Point of Sale Software

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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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EFTPOS warning

POS SOFTWARE

One of my clients had the following happen to them.

 

They got a query from the credit card that one of their customers is claiming that a transaction was rung up twice and so they have charged the customer twice for the same thing.

When they investigated in their POS systems what they discovered was that they had done two purchases on the same day for different items but the value was the same as the amount claimed. 

Now what they had to do was show clearly that both these transactions were for something different and that they were different transactions.  The security footage was very useful here.

What it does show is how important it is to include enough detail to show that even though the transactions are for the same amount, that they are a different purchase.

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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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Speed improvement

POS SOFTWARE

Speed improvement

On the newer version of our point of sale software, you will see soon an increase in speed on starting the cash register. We have done a lot of work to make it go faster still. 

This will make it quicker to add another register.

Here are some good tips if you find that your queues are getting too long. 

 

 

 

 

 

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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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Why Integrate Your eCommerce Website and your Point of Sale Software?

POS SOFTWARE

Image removed.


The major reason is it is more practical, quicker and easier to use, as you do not need to learn and operate two separate systems. 

It is almost certainly a cheaper solution too as you are only buying one system, not two.

With two separate systems, someone will need to move information from one system to another.

A typical cycle might be something like this. 

  • Stock information has to be taken from your POS software and put into your eCommerce website.
  • Orders from your eCommerce website have to be put into your POS software
  • Stock levels need to be checked on both systems.
  • Then the shipping information and tracking reports have to be put into the eCommerce website from the POS software.

During all of this mistakes happen.

What I have seen is

  • Shipping addresses entered wrong.
  • Stock levels are wrong so there is the problem of no stock due to overselling.
  • There is a lot of stock information required to be put in, so many items are not put on the eCommerce site as it is too much work.  

All these problems are avoided by integration.

If you do not integrate your eCommerce and POS software, it will cost you. 

Check our solution out.

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Verifying an order sent with a photo

POS SOFTWARE

Here is a tip that you can do with our point of sale software that one of our clients is doing.

Sending goods

When you pack a parcel to send off to a customer, lay the goods out and take a picture with your smartphone. Then attach this picture to the invoice in the POS System. That way you will have a photo ID of what was sent.

After being burnt badly, this client is now doing it religiously as he states photos is one piece of evidence that the authorities do accept.

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Comparisons with previous sales figures

POS SOFTWARE

Our point of sale software reporting feature allows you to dive into your sales so you can get a better understanding of your business.

There is a common problem that we face almost every month is that some months have four Saturdays and some five Saturdays. This often makes it hard to budget. It also makes it hard to compare periods for sales analysis. The other problem is that making sales comparisons meaningful between periods is that different periods are different September month is very different than December.

That is why our POS software when it makes comparisons asks you what period do you want to compare to the nominated period you request. If you look at the above example, you can see that I put in some bizarre dates to show what you can decide what works for you. 

Many of the commonly used dates such as Last Fiscal Year, Last Year, Last Quarter, Last Month, etc. are already programmed in for you.

Some that are commonly used are the moving or rolling time frames such as the last 30 days and compare this result to the same period the previous year for 30 days. Another common request available is to examine how the current YTD versus the last year to this point.

For more ideas, please click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Barcode scanner range

POS SOFTWARE

Scanners are explicitly made for use in mind. Some are long range. Some are short range, middle range, etc. It certainly is not the case that dearer scanner is the best one for you to use in all circumstances.

I have seen scanners that can read a bar code as close as few centimetres away and some that need at least 300 cm to scan the same barcode. 

So when you are ordering a scanner, you need to specify to the seller (like us) exactly how far away a typical barcode will be read. 

What I suggest you do is make a fist with your hand, grasping a long ruler at the 10 cm line and imagine that this 10 cm point is the barcode len. Now with the other hand put some typical items and measure out what to you is a convenient distance to read the barcode. This is what this new scanner will need to scan a barcode. It is not an advantage to have too much range as what you tend to get then is misreading from other barcodes that are nearby. 

If you require some long range scanners, then it is not as simple as a ruler. This video will show you how to measure the distance.

Then tell us the range you require.

Otherwise, there can be problems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Heavy items

POS SOFTWARE

In your shop, what is strongly suggested all things being equal that you keep heavy goods on or near the floor! Although there is no limit as such, as a general guide anything over 45 kgs needs to be looked at ASAP.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg

Legally a heavy item depends, on many factors eg if the item is wet or slippery if the items are stored in a cramped area so that people had to assume awkward positions to lift them etc. Here is a guide for retail {Link removed} that explains much of it from a legal point of view.

