisation today needs a web presence. The web has become the major means of communication between business and their clients.

One place you have to be in is Facebook as every day, 10 million Australians are active on Facebook. Many spend almost two hours a day on it.

And it is free.

If you are not there, I recommend you go to Facebook, see what a few similar businesses to yours are doing on Facebook now. Check the ones you like and take a few notes about what your business needs. Note the words you need to say.

Then take a good camera, someone associated with your shop must have such a camera or failing that use a top smartphone. Now give the shop a clean, tell everyone to get nicely dressed tomorrow and take heaps of digital photos of shop, you in the shop, the staff, the shop, the products and services. You will not be sorry if you take too many, only if you do not have enough. Now go through them and select the ten best.

Now find the pages of your suppliers, similar businesses, your own and some other pages that would interest your clients, check out what they do, the details required and note these down. Change it to what you need for your business.

With so many Australians already on Facebook, the odds are that someone associated with your business knows how to set up a Facebook page.

If you are stuck and are a client of ours, we offer a free service to help you.

Now go to Facebook and set up a page. In my experience, it takes people about an hour to set up. If you do not know what you are doing it’s a pretty full-on hour. If you make a big blunder, do not be worried as you can correct later.

Once this is done now push your page on your clients. Ask them to like your page. Put a sign up the front of the shop, “Like us on Facebook." Put a similar message on all your receipts and statements. Push the page to all your VIP members, your staff, etc.

Now every few days check out the pages you noted above. Share or cut and paste an interesting comment from one of these. Please if you do a cut and paste make sure you change it so it becomes an original piece. Furthermore, add every now and then something interesting from your store, for example, a new service you are offering, an award you won, a new stand, new items, etc. Doing this will probably take you about half an hour a week and while you are doing that you will, in addition, keep you abreast of current affairs in your marketplace.

As an added bonus, our clients can integrate this Facebook page in our point-of-sale system.

Now if you want something more like an integrated website available through our point-of-sale system, stay tuned as I will discuss how you can do this in my next article.