Point of Sale Software

Here are some Articles from the Blog Subject - point of sale management -

Your sales performance

POS SOFTWARE

Now is the perfect time to assess how you went over the last quarter and last year in comparison to the year before. This will help you to determine your growth or decline rates. It will show you where you are going. 

Although there are a few such reports with slightly different emphases, the one report I would like you to look at now in your point of sale software is the dissection comparison report. 

You will find it

Main Menu > Cash Register > Register Reports > under the Select Report tab, expand the Stock folder > select the report “Dissection Family Class Period Sales Comparison”.

 

Then you will see this screen, this is what you will get

 

 

Now put in the left side

  • From dates 01/01/2017
  • To Date 31/12/2017

 

On the right side 

  • From dates 01/01/2018 
  • To Date 31/12/2018

 

Now see what it says

 

Now check the last quarter, so go back into it and put in

Now put in the left side

  • From dates 01/10/2017 
  • To Date 31/12/2017

 

On the right side 

  • From dates 01/10/2018 
  • To Date 31/12/2018
  •  

Now check this and see what worked for you and what did not.

Knowledge is power.

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Cloud backup

POS SOFTWARE

A client's point of sale server went down yesterday night. Everything as such stopped. No technician was available. Today a technician came along and stated it would be a few days before it can be fixed.

However, to fix the immediate problem, we do not need their computers to work. As they were doing cloud backup, we were able to get their information from a cloud backup. Then we installed a point of sale system on a temporary computer, that we have here. Put their information on and we will be able to send them in a few hours a working system.

This is a dramatic example of how useful a free cloud backup can be.

Here are some more reasons to look at a cloud backup 

1. Automatic once set up it requires minimal human intervention.

2. Storing your information offsite is always the best, what if the shop burnt down tomorrow?

Disadvantages

1. Cost, they are dearer then USB sticks. Internet costs can be high. Electricity costs can mount up.

2. Security, when you use the cloud what you are doing is using someone else's computer who knows what happens to your data in these locations.

Note: Unless you get an expensive plan on your cloud backup, generally cloud will not protect you from Ransomware attacks whereas USB backups will protect you from ransomware.

 

 

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Accept cash, EFTPOS, direct debit and more fast

POS SOFTWARE

EFTPOS,Our point of sale software is designed to handle all types of payment fast. You can set up fully customised buttons to accept a wide variety of different payment methods, eg cash, EFTPOS, cheques, bank deposit, etc.

You can even accept split payments, where some go with one payment type and the rest with other types all simply and securely.

We also allow you to accept Part Payment, Advance payments and Overpayments.

One point that some people have asked is can they refuse to accept in some payment methods in some circumstances. The answer appears to be YES as long as it is specified before the debt is incurred. For example, if you have a sign that we accept EFTPOS and I go to pay to pay with EFTPOS you must receive it unless you explicitly state the conditions that you will not allow it e.g. for Lotto payments. The sole exception is cash. You must clearly say in advance if you do not want to accept cash.

But this is a legal problem, not a software issue. 

These payment types are set up with rules in the Dissection maintenance, where you can set up exactly as you require it for single touch transactions including surcharges.

 

 

 

 

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Last check on your stock levels

POS SOFTWARE

Now is your last chance to get your stock levels right.

Fortunately, with our point of sale software, you have both real-time reporting and low-stock alerts to warn you when the stock is running low. This is to keep your stock levels at your ideal level.

However, running out of stock now can severely impact your bottom line and do untold damage to your customers’ view on you.

 

Good news:

We have a unique report which gives you an immediate way of checking your current situation.

In Cash register report, call up the GMROI (see the selection highlighted) in your point of sale software in the reports here.

You can select the list of options you want, and I suggest you go over these options later.

I recommend doing this by departments for a first run.

Then you will get a report like this.

As you can see the items are all listed.