 

The other issue is forgetting the legal problems, do you really want anyone to get hurt?   Everyone is trying to do the right thing here.

So what can you do about it?

So once you have identified the heavy stock, move them to safe areas.

What I further recommend is that you mark in your software these items so that people will just by looking at the item on the screen know that they are potentially looking at a lifting problem and these items require special handling.

You’d do it like this:

Go to stock maintenance in your point of sale software -> Edit marked them as in the red box.

 

 

Just another example of how our software has useful items that you can use.

 

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Australian retail sales up a bit

POS SOFTWARE

Overall most retailers are pleased with the latest retail figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). It shows a moderate increase. The report itself is available here.

 

Now since this is coming out in excel, what you might want to do is merge your figures with an appropriate set of figures from this report to see how you compare with an average appropriate to you.

This you can do as unlike most point of sale software that can only produce standard reports, which works about 80% of the time. Ours has ad-hoc reporting so all you need to do is export your information into a spreadsheet, and put it into the Australian Bureau of Statistics report. 

If you have Microsoft Excel, you can use that, or you can use the free OpenOffice both as very good.

If you are unsure how to the export here is a training video which shows you how to do these exports.

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Stock know your 1%

POS SOFTWARE

There is a rule that seems to show up all the time that 1% of the population participate, 9% occasionally participate and the other 90%  do nothing. It is called the 1% rule although a lot of people call it the 90/10 rule. 

We see something like this is stock.

Here is a graph of a reasonable size shop with sales in order of the top selling items to the worst selling items based on retail turnover.

Top selling stock lines in ranking order

The shop sold in a year exactly 20,060 different stock lines.

Here are some figures, slightly less then 1% actually the top 220 stock lines did 50% of shop sales. But it does down further out of the top 220 stock lines, the top 10 stock lines did about 33% of the shop sales and the top two lines did just over 15% of the shops' trade.

When I first saw this, it hit me like a brick

I think you would have to admit that this is quite amazing. Now what the retailer should do is concentrate most of there efforts on the items that are really making the money.

Now let us find your top 1% stock lines.

Go to register reports and select the top stock report as marked with the red arrow here

You will get this screen

Now select your criteria, note there is also a tab called "More Criteria" which has more options plus the traffic (which is people in the shop) option but we will discuss that later.

I do suggest that you do this by overall shop sales and then research in depth for each department.

Here I used the stationery department. In red, I put in 32000 to make sure I get everything and as I like to get a long-term view, I selected a whole year as small periods can have major fluctuations.

Then you will get a report with all the figures.

It’s that simple

It can be done in less than a minute.

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International Coffee Day

POS SOFTWARE

International Coffee Day

 

If you are interested in some marketing idea for today, what about trying to market coffee today as today is the International Coffee Day? It should be good for a few sales. 

Such things are easy to set up in your receipts in your POS system. If you have a VIP club it is easy to send email newsletters out.

International Coffee Day 2018, celebrates the most popular drink in the world. According to recent research, it is good for you too.

An example of how these marketing days are good for business.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF BACKUPS

POS SOFTWARE

Well a few days ago a client contacts us, the shop was burnt down in a big fire, and all the backups were in the shop. 

If we are lucky the computer will be okay, sometimes they survive the fire, I have seen cases where the hard drive survives fire and once it did not survive but we had it rebuilt in Perth and they were able to get the data off the drive. It is all a maybe now until the police allow us access to the building. 

If they had a backup, then we could have sent them a new computer and their information would be available now. Even though the shop is closed they could still have sent out customer statements.

It does not matter how big or small you are, it is your legal responsibility as a user to have backups. 

I noticed that Apple stated in their contract "TO THE GREATEST EXTENT PERMISSIBLE BY APPLICABLE LAW, APPLE DOES NOT GUARANTEE OR WARRANT THAT ANY CONTENT YOU MAY STORE OR ACCESS THROUGH THE SERVICE WILL NOT BE SUBJECT TO INADVERTENT DAMAGE, CORRUPTION, LOSS, OR REMOVAL IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, AND APPLE SHALL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE SHOULD SUCH DAMAGE, CORRUPTION, LOSS, OR REMOVAL OCCUR. It is your responsibility to maintain appropriate alternate backup of your information and data."

Microsoft state bluntly "You are wholly responsible for configuring your Customer Solution to ensure adequate security, protection, and backup of Customer Data."

