Now is the time to look at what stock you have leftover from Chinese New Year and Valentines Day. 

Here is a quick and straightforward way to start. It will take you a second to do and should pick up most of it. 

Go to Register reports > Stock > Slow-moving Stock lines

Put in the parameters. I would suggest going by departments because it is easier to assess and collect as it is logical. Once collected, you will need to decide what to do with it. While you are at it, you may as well check the shrinkage.

This is one report in our point of sale software that can help you expand your business and grow.

If you are like me and always count parcels and objects coming in, this is a cool app that will save you time. What it does is count objects in a photo. 

I took a lot of pencils and put them on the table, now how many are there? Do you want to count? Often we have too.

I then ran it through the app and got this in a few seconds.

It missed a few, but it looks pretty accurate, I have about 116.

I then tried it on a range of coins, and it counted them correctly.

Here is a video explaining details on how it counts and how it can be used  

It is available on android and apple details here.

Now almost everyone sends invoices by email. Our POS software gives a vast range of flexibility for which formats to send. If in any doubt, we recommend that you use PDF format. This is because PDF is harder to change, will look the same on all computers, and is trusted. Many will be reluctant to accept a word document or excel format because viruses are frequently being transported in them. I also think that PDF gives you a professional look.

As such, unless someone specifies Word or Excel, I recommend you use the PDF option in our software.

But, some people will request different formats, generally excel and word. This is often because they need to have the ability to change the information, e.g., they are on selling the goods and want to remove your details from it. 

In this case, send a PDF copy and the other one in their selected format.

A customer asks you a question, and you need to brief the person on duty that day, who is that person. If you use the automatic roster system supplied free in our software, you can find out.  Instantly!

In the cash register, go to the hotkeys on the right.

Click Roster Enquiry.

Then enter in the details required, and it's there. You will see if the shift is covered and who is scheduled to be there in real-time. 

Please give it a go!

Current figures, well figures based on the last survey done in August 2019, in Australia and New Zealand Retail Crime Survey reported total crime-related retail losses to 0.92% of revenue.

If you want to read the report yourself, you need to register here.

Looking at the figure from many of my clients, I think it's higher. But as a first-level approximation, it's a start.  Put in your turnover and get a figure.

It is impossible to check everything all the time. So  I decided to put together a point list to determine which items to checked more often. 

Do it by department and give them a score based on 1=Low   2=Average   3=High. Then add them up for each department and look at the high scores.

Then divide it up the departments that need to check by priority.

1) Number of items you have. People tend to try to steal things that you have many of as they think you will not notice a missing one. Give priority to those departments you are well stocked.

2) Easy to count. If it is quick and easy to count, why not do so?

3) How often does it get touched. Every time someone touches it, it is open to temptation. This is why I guess items that are regularly purchased tend to be stolen more.

4) Stock that has a history of going missing. If you have items that go missing a lot in a count, that is a sign that something is wrong. Move it.

5) Small, easy to grab items. 

6) How valuable is it? If it's valuable, it is worth looking into it. I found it unexpected that low-value products will go missing almost as much as high priced items. 

7) Anything to do with computers, cosmetics, and sex items tends to be high on the list. 

Give this a try. If you have any good ideas on how to change the list, let me know.

If we get a lot of interest, we will look to automate this process.

Say you are running up in the cash register a transaction. You notice that a price, description, quantity, discount, or whatever is not right.

Simply click on the item. For example, to change the item's description in the cash register, click or touch on a touch screen on it. 

Then a description override window will then appear.

Now you can edit the description.

Then click OK and it will be changed.

My recent post on refund caused some people to ask how you mark those sales made with special conditions. This my previous example was a broken item, sold cheaply as an "AS IS."

This we call transaction tracking in our system. It's an incredibly sophisticated system worth going through, but here is a brief look at how to use it.

When you do a transaction, there is an item on the screen. *Change Description*. Press this, and you will see onscreen another option *Attach as Note*.

Here I wrote, "IT WAS BROKEN" see where the red arrow is.

The saved transaction will have full reporting and analysis available. 

To see it, go to find register transactions, look at it. Now after calling up the transaction, click show details. Now examine the items in red circles below, one by one.

Another example of how our POS Solutions software is giving retailers more.

Suppose your scanner plays up a bit and seems to be getting worse.

The first point I would check is, does it have a dirty lens. Retail environments are messy places. On the scanner lens, often fingerprints, smudges, glues from sticky tape, etc. collects. What can happen then is that you have to position your scanner over time. This is to get the laser beam to try to make its way through the dirt.  Soon over time, your scanner rate will slow down. 

So try cleaning the lens before buying a new scanner. 

Be careful as you do not want to do is scratch the lens. 