Let’s look at it in detail:

What we are looking for is items with low stock on hand figures, decent sales, and reasonable ROI% figures, ROI% is the return on investment, it is one of the best ways to determine how valuable your stock items are to your business. It is calculated by the (unit sold) x (Profit)/ (Average stock cost) and you need about 3.2 in industry, but as you can see here, there are many items above and below it.

Now it is up to you

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Clunky monitors on the front counter

POS SOFTWARE

 People go to a lot of trouble and expense to make their shop and front counter. Sometimes what you see on the front counter an old computer screen like this one.

Old monitor for the tip


It is firstly taking up a lot of room on the most valuable and best spot in your shop, that space should and could be used far better. A monitor can often, for example, be raised on a stand, so take up no room on the front counter and be better positioned for the cashier too

More importantly, it is making a wrong impression to your customers on your business. With such an ancient monitor what are they thinking of your software and technology? 

I would suggest getting a monitor that is modern, stylish and sleek. This will enhance your shop and move the old one to the back where no-one sees it.

Here is an idea get a monitor in colour, now that makes a bold statement about your shop, matches your shop colours and a cool talking point.

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Speed of cash registers

POS SOFTWARE

In modern retail, most of the time taken to process a transaction is independent of the point of sale software.

If you think about it, 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 its about 52 seconds. 

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

Of course, the trouble that retailers have is if the queues start to get big, then people walk out. What annoys retailers is when they see people dumping their proposed purchases and leave.  What is even worse people then often avoid shops that they know has long queues and do not come back.  So they hellos and goodbyes get a bit quicker, the processing gets rushed. 

To see what is happening now with our system, I took about 20,000 cash register transactions from a client with actually a slow machine but in a busy shop and measured their results.  

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 

 

Cash register transaction speeds

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

Transaction speed raw data

So it is not the computer, but on an average, I think our clients should budget about 36 seconds plus or minus. 

One idea that does work well in practice is to introduce a single queue, and have many cash register serving that queue. Although there are still waiting, people do prefer it.  If you have access to Mythbusters shows checkout S16E05 which has an experiment on this, the conclusion was even if this method is slower, people prefer it as it appears fairer. For a discussion on the subject click here,

 

 

 

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Measure how your shop is doing?

POS SOFTWARE

To improve your business, you need measurable facts. You need to assess how you are going.

So in your point of sale software let us get some.

Go to reports and the click on sales

Point of sale menu selection for compare

What this report will allow you to do is check how each department in your shop is doing in comparison to previous periods.

Options to compare periods

Now select the dates that you are interested in here. I am ignoring for this example all the extra options that you can examine here, but I do suggest after you work your way through this example that you study this screen in more detail.

You do not need to have formal dates as this shows, you can pick any dates. For example, today is the 06 Dec 2018, so I might select a month period from 06 Nov 2018 to 05 Dec 2018. What I suggest you do is pick a date in previous periods similar to what you are interested in so you may need to look at your diary.

Now a report with the simplified options here

Comparison reports

 

Now there are lots of details for you to look. If you want to just look at one department click on the left.

Now with all the detail, we put in you may want more, say I wanted to know my average sale price in a department now compared to before as I might be curious if the public is buying cheaper priced items now. This is not in the report explicitly. 

So on the top left-hand side is a little export button.

 

Export to excel

Now click to export to excel or OpenOffice (which is free here) and then once it is in excel divide the qty into the sales to get my average sale price.

 And that was just the beginning of what you can learn here.

As I stated as you work through the options, you will get lots more information out of this report.

 

 

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All I want for Christmas...

POS SOFTWARE

Currently, 2018 Christmas retails sales are expected to grow 2.9% this year. According to the well-known comparison site, finder.com.au Australians are expecting to spend $1325 each on average on Christmas. “people expect to spend on average $464 each on presents, $444 on travel, $131 on alcohol, $122 on food and $61 on decorations,”

Are you part of it?

Do you have the right stock NOW in your shop? Another important question is do you actually have the stock you think you do? It is easy to forget what you have.

What I do suggest is you look at your mirror marketing reports.

Go to Register Reports marked in green.

