Bernard Zimmermann's blog

If you sell or would like to weight items to make a bundle or package to trade in your shop, eg cheese, spices, fruit, dips, potatoes, etc. You are in luck as we have some top-quality scales that can do this

and produce a professional label for your shop.

It is extremely fast in operation. What you do is grab some items, put them in a container, then on the scale and our POS system produces a label that can be used at the cash register.

It is also advantageous if you have a deli in the back of your shop and your cash registers are in the front.

To anyone that seriously sells spices, I would say its a must.

Well if anyone wants an example of the power of Facebook in today's world, well here it is Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us. Over 2 million people have signed up to go, although it is highly doubtful that anywhere that number will show up. 

Even if an alien or evidence of any alien technology is there which I doubt, I am sure it will not be found. If it is there, it will be moved and/or hidden today. And I doubt that any of the demonstrators will get anywhere near the base. They are quite a distance from the wall, and the wall encloses an area of 8,000 sq miles. Area 51 is about 150 sq miles and is well inside this wall. The area is protected by many guards who are instructed to shoot to kill and people have been killed trying to break in. There are good reasons for the guards' concerns to keep people out as we do know that the area has highly toxic materials lying around and two people who work in Area 51, probably died from this. I just hope no-one gets hurt.

Still, it has proven to be a significant business event, many businesses and merchandise related to this event are on offer. If you have some items that fit such an event, you should put it in front as there is undoubtedly a lot of buzz about it.

In your point of sale software, now is a very powerful tool to see your cash breakup. Any study of this is getting into the heart of a business.

So off we go, in the main menu select "End of day."

Now in your Options menu marked in green, tick everything, so you are going to get as much detail as you can. 

Now in the Option above, as for the following 

Now you are going to get a detailed report on all the cash takings for the last 12 months.

Now one part that I do suggest that you look at is the Sales Payment Breakup, in that you can see an analysis of how people are paying in your shop. I am sure just that alone will make interesting reading.

Enjoy!!!

Our website is currently being upgraded and restructured which is why some people who we thank are notifying us of any issues they are experiencing with the site.  Please continue as we want to bed it down.

What it is, is that we are pushing to make it better.

Note we believe although there is much to do that it is running properly now

Every day we need to balance our priorities, this is the most popular system which is the most common in software, it is a combination of urgent and important.

• P0. Your Mum dying, kids are in trouble, a guy just had a heart attack in the shop and now nothing else matters. This P0 just block everything else and stops all thought of scheduling. 

• P1. The system is down and is needed now
• P2. Some important function really needed now is not working but we can operate
• P3. Some important function is required soon but it can wait
• P4. A non-urgent question that can wait.

You may want to try it with your own scheduling as it does work, I use a combination of urgent, work time and important. I look at each task for today, and then set my tasks by the following formula in the following software. It can talk to our software.

Urgent tasks  Are they urgent or can they wait.

Workload Will they take a lot of time, preference to those that I can do quickly. Ideally, I want to get as many tasks off my lists ASAP

Important If they are more important I will do them first

It works for me. 

According to a recent survey we did, we discovered that most of our clients have some form of loyalty VIP program in place. Assuming you have one, you need to monitor it.

What you are trying to do with such a program is to increase the number of sales of high-margin products proactively.

So what you want is a scientific list of what people that are using your loyalty VIP programs are doing with it. I strongly suggest that you do not just rely on gut feel and its not hard to get such a list from our POS software as it collects the sales information on your customers’ purchase histories. This allows you to identify what your loyalty VIP program is doing.

One report that I suggest you look at is "loyalty vs Non-loyalty sales", in cash register reports marked here in green.

Now if you go into it, although it has plenty of options, just keep it simple for now and put in the last 12 months and run it.

Now out will pop put a comparison list of exactly what the loyal VIP and regular customers are buying.

In particular look at the profit field, it is not uncommon now for over a third of profit in a modern retailer to be from these VIP customers. What is interesting is that they are much more profitable per visit than regular customers.

Now also there is a row there of %Gross Profit. This is for you to see what high margin items people are buying and to allow you to identify possible products for your VIP customers to buy.

Lastly, there is a row of costs so you can see precisely what these VIP customers cost you.

Our POS software is built for speed. It is the fastest in our market space, but we are increasing the speed on the next version. 

Time, after all, is precious and I think it is essential that as technology continues to move we take advantages of the latest advances to keep your business running as quickly as possible.

Some places it is nice, no-one likes to wait for a long report but in the cash register its critical.  If the queues start to get big, then people walk out and I know from personal experience nothing upsets us more then seeing people dumping their proposed purchases and leaving.  It gets worse as people seeing a long queue in your shop do not even come in.  

Today, most of the time taken in processing a transaction is independent of the point of sale software. Every customer when being processed today should be greeted with a friendly smile, hellos exchanged, they are processed, the cash or EFTPOS is handled, goodbyes are said, and they go. The industry standard to do this is about 40 seconds a transaction plus about three seconds for each item to scanned and rung up.  So if they want to buy four things, the time taken is expected to be about 40 seconds plus four items in their basket at 3 seconds each so it is about 52 seconds. 

Very little of this time is actually due to the POS software slowing down the transaction.

Here is the current speed test of about 20,000 cash register transactions in a busy shop.  Note when the new version is out in beta, I will do an update.

The average speed of a transaction was about 36 seconds a sale which is what I expected as our clients tend to have low numbers in their baskets and they are almost all in high volume pressure environments.

Here is what the graph looks like 

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As you can see in a pinch, our clients are doing transactions much less than 36 seconds as you can see here in seconds.

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I think our clients should budget about 36 seconds plus or minus here. 

There were problems this morning with MYOB, with people trying to log in, when we tested it then there was a problem however according to MYOB the problems have been fixed.

Also, I have tested it now and it seems all fine.