I am not sure about Australia, but I have been told that the US courts have ruled that a backup is considered to be an obligation on the user not having it is considered misuse.

In your Point-of-Sale system, a backup is crucial to your business. It should be done at least once a day. We have clients that do it much more than that too.

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Point Of Sale Stock Control

POS SOFTWARE

Retail stock control

Fact is

It does not matter how many products you sell, our Point of Sale Software can keep you informed of your stock levels just to help you make sure that you do not run out of the relevant stock on an item. 

According to one study, I read the main cause of these out of stock situations, was 72% of the time the retailer fault?

This is what your stock levels should look like

With our demand automatic ordering, this can be automatically implemented with very little work for you. It can generate profitable reports virtually instantly. If you get a run on a certain item, it will be picked up immediately by the AI ordering system and can issue an order with almost zero work to you.

And the best part?

  • Reduced holding costs - as you are not holding that much in stock.
  • Lower ordering costs - as you are buying only what you need.
  • Improved throughput rates - as you are ordering only what you need.
  • Decreased stock out occurrences - as the computer is checking continuously
  • Overstock wastes - this is often caused by people overestimating what they require.
  • Improved stock accuracy - you have a continuous check on your stock.
  • Higher customer satisfaction - you have the stock you require.

Can you really afford not to do it?

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Retail Express

POS SOFTWARE

We are a major cloud-based Point of Sale supplier, Retail Express, a competitor to us released shady advertisements, about us we think. They like us, they can handle central ordering and receive with head-office buying. Where I think, we are stronger is where stores within the chain also do their own wholesale ordering and receiving, where they have large numbers of stock items, a large number of sales and/or numerous suppliers.

They must see us as their major competitor

If you put into the search bar of google "POS Solutions Australia" Sometimes you will get something that looks like this.

 

Now look at the top entry where the green arrow is pointing, its states that it is "POS Solutions Australia" but it's not us; it actually is an advertisement from Retail Express offering to give you a quote. If a person is looking for us and is not careful what they will find is Retail Express. They need to make doubly sure as we are there, a bit further down see the red arrow.

Similarly if you put into the search bar of Yahoo "POS Solutions Australia", you get the same result.

 

 

Please click here for google. Now click on POS Solutions Australia on the top and see where you go.

This one is even more interesting so click here for Yahoo. Now click on POS Solutions Australia on the top and see where you go?

Interesting huh??? Note sometimes it does not come up, so check the images above for what comes up sometimes. How would you like it if it was your company, and this was happening to? Actually, I personally would never do anything like this

Now what do you think about that?

I am actually unfortunately quite experienced in this matter as I had a similar experience with another company who tried to steal our name. I won, but I still remember the lawyer's bills for that case.

So I contacted Retail Express and was ignored. Finally, I got a response that I felt was not adequate, so I am now upset.

So then I contacted google. It was not easy, but I found an online form and lodged a complaint with google. I have a case number, but they will not contact me. They are not even talking to me.

Then I contacted Yahoo. This time I demanded to talk to someone. Now, this part is funny. I called a person at Yahoo and explained the situation. Once I finished explaining, the guy just hung up on me in mid-sentence. He did not even say boo. Wow, I thought this was the way to run a business. So I rang back and got another support staff and explained the story again. This guy gave me a special Yahoo phone number to call. When I called the special number, the automatic response on the number stated what my verification number is? I was not given one so it asked me to get a verification number from the number in Yahoo, I had just called. It also gave me a Yahoo email to write too. So I wrote an email and sent that. So I have a case number from Yahoo and an assurance that they will get back to me in 24 hours but no one to talk to. So I called back the original number in Yahoo because I did want to talk to someone. The guy refused to give me a verification number; why give me a phone number earlier without a verification number; I asked. He did not answer my question. He kept referring me to help on the Yahoo page. When I pointed out to him that there was nothing on that page for my problem, I was told I would have to search. I told him, I had done that but really why should I search? Just give me the web address. He refused to give me the page. He then when I requested it, refused to do a search for my problem on the help page either. At that point, I demanded to speak to someone else.

She was considerably better, and her English was much better too, but she could not help me. Her solution was that I should write Yahoo a letter. Yahoo is asking me to write a letter. Won't the post office be happy to hear that? Mind you, I think Australia Post's service is better than this, actually, I think almost any company's service is better than this.

It is too late now so I will give them 24 hours before I can do something as I need to provide Retail with Express, Google and Yahoo a chance to react. I hope it ends amicably before it escalates.

To be continued!!!

