Today the best way of communicating with people if what you want instant communication is SMS. It tends to be read immediately. Often I find it takes up less time than a phone call. I saw a survey that showed that SMS tended to be read 98% of the time and almost all within seconds of being sent, in comparison emails gets about 22% reads and often not for days.

This in retail makes it invaluable for rostering. 

Here are two tips you can use.

1) People, particularly if they are casual, tend to forget their shifts; you can use SMSs to remind them of shifts a short time before they are expected.

2)  One of my clients, when the shop gets busy and, needs someone immediately, what he does, is sent out a few SMSs to his causals. The first one that responds gets the job.  This he finds an efficient way of finding someone and takes only a few minutes to do.

One successful and popular method of improving a business is called kaizen. It originated in Japan, and the word translates to mean change (kai) for good (zen). It works by using an approach of continuous, incremental improvement. 

The idea of kaizen is that you work on making small improvements. Every day you fine-tune your processes and practice. What you are working for is continuous improvement and that over time, all of these incremental changes will add up, and make a significant positive impact on your business.

Now people often tell me that for some reason their retail shop cannot do what someone else in a similar retail shop is doing. For some reason, they are different. Okay, what about doing what you have done in the past with just a little better. That person you were had with similar resources to you now, a similar shop and customers? Ask yourself, what did your past self do better? What about competing with that person? Interested, if so, you are looking at kaizen.

What you do is use your historical reports in stock, sales trends, promotions and customer sales and now compare it to what you are doing now?

It is easy to do look at the calendar last year and find a date comparable to yesterday and now check your performance compared to their performance.

Now look at their tomorrow and see what they did then and how your shop looks for your tomorrow? It will be a massive benefit to you to try to predict what items will sell well and which probably won’t. What you are trying to do is your stock, get your prices right and guide your promotions (Father's Day coming). This can add up to running a profitable and successful small business.

Here is a start

Go to Register reports

Now select "Top N Stock Sales for a Given Period"

Now the following popped up.

Put in *their* tomorrow

A report for the top sellers for today comes up.

Now, these need to be checked that you have enough stock because that is what they sold, why not you.

Also while you are at it, one point that comes up a lot in retail is a top seller today will be a good seller tomorrow. Technically its called decay. Typically in retail, what you expect to see is that an item that sells 50 today will sell about 66% of 50 or about 30 tomorrow and day after that 66% of 30 and so on. What you need to do is identify today what is selling well to check you have adequate stock for tomorrow.

Gives there two tips a shot, I am sure you will pick up some business.

One of the most time-consuming tasks and daunting tasks in retail is setting the right price, the next is trying to justify your prices to a customer who comes in and suddenly makes an issue as what the price of a product was and why now is it different. Another example would be a supplier rep who is now in the store or phone, and you need to check old costs.

So we have made a unique screen to help you so you can get the answer instantly. 

In the stock item, you will find a Price Change screen marked in green above. 

Now when you click that, you get another screen with the cost price shown in red and see the blue arrow, you have your retail price. 

Now you have a full history of the costs and retail prices, and you can go up and down by dates. This can help you determine your retail pricing strategy to use in determining the right price for your products.

Note: You also get a lot more information on the screen and on the bottom which I will discuss later.

Today almost every one of our clients uses thermal receipt printers although there is a going trend by retailers to use electronic receipts. It is cheaper, many customers prefer it as it does not fade and it is easy to store when they need it, and it gives the retailer client information for their loyalty program. So I expect that soon the paper receipt will go partly because of the trees and the lack of use. Soon in the US, I expect in many places it will be mandatory that a retailer must be able to do electronic receipts are compulsory on all retailers with Australia then following.

However, currently, we all use paper receipts so now sometimes I get asked for how much does the paper cost for a thermal receipt printer as let's face it the purchase price of the printer is only one cost.

This is a hard question to answer as it depends on many factors.

* How many receipts do you print? If you use electronic receipts, it will be very low.

* Do you print extras, eg do you print advertisements on the receipt, do you print discount vouchers, do you print heading with logos, etc. All this will add up. I would not write this part off immediately as if you notice the major retailers e.g. supermarkets who have done the maths like to print long receipts with advertisements so it must pay them to do it.

* What is your buy price on receipt paper? 

* Wastage rate of receipt paper, I have seen people that buy a big lot of very cheap receipt printer, only to discover that when its time to use it, that many of rolls are useless as they are ruined. 

* What sort of image are you prepared to give your shop, a low-quality receipt paper looks cheap. You may want something better.

* How many are you willing to buy, I have noticed that receipt rolls are much less expensive if you are prepared to buy in bulk plus the delivery costs are much cheaper per roll if you buy in bulk. 

Firstly what you need is the number of receipts you print a day, if you do not know that you can use this calculation

How many transactions do you do in a period, your point of sale system should tell you this? 

As a guess what percentage of your transactions, do you need to print a receipt?     

Number of receipts a day = ( Transactions per period) x (Percentage of transactions where a receipt is printed) / (the number of days in a period)

The bigger the period you work with, the more accurate your figure will be.

Now you need an estimate of your receipt printer roll costs. I would expect that it would be somewhere between $2 to $10 a roll, so what are your rolls cost each?

How long are your rolls generally it is about 16 ft (for some reason it has not gone metric), but it works out to about 120 cm.

How big are your receipts? A typical figure is about 5 to 20 cm.

So your daily paper costs= (Number of receipts a day) x (Cost of your receipt roll) x  (Length of your receipt) /  (Length of receipt roll)

- It will add up say you do a hundred receipts a day

- Say you buy at $3.5 roll of 16 ft about 488 cm

- Say a receipt length is about 10 cm

 It works out to about $7.17 a day.

Over a year it is about $2,582

A quick way to often speed up and make rules in the shop is to put a sign-up. 

It can be very frustrating for you and your staff to keep answering questions. Often what you will find is common in-store questions can be answered quickly with a sign. It may give quite a relief from having to repeat the same answers over and over.

Not only that but it will save you a lot of time. 

Be aware that if you have a computer at home which you do work on for your business, you may be entitled to claim many other expenses including many other costs such as the desk, chair, lamps, carpets, lighting, etc for the area from which you conduct business.