Unless you have a good reason for cleaning the lens do not clean them. 

If you decide to clean your scanner, do the following.

1) Unplug the scanner from everything. Do not pull out the wires from the computer and power as you will need to use them after the clean.

2) Use a soft, lint-free cloth, like a microfiber cleaning cloth, and give the lens a good wipe. 

3) If you see that the glass has streaks that are not removed, use a reading glass cleaner wipe. 

4) Then dry with a dry microfiber cloth lens.

5) Now plug the scanner in and test it.

A good scanner well treated should last you for many years.

Say an international customer pays using their credit card. If you have activated Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC), they get a choice of whether to pay in their own or your currency. DCC can be attractive to them. The reason is that generally, they are not interested in your currency. They want to know what it will cost them in their money. Yet, it does open you up to legal issues that I am sure no-one wants. A reasonable discussion on this is here.

These legal problems are severe. Visa was in the Federal Court over it when it attempted to ban DCC.  The courts found that Visa acted anti-competitively and fined them. So they re-instate it.

Well, it appears that the credit card providers are now appearing to transfer or notify some of the legal problems to their merchants, so beware.  

If you decide to do the DCC! 

Our POS Software does all the conversions relevant to local currency. It does not know of the legal information now required to give.  This depending on what country you are in and the country of the customer's card. It looks something like this.

This has to be given to the customer, so what we are recommending is that if you are using DCC that you give the customer the credit card machine receipt as ours will not have this information.

Tyro has put together a checklist that I suggest if you use DCC to follow.

Our advice is that although your customer the DCC maybe sometimes wanted by the customer generally it is costing them more and you now have a legal headache, so maybe it is best now if on to politely turn it off.

If the customer wants to buy they can pay in your currency.

If you notice here in the photo above, in light blue is the front counter area for serving customers. Where the circle in green is, is the receipt printer. 

Once they served the customer, the receipt printer prints a receipt. To get their receipt, the customer has to leave the front counter area and go to the receipt printer.

This gives some advantages.

1) It makes the customer move away faster from the front counter, so speeding up the traffic flow.

2) The person serving now does not handle the receipt, a big plus in our COVID world.

3) It increases the size of the front counter so allowing more impulsive stock to be displayed.

It works.

Have a chew and tell me what you think?

Sometimes what happens is you print off a big report, and all you want is one small piece of information. Our software has a simple and easy-to-use set of features that will allow you to search through your reports. Here is one of them.

This is the problem. I ran this report, which, if you look at the red arrow, you can see that it is 13,533 pages long. It is all great stuff, but what if all I wanted is one item off the report? Say one greeting card details.

Well, it's simple to find!

Press the search button marked with a brown arrow above, up comes a box shown with the blue arrow.

Now since I want to find a card that has "heart" in the title. So I entered here "heart" and then pressed "Find next"

Out popped out immediately the card on page 312. If not right, I press "Next"

Now that is a lot faster than manually searching through 13,533 pages!

It's lovely how our software has useful benefits like this.

Your cashiers need to process transactions quickly and accurately to keep your lanes moving.  Yet bad barcodes slow down the lanes and cause errors.

Here is a quick and straightforward way to determine the problem

Go in cash register reports.

Select in sales

Dissection Sales /Profitability for a given period

Now place here, say the past three months and run this report.

You will get a report that looks like this one. Now, look at the last row marked.

Now run down the list.

You are looking for dissections with high quantities, and low scan rates as these are the big problem here.

A study of Seek listings showed that a top skill required by employers today was the use of an office suite.  In business today, it's a must-have. The days of secretaries and personal assistants are long over. 

Microsoft Office is so familiar today that almost all software will link directly (natively) into it, including ours. Microsoft no longer supports the old versions of Microsoft Office, yet they work. They also continue to work with our software. Since they are out of support today, you can buy a Microsoft Office Suite 2010 for about $30, which works fine. I use it, and I have not bothered updating it. 

In my experience, the essential functions of a business today are word processing and spreadsheets. I have marked in yellow above these. To me, the rest is a bonus.  

If you want something else, there are plenty of free office software here. All seem to be relatively easy to use, all packed with features, and most importantly, fully compatible with Microsoft Office documents. I  admit I have not used many of them, but I do like OpenOffice, which is there. It's a case of working through them and finding one you like.

They should all will work with our software, although some not natively. So if you decide to use one of these, you may need to do three extra steps, save it in our software, and then open their office suite and call it up. 

Saying this I do recommend that all businesses today use at least one such software.

One point about our POS system is that it is ultra-fast processing.

Let us say you want to verify some detail of a refund done.

Now go into register transactions.

Put in the date, as you can see I will pick one very old.

At this point, it's worth reviewing the many options you can use to search.