 

Update 23 May 17:

 

I got an email from Yahoo today saying that "Due to the implications of legal action, all of your future correspondence will need to be sent in writing to our Legal Department:"

 

Update: 29 May 2017

 

I have heard nothing from Retail Express, Yahoo or Google, although the more blatant advertisements have been withdrawn.

 

Update 12 June 2017

 

A letter was sent to Retail Express, Yahoo and Google on 8/June/2017 that the advertisements had been changed and now clearly show that they are from Retail Express, not POS Solutions; we were withdrawing our claim in VCAT. No response was received back however, its too early to say

 

However, when I did a search with google and yahoo, I can see that the advertisements have stopped entirely.

Perhaps Retail Express have stopped this type of promotion, if so why? Maybe commercial as many of the clicks would be readers here and myself, which would have costed them, or maybe they stopped because of something that we did. Anyway for now, we are happy they have stopped this form of advertising which we think is very dubious.

Update 14 June 2017

 

Well no response came from our letters sent on the 8/June/2017 but it appears that Retail Express have restarted the advertisements but now they are clearly marked as coming from them and not us.

 

You know somehow I expected better service from Google and Yahoo on this issue.

 

But I do wonder why would Retail Express go to such lengths just to use our company's name in their advertising. We have never used their name for our advertising.

 

Update: 29 June 2017

 

Well its back but with a difference, now if you go searching for us in google or yahoo with the keyword, they use in their heading "POS Solution" singular without putting in their name.

 

If you ask me this form of advertising does not honour to retail express and to google and yahoo for allowing it. Retail Express should not be allowed to do this form of advertising and it should be banned.

To be continued

Conveyor belt scanning

POS SOFTWARE

This is very useful if you have lots of items to scan. It is more accurate than a person and faster.

Here is a video of conveyor belt scanning in operation. All a person had to do was place the items which were tipped straight out of a cart, the items sort of lined themselves up on the belt then we tested it. We could not find a product that it could not scan including cans dripping wet out of the fridge. We were just amazed at the speed that it is counting. The items do not need a barcode to be counted, in fact here we did not use the barcodes at all, and it is reading an item from any angle, it is not lined up.

Click here for another example of it in operation. As you can see it reads it repeatably so its a series of 99% accuracies which add up to incredible accuracy. Even five times 99% will add up to 99.9999% plus.

There is no limit to the number of different items if can count.

If you think that you could use such point of sale software technology and want to know more then please let us know.

 

 

GST rates

POS SOFTWARE

GST is not always 10%. For some reason now, we are getting a lot of people asking about how to put in a different figure.

Okay, it is easy to do in our point of sale software.

Call up stock maintenance

On the top right, you will see a GST category and a GST rate. Enter in the GST rate that you like to put in.

Note once you do this it can make it hard to reconcile your GST figures.

Melbourne gift show today

POS SOFTWARE

We are showing off our point of sale software plus our eCommerce products at the Melbourne Gift Show.

 

 

 

 

The actual show is huge, so much that I would think that almost everyone of our clients could gain at least some ideas for possible products for their store. Although I do feel that many of the products were too expensive for example I doubt many people would buy $25 socks. I know my daughter has a ball looking at some of the stuff.

 

 

Point of sale Reporting and Analytics

POS SOFTWARE

As a market-leading point of sale software provider, we deliver on our promise of creating a huge number of business reports that transforms our users into wizards by giving them accurate, on-demand, and highly interactive information that they can act upon.

We offer 100s of pre-written reports and if that is not enough, we give you ad-hoc reporting too where you can write your own reports.

Go to the reporting section and you get this.

 

[Image removed]

 

Click on an item here and even more will pop out

 

 

Running through these reports in no particular order, you can see crucial sales metrics such as:

Profit

The number of items sold.

Breakdown of sales
Employee performance
Departmental performance.
Price performance
Sales
Inventory
Payments
Register breakdowns
Gift card sales
Gift card usage
Total sales
Hourly sales
Total transactions
Average transaction amount
Order history
Payment summaries
etc
etc
etc

All these give you massive insights that help you to better understand your shop. You see stock is over/under performing, what is selling, who is buying what, when they are buying, how they are paying for it buying it and which employee is selling it to them.

This is how you can gain the detailed insights you need to make informed decisions about your shop.

Note unlike so many other pos software systems you do not need to buy extras to access this data. Want to compare systems, demand to see the reports, count them quickly, I have not seen a system with more reports then us, demand to see them run with full data not play data as unlike us, many do not use proper SQL so the run like a dog.