 

 

Now select in stock, "Stock Sold During Period(a) Not Sold in Period(b)"

What the report will tell you is what was sold in a previous period last year but has not been sold in this period. What you are trying to do is mirror your success last year.

 

Now in brown, you will see that there is a lot of flexibility for your reports there is also an integrated traffic analysis available too but let's keep it simple for the time being.

Now you will get a report with what you sold over the period, but you are not selling in your current period. What you find is I am sure worth investigating.

After that please redo this report for other years besides last year.

If you find goods missing, you need to hurry as we have less then 20 days left.

 

 

Comments

Dear Bernie
I am in Perth and I am trying to find an app that will convert anything into an ddo or dd2 file did you have any success. or are you beating your head on the wall like me. vladlenc@iinet.net.au

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Afterpay emergency update going out now

POS SOFTWARE

We are sending out tonight automatic emergency upgrade for the afterpay software. It will not solve all the current problems, but it will answer those that we can address.

So all our clients should be fixed tonight and tomorrow morning at the latest.

Currently, our advice is to ignore the message to upgrade for the time being and continue as before as it appears that Afterpay still has some issues. We are working with them on this.

 

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The years 10 busiest shopping days are here

POS SOFTWARE

Studies in the US  which I believe are valid here show that 45% of all shopping traffic in bricks-and-mortar shops in the Christmas season occurs on the following ten days. 

  1. Friday, November 23 – Black Friday (Today - Less important then in the US but rapidly growing)
  2. Saturday, November 24
  3. Saturday, December 1
  4. Saturday, December 8
  5. Saturday, December 15
  6. Friday, December 21
  7. Saturday, December 22 – Super Saturday
  8. Sunday, December 23
  9. Wednesday, December 26
  10. Saturday, December 29

Peak shopper times are between 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m.

 

Looking at the list, it seems like a lot of Saturday work coming up.

These days are the ones that you need to plan and have your rosters, stock and signage right.

Warning

It is also a good idea to have someone special doing security on those days too; I am a great believer in the theory that much of the security problems in retail can be solved by having grandmother greet everyone personally that comes into the shop.

 

 

 

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AMAZON back flips, it is reopening its American site to Aussie

POS SOFTWARE

 

Amazon Australia as I expected has not done well, the problem is not that our retailers are inefficient or not tech-savvy but our overpriced, undependable and slow delivery services which are holding us back in e-commerce plus our small comparative market. 

So now Amazon has done a backflip and will sell Aussies Amazon stocked and sold products from the US. I expect soon that the 3rd party sellers on Amazon will be released soon.

What happens with the costs of delivery to the Australian consumer from Amazon overseas sites will be interesting. Will they keep the Prime subs which allowed free postage over $49 from the US store?

For Australian retailers, the opening of the Amazon sites overseas is going to increase competition, and the two immediate issues are they need to look at their e-commerce and their delivery options.

Where we are unique in our market space is that our point of sale software is a unified commerce solution which brings together both of these issues into one platform in your POS system. Pieced together systems, that our competitors offer cost more money and lead to problems as different systems both in use, training and the need to talk to each other. Plus there is no long-term as who knows what the individual and separate parts are going.

Only our unified system gives you long-term as well as a day-to-day business solution. Click here for more details

 

 

 

 

 

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Booster bags

POS SOFTWARE

A "booster bag" or "magic bag" has been used by professional shoplifters for years to beat security detectors. 

Magic booster bags

Although you can buy them, which does present a problem that the bags look legit if empty as a rule, shoplifters prefer to make their own. What you do is take a bag although a pocket in pants can be used too, put metal foil inside and so shield the security tag from the detectors in the gate. Using it often they can put something in a bag and walk out of a shop.

One shoplifter just got caught using one by one of our clients. What he noticed was someone walking in with a larger sized bag from a well known retail shop, but it appeared to be empty which did not look right. So he watched the person and noticed as the person was passing out, the bag was not empty. When he examined the bag later, he saw that it was lined with aluminium foil.

If you want to know more click here.