One option that I find very handy is that you can get extra details here. See the red circle. 

Also, as you can see here you can printout the detail too in one screen.

This was all done in a second in a busy shop for a transaction almost five years ago.

We are giving retailers more in their software.

Here is one example. 

In retail today, you need to invest your time in meeting your consumer desires.

When you are doing this, you must plan the roster by need. It is better to design this roster for the shop business needs and make changes for the business/staff realities later. You should do it as far ahead as possible as this gives everyone associated with the shop time to plan. 

Our software has a roster system available free.

Before you make the roster, you need to study your current situation. Our traffic analysis report by the hour can help. I marked it with a green arrow below can do.

Now put in dates from a previous period that you feel will give you typical results for the planned roster. For this year, you will have to use a lot of judgment on how you think it will go. Looking at what we see now, we expect you will have about the same traffic as last year but a higher basket size.  

What is the report will give you a color-coded analysis!

Red and Green are the busiest.  

Now you can see where the action, and gives you a formal way to start. 

An efficient staff roster system can increase efficiency. See how you go when you match your shop's traffic to your roster.

Shoppers are put off your store if they see a lengthy queue, particularly if it's not moving fast. This is worse now as Australian standards need us to put floor markings every 1.5 metres where customers queue. 

So now the queue is longer plus many people for health reasons do not want to queue.

Here are some tried and tested tips to get your queue moving and so increase conversions. 

-Put a noticeable sign on your window when you have a less than 3-minute queue now. Make sure that the sign is in green. 

Also, advertise on your window/Facebook page, etc., at the best time to come to your shop to avoid the queues. 

-Hid the queue, so it looks smaller. A stand can hide a person standing. 

-Use your multiple cash draws facility, so you use many cash draws on one register. This allows many people to use one register simultaneously. Our tests show, two people working on one register with two cash draws can go 80% faster than one register. Not bad for an outlay of about a hundred dollars.

This also helps with cash security as only one person is responsible for a cash draw, but that is another point.

-Have more registers. 

You now have a perfect excuse to move a spare register in the back of the shop.

-Have multiple queues that lead to several checkouts. This creates an illusion of a shorter line.

Some extra ideas

-Make sure the queuing area looks clean. It does not hurt for people waiting to see someone cleaning and sanitising. 

-Have sanitising stations where people waiting can do something.

Start now!

Here is a step by step method which works to sell more which is very easy to do with our software.

-Get some signs in red with the notation "Bestseller". Above are some that a pharmacy got. If you cannot get them, print a few signs with your printer. Make sure that it's in red. 

-In your POS Software go to 

Go to Register reports.

Now pick "Top N Stock Sales for a Given Period."

Now in the form put in the last 30 days

A report comes out that looks like this with your top sellers listed.

- Now go through these items and select as many as possible and put these signs pointing at these items.

- You will find that people will buy these items more.

- Do this process weekly.

As it is, the keyboard at the register in a POS system in a shop is generally dirty. It is likely to be one of the dirtiest spots in your shop as it is shared with many people, so we recommend cleaning.  Now with COVID,  this is much more critical. Although I have not seen any figures for COVID, as a keyboard is known as an excellent environment for germs to spread, so I am sure will COVID.

Work safe Australia's recommendation now is that a keyboard shared by several people is to be daily cleaned.

This is a quick, non-technical way of how to do it.

You will need 

-Cotton swabs

-A few toothpicks

-A cleaning product, use a disinfectant, Australian standards now require that you use one that is listed as having antiviral activity, meaning it can kill viruses. This should be on its label. Do not use bleach as it can ruin the writing on a keyboard.

-Two rags

Let us start

1) Disconnect the keyboard.  

2) Now dampen a cotton swab with the disinfectant. Run down the tracks to pick up the dirt. You will need a few swabs as they get dirty quickly.  See the picture above.

3) A toothpick is handy here for bigger stuff. 

4) Use the dampened rag dampen with the disinfectant and wipe the surface. If a spot does not go away, use a toothpick to remove a spot.

5) Now wipe with the dry rag. Do not leave the keyboard moist! 

6) Flip the keyboard so it's upside down to let the moisture drain out.

It's best to do it at the end of the day to give plenty of time to dry out.

Note: There is an Australian Government Standard for Business retail to clean, details are here.

With all the price changes people are having now, this will help check your prices to see whether they are right. It only takes a minute.

In your cash register reports> Stock > Quantity On Hand and Price check.

You will get this screen.

Now I am assuming that your stock levels are correct here. If they are not, then you would use the line immediately below. Put in date since in the stock activity. 

Here I picked tobacco but generally, you use it by supplier here.

Now out comes a report showing the items, cost, the quantity on hand, and the retail price.

Now you can check the details.