Bernard Zimmermann's blog

Here is a tip, if you are going to make in your shop, a sale sign make sure that it is red. People have been trained to that red is the colour for sale signs. 

I saw a study a few days ago, which stated that the average person has on average 90 seconds to decide on a sign. After that, they are gone. And what they see first is not the message but the colour. Red attracts attention.

The next point is nake sure that there is a clear definition between the colours on the sign eg black, blue or red on white work well.

There is a whole science to this, click here for more details.

Balancing your tills is essential to any retail business. It actually should be part of your daily routine, but now suddenly you sense that something is not right and you want to balance the till. This is where we use X-offs,

What we strongly suggest is that every cashier has their cash drawer. There is no problem as our system allows many tills to work on one computer,

At the start of each shift, the staff member gets the float. This can be easily balanced at any time.

Go to the End of Day section in the cash register and select X-offs

With this summary of sales what will get extra information which may help with your investigations such is the net sales, voids, paid ins/outs, taxes, the breakdown of various methods of payment and more.

Select on the end of day page choose the X-off option that is below the EOD option marked in green. Select the time the staff member assigned to the register started and the current time. You now run the report.

Now it’s time to count your cash.

When balancing lookout for overages and shortages, an overage is not to be ignored as it can mean that people are not recording all their sales. If so, why are they not recording all the transactions?

Over the years, VIP points have proven the most successful way of running a VIP system. It is by far, the most cost/effective.

However, one problem with VIP points is that many potential customers cannot use them for some reason. So offering in your VIP system, points will not tempt them

If this is your problem, here is a solution that may help. 

Let your VIP customers use the points they collect for charity. Select a charity to support and make a clear message that your customer can elect to donate their points to this charity. It works better if its that charity official drive as the charity advertising will drive your business too. It will also give you something to talk about.

If so please select a non-controversial charity, the last thing you want to do is offend someone. So I would suggest a medical or child charity.  Who is going t complain about medical rehabilitation? I can guarantee you will have problems with climate change as one of my clients found last week.

No-one can handle the vast numbers of products available to almost all retailers.

Most the suppliers have large numbers of items on catalogue. They will also have many more if you require something special. 

A typical client of ours would be selling actively over a year over 43,000 lines. That is a lot of work if you order once a week to handle it. Who can go over that many items?   There is only so far gut feel and memory. Can take you.

A computer can but to get a computer to do it requires a central stock system that is up to date and updated. Once done this allows your stock to be managed better and meet your customer's expectations while reducing wasting money with overstocking

This is why we recommend that you consider switching to a computer ordering system, e.g. focus that can quite cheaply and fast do the ordering. One point you will find is that the computer system works well in the model of smaller order and frequent buying.

What the computer does is looking at your history of sales, it then makes an ideal stock quantity for today that it thinks you will require (focus). 

It then compares this figure to what the actual stock on hand figure you have, it then adds some safety stock and then issues a stock order with almost no work to you to the supplier depending on the suppliers' requirements.

This reduces your holding costs, as you are not holding that much in stock.

It also

• Lower labour charges - as its computer time, not your buyers time.
• Lower ordering costs - as you are buying to the suppliers' terms
• Improved selling rates - as you are now ordering what you need.
• Decreased out of stock - as the computer is checking continuously
• Overstock wastes - in practice a computer works out the required stock better than a person
• Improved stock accuracy - you know what you have 
• Higher customer satisfaction - you have fewer stock-outs

You will save a lot of time.

Does not matter how fast the internet goes, we all want more speed.

No two places are the same.

The problem is that today we have in Australia seven different nbn connections and your internet speed depends on what connection you do have, how many people are on the internet in your area and the distance that you are to the fibre cable.  Now it is slowly getting to be only fibre as most of the copper is gone. 

If you want to know what type of internet connection you actually have and your options click here.

If you want to test your internet speed click here.

As a rule, I would say that a modern business needs a broadband download speed of 40Mbps (megabits per second). What you need to check is a few times in the day as it changes eg morning, lunchtime and evening.

We had a client that tested their connection and then they complained. It was discovered that some of the internet wiring was corroded, and once that was fixed the problem went away.  So it pays to check.

Here are some questions to ask yourself.

What are my best selling items?

Which items in my shop are just sitting there?

Here is a rule that that shows in retail often all the time, a small percentage of your stock lines up all the time give you almost all your sales. 

I took a data file from a customer of ours, and in a year, I found that they sold 20,060 different stock lines.

Here are some figures:

Less than 1% did 50% of shop sales.

The top  2 stock items did 15% of the shop sales.

Ten stock lines did about 33% of the shop sales.

Now let us find your top 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 choose 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.

It’s that simple

It can be done in less than a minute.

Check your treasures. 

A competitor released a dubious statement which among claims is that they serve more newsagencies then anyone and that this is shown by evidence that is 

1) recent

2) independent

3) verified 

As such from what I gather their system

1) the industry standard - something that I doubt eg much in magazine processing and lotto they cannot do.  

2) Not expensive - something that would surprise many of its users and me too.

When I queried them about what the evidence, it appears that it comes from a series of court cases they were involved in going from 2004 to 2009, hardly what I would call recent.

If so it would not be what I would call independent.

They then claimed to me that the other side agreed with the facts. The problem here is that the case never was resolved in court so that the judge would not have assessed this. Still, then it gets puzzling as I went through the court records and the opposing barrister's book, which has the information they need in the case. I can find no record of such a document. When I queried my competitor about this, I am still waiting for a reply. Until then, it is hardly what I would call verified.

So I have great doubts about all this, but I am willing to keep an open mind if they want to show me the evidence. 

Note: We offered to have an 

1) recent

2) independent

3) verified 

report on this subject with them, when it mattered and they refused.

We suggest that every month you do a sales Comparison report to compare how you did this month to the same month last year.  This is considered as being a very good indication of how you are travelling,

You will find it here:

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.

Now put in the last month of January 2020 and compare it to January 2019.  Then out will pop out a wide range of KPIs, including quantity, cost, sales, profit and GP%. with a breakdown by amount and percentage. I find the GP% to being very useful as that is the actual figure that I am getting not what the suppliers are telling me.

Once you have done that please experiment with the extra options in the More Criteria tab which I marked with a green arrow.