If you find them, you know you have a serious security problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Stock Performance Reporting by supplier

POS SOFTWARE

It is said that "The devil is in the detail."

In retail, its the item that sells not the category or the department! 

A supplier rep is coming to see you, no doubt they are a friendly person. They have been briefed, they have an excellent overview of the market for their product, the odds are they know how their stock is moving in your store better then you do and they know your shops potential for their product better than you but they also have an agenda to get you to sell more of their product.

So what you need to be is briefed too and with a point of sale software, you can and should be able to look at this supplier's range in your shop and see exactly to the item level what is selling. How fast their items are selling? Which items are making the money?  So you can determine which of their items are worth investing.

Your stock performance report helps to answer such questions. 

What I will do here is take you through a review on one such report and what you can learn from this report.

Go to register reports>Suppliers>Suppliers sales trend, see the arrow in green

 

Supplier sales trend menu

There are the ad-hoc, excel and OpenOffice import which please ignore for the time being although I do suggest later using it to produce summary reports.

Now the options, I picked are here.

Supplier trend options

I picked an arbitrary supplier FAS. Again ignore the extra options for now and press view report. 

Supplier sales trend report

Here’s how it goes:

Look at the arrow in red, you have 19 of this item now, but you never sell any of these items. It is a worry.

Conversely look at the item in blue, you have none in the shop, and you have sold heaps of these items, what gives here?

Now in green what you will see is that one of the stock items is in negative. This is not a good sign as it shows your stock quantities are not entirely right. 

It all comes down to this

By looking at these items in detail, you can see which items are selling well. You can bring up this with the rep as you now have a clearer idea of what you need and what to order. 

 

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Top customers by visits

POS SOFTWARE

In retail getting customers to come more often to the shop is vital.

Questions:

Why do some customers come often and others do not?

Have you thought about this tried to figure out why some come a lot?

If you know, maybe you can use this information to get more people to come to your shop. Well, let us do that!

In your point of sale software and go into register reports>customers

There you will find a report "Top customers"

Image removed.Image removed.

Now click on that report (see the arrow in green)

Image removed.Image removed.

Now put in the dates you are looking at, I suggest at least a year and if you like a minimum spend.

See where the green arrow is highlighting. Change the sort order by visits.

This will give you a report with a grouping of your customers based on how often they buy from you. Now chew over why these people are coming, what are you doing right to get them to come?

 

Now let’s dig deeper

There are many other orders e.g. a listing by people that buy a lot you can use in this report, all which have their own story too. So there is plenty to chew over here.

 

 

 

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Busiest retail days of the years coming!

POS SOFTWARE

Are you prepared for Christmas?

Being prepared

 We are now to the start of this year's festive season, have you checked to make sure that everything technically works? 

Here is an interesting question to ask yourself, what will be the cost to your business if you suffer a Point of Sale outage on this holiday? 

If you want to deliver the level of service that your customers demand, check that your computer system is working correctly now!

 

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Credit limits

POS SOFTWARE

One of the main reasons for small business failure is poor credit management.

Now the problem is

Many people will not deal with you without credit yet it is too easy to sell on credit to a customer and as they come in, for your staff allow them to get more and more money outstanding, and then you find out later that you are looking at a long and big problem trying to collect it all. I know from personal experience trying to recover debt can be stressful and time-consuming and it is also a great way of making enemies. 

Often what we see is retailers often have to make deals to get most of the debt so you’re just leaving money on the table

This is why it is so essential to make from day one for each debtor a credit limit. It then becomes a management decision if the debt goes over a certain amount. Once the credit limit is reached (the account is maxed out) and our POS software will not allow any more purchases on the account unless some of the debt is paid or you make a management decision to increase the credit limit.

Here is how we do it

In your system, click on the main menu to customer > customer maintenance

Now call up a customer, now click Other Details. (see green arrow below)

 

 

There are two options that I would like to run through with you. 

You can select a credit limit for a period, a big problem with majors is that they have the money, but they take a long time to pay, so in this case, you may want to give them a large credit limit but watch if they go over time.

