Tim from Middle Brighton Newsagency recently won the prestigious VANA Newsagency of the year award.
Recently he wrote me a letter which I think is well worth reading.
Thanks Bernard.
The business has been what I would describe as a rebuild – particularly in adopting the functionality available from POS.
The previous owner did not use POS and when I asked why he said the investment wasn’t worth it.
Intuitively I knew that was wrong.
Since early 2017 we have been progressively implementing POS and are almost there.
There is a story that backs up my view of using POS and it reflects very favourably on your support team.
Last year in trying to understand POS one of your support team – I think it was Peter logged on to our system to take me through dissections and the end of day takings printout.
In doing that he commented I had too many voids and told me I needed to look into it because the number and value of voids was a concern.
When I started investigating I could not identify who was doing the voids because the register was not set up to require everyone to enter an individual code before handling a transaction.
Following Peter’s guidance, I set up POS so everyone had their own codes to enable me to track a particular transaction back to an employee.
I spoke to all the staff about voids and one particular employee explained it was due to searches when employees would register the item as a sale to find the price and then void it.
So again I spoke to Peter and was then able to show the staff how to do searches using POS and eliminate that reason for the voids.
The number of voids dropped and then I had trouble balancing the cash.
So we started counting the coins every night - we have anywhere between $200 and $500 coins in the 4 tills.
Then the voids crept back in.
But now I could identify the employee involved in the voids.
So I had a look at the camera record of the voided transactions which showed the customer both paying in full and taking all the items which were voided.
Interestingly all the voids involved cash transactions.
With a witness present, I showed the employee concerned the camera record of the transactions and got her to acknowledge that the customer had paid for and taken all the items and that she was the next person to use the register.
Then I took her to POS and showed her the transaction record showing the transactions we had just viewed had been voided.
She immediately resigned and a year on year comparison shows the takings have improved substantially when you match days she worked last year against days she hasn’t worked since she resigned.
And guess what - she was the person who had tried to reassure me about the voids really only being price searches.
The previous owner had the business for 11 years.
If she was engaging in the same activity whilst employed by him, based on our analysis, it cost him well over $100K – probably much more.
It was false economy not to fully implement POS.
I haven’t shared the story with Peter.
Would you please thank him on my behalf?
His support and guidance have more than paid my POS subscription.
Regards
Tim
Middle Brighton Newsagency
75-77 Church Street
Tel: 9592 1000