The next option is that you can decide whether the account if it goes over the credit limit should be stopped or whether the operator should be warned so you can be notified. While they are in front of you and they want the goods is the cheapest and best place to collect the debt.

Trust me. It’ll all be worth it to do this.

Allow people to get more credit limits over time, start them small and let the amount build up.

I also would recommend too that every year to do a review of your credit limits.

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Black Friday

POS SOFTWARE

Black Friday is considered to be the official start the Christmas shopping retail season. In the US it is one of the busiest retail days of the year. Its importance in Australia is growing as you can see here.

Black Friday on Google Trends 2018

There is every indication that this year will exceed last year so almost all significant retailers Australia are doing something by offering the public some good specials and most will have extended trading hours to take advantage of the increased traffic on that day.

Also what we are seeing is the marketing groups are pushing their members for submissions for the day.

Image removed.Image removed.

If you are part of Zip, you need to have your submissions in by this Friday, 9 November. One advantage of Zip as a marketing group is that its membership is free.

Note I would not worry about Cyber Monday, it is more for software companies like us in Australia, rather retailers.

If you have not done anything yet, I do suggest that you do give serious thought about doing something at least put a few signs up and put something on your receipts. 

 

 

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The end of laybys

POS SOFTWARE

Christmas is coming, it is less than two months away and I was talking to a few clients who do a lot of laybys, their laybys are down, way down on last year. 

I decided to check with google trends, as to what the Australian market thinks.

Layby vs afterpay over the past three years

It is clear that a market shift is underway.  The figure is even bigger for "Buy now, pay later" model as I could not include zip because zip is a common term used for other things so it is fair to say that this yellow line should be twice that height. 

I decided to just look at the layby by itself and got this.

Layby interest over 3 years

The green line is the trend and you will notice that it is straight down. 

How are your laybys doing? Believe me, if you are doing well with them you are an exception.

If you are counting on using laybys this year, I doubt there will not be much. The closer it gets to Christmas, the worse it is going to get as laybys need time to work and the time is running out.

Every store needs now a "Buy now, pay later" option, it does not need time, you can pick when you want to use it, you are under no obligation and it costs you nothing to have it. Plus these, in general, are very good customers to get.

Image removed.

 

We have arranged a very good offer from Zip for our clients, which includes a good rate, marketing information and signs as an introductory with no obligation to try it out. I suggest you look into it. Click here  if you want more details.

Note the recent announcement from one of our competitors that they are going to offer zip and afterpay too as well as oxipay, confirms that their customers are reporting the same thing and have similar needs to our clients.


 

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Favourite reports for monthly reports

POS SOFTWARE

They say that a business is "not a product of circumstances. but of decisions"

No decision should be made without facts and your point of sale software has lots of facts.  We have hundreds of reports, more then any other system I know.

So here is a tip, organise the reports you want in your favourite folder, these are all the reports that you want to run regularly so you can find them when you require.

 

Point of Sale Software favourite reports


All you have to do is right-click on the reports, then this will put it in your Favourites Section.

Soon all your favourite reports are there one page, so there is no more going from a screen to another screen as all your favourite reports are in one convenient place!

It is easy then to add more reports or take out a report that you no longer need (just right click on the report in favourite and then click remove).

Using our software you have a unique ability to quickly design a smart list just for yourselves of reports so allowing you to increase your overall productivity.

 

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Rental of point of sale software

POS SOFTWARE

Rent vs buy

There are several tax and management advantages to renting rather than leasing a POS system.  Overall the costs are in my experience, a bit dearer with the rental. 

Generally, these rentals are done for a four year period. At the conclusion of the agreement, you have the following options

1) Return the system to us which we accept as long as it is in good working order.

2) Purchase the POS system at a fair market rate. This is normally agreed at the start of the rental. 

3) Continue with the rental on a month to month basis which is a very popular option particularly if you are unsure of what is going to happen soon in the business.

 

 

 

 

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