I am off to the ANF conference this weekend.

I am looking forward to seeing the “Australian Outback Spectacular” and getting my RM Williams hat.

I have marked out some talks that will interesting me.

Mark Webster the National Circulation Director, News Ltd is worth a listen. At least he tells us what News Corp is planning and the issues that they see.

Andrew Griffiths who is a prolific writer! I looked at his resume and he has an impressive client file. I think the ANF have done well with the subject matter too. The problem with business plans is you can see the advantages for large organizations with tens of thousands of people as it puts everyone on the same path. But with smaller companies often it tell us what we already know. It seems like we end out filling in meaningless questions again and again and again.

If anyone is there and wants to talk to me about anything at all, then I certainly will make some time to see you.

I also hope I will get time at the conference to keep writing my blog which I am finding enjoyable to write.

We have just introduced a new advertising campaign designed to shines a spotlight on newsagency software.

People don’t go to a travel agent thinking that one holiday is the same!

Yet too often people, yet unbelievable as it may sound, think that one window software is the same as another. So the focus on this campaign is to show the difference. To show the intense pride that we feel for our software by getting people to check out posbrowser features.

So we are coming out with a new tagline, “Software beautiful”, to reflecting this campaigns focus.

http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/769714

I think it is an interesting case at the ACCC at the moment which may have a large bearing to our clients.

If I understand the case correctly what Metcash did, was tell their IGA retailer that they can only buy one of eight different computerized point-of-sale systems if they want Metcash to supply data. Supply of data is extremely important to a supermarket. The reason Metcash want this, in their words is to “coordinate the extraction of scan data from all IGA retailers”. Which from my own discussions with several newsagents suppliers, I can understand.

However this brings up three questions to the ACCC
1) Can Metcash say to their IGA retailers that unless they use one of these eight systems, they will not supply data?
2) What about those that have another system, can they be forced to spend much time and possibly money to change over to these new systems if they want data?
3) Can data retrieval of scan data be made compulsory or is it only voluntary?

The answer given by the ACCC will be of interest to us and I suspect most of our clients.

If you want to read further the case details are here
http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/769714

Since I realised that it is the middle of winter in Melbourne and the conference is in Surfers Paradise. Suddenly seems a better idea to go to the conference and I would like to see the “Australian Outback Spectacular” as well. I think that Zac got the same message as suddenly he wants to go. Yet only one partner can go.

I thought it was good last time I went to the conference. I thought the ANF did a professional job. I learnt something as there were a couple of good talks that I enjoyed. I gained more than a titbit or two from the speaker. Most of them gave me some new ideas and inspiration. What did I remember to disappoint me is that I did not get any update information direct from the source. What I got was prepackaged information from a consultation with a prepared speech. Still, this is what you expect at these conferences. The guys that know what is happening keep their cards close to their chest. Still, you did get to meet them which is a start.

Still, I did meet a few people that were good to meet.

Three tips for the conference if you are going.
1) Take a small notepad that can sit in your pocket plus a pen so you can write something reasonably clearly always because you never know when something important happens that you need to record. Last time I needed it in the corridor.
2) Make sure that you always have plenty of business cards.
3) Grab as much sleep as you can whenever you can at the conference! Newsagents start early, suppliers finish late.

We have been working with News Ltd to get this subscription problem worked out so all the newsagent computer systems will improve the data transfer from the newsagents’ computer to News Ltd.

The problem is that people take a subscription for a newspaper for a period. News Ltd would like to contact them just before the end of the subscription to ask them to renew if they have not done so already.

However it is not so simple in the real world to get that end date. Say during part of the period, the newsagents’ client takes a few weeks off. Sometimes they don’t tell the newsagent when they are restarting so the newsagent has no clue when the subscription should end. Sometime what is stated as a temporary stop lasts forever.

Alternatively the newsagents’ computer knows but not the News Ltd computers.

Often it gets complex when the client has a few subscriptions with News Ltd.

The result is the newsagent’s computer is full of accounts that have long since stopped. However the News Ltd computers sees these as current subscribers. So News Ltd don't market to them.

While the newsagents get reports from News Ltd that are misleading. I remember in one newsagency, we spent a day going over every subscription with the newsagent. When we finished late in the night (I mean late) the problem was clear for all to see.

We think the best solution is that we give up on dates and use the number of papers. If the person takes out a year subscription then it is not a year but 365 papers. However this solution will not happen soon with News Ltd.

Now everyone agrees that it is unsatisfactory. I am sure it is costing both News Ltd and our client's newsagent money. But it is not an easy problem to solve. So it is taking time to work out. I can assure you that it is not for lack of effort by anyone measured by kilometres, emails, telephone calls and discussions.

I know we are getting closer but it is frustrating to all. I just hope that we work it out soon. As I would like to announce at the newsagency conference in Surfers Paradise that we finally have at least a solution to most of this problem. I am sure News Ltd would too.

Then we can move to the next item on the list that is to match up the newsagents' name and addresses to what is in the News Ltd computer.

Attached is the latest Newsink May flyer on the POS blog. What I did was reduce the quality of the brochure because the actual brochure is too high a quality and would just waste bandwidth.

It has some great HP twin pack prices that are not available anywhere else! You will find them on the top of page 2.

Date: Tuesday 19th June 2007

Venue: VANA, 806-810 Nicholson Street, Fitzroy North

There will be two training sessions held at VANA on Tuesday 19th June 2007 for BROWSER USERS.

10am - 1pm for Beginners to Intermediate Users
2pm - 5pm for Advanced users.
Members can stay for both sessions if they wish

An outline of the training is:

Morning session:

Register Training
......Register screen
Back office training
Welcome Document explained
......View Messages tab
......Creating new messages
......Tasks tab (Checking of round charges) ......System Info. And Prog. Updates tab explained
Stock Received/Invoicing
......Stock Received document (Manual and Electronic Invoicing)

Questions and answers section

***** Lunch *****

XChangeIT
......Transferring files from XChangeIT
Returns
End Of Day

***** General and brief run through of the whole PB system again if time permits *****

Light refreshments will be provided for lunch. Please register your interest by telephoning VANA on (03) 9482 2911. If sufficient numbers are not registered the training sessions maybe canceled. Please support these sessions as these have been arranged after many requests from newsagents.

Date: Tuesday 10th July 2007

Venue: VANA, 806-810 Nicholson Street, Fitzroy North

There will be two training sessions held at VANA on Tuesday 10th July 2007 for DOS USERS.

10am - 1pm for Beginners to Intermediate Users
2pm - 5pm for Advanced users.
Members can stay for both sessions if they wish

The training will be conducted by Bernard

An outline of the training is:

Morning session:

* How to turn on the system
* Backups
* How move around the system
* Cash register functions
* Customer payments
* How to set up a customer
* Rounds and sequencing
* Subagent handling

Afternoon session:

* System Maintenance
* Stock Taking
* Maintaining Stock Control
* Automatic Ordering
* Customer Statements
* XchangeIT & Magazine Returns
* And More..
* Questions and answers section

Light refreshments will be provided for lunch. Please register your interest by telephoning VANA on (03) 9482 2911. If sufficient numbers are not registered the training sessions may be canceled. Please support these sessions as these have been arranged after many requests from newsagents.

GNS years ago set up a comprehensive category system mainly for their website. It is used internally.

The problem to us is that they never released it to the public. Several of our clients stuck with the old GNS/VNS standard, some adopted one of several other stationery companies’ category system while others went ahead and created their own.

However many had nothing and wanted something!

Say they wanted to know - How are our scissors selling now compared with last year? It is not so easy to find out unless you want to go though several different items and then do some manual addition.

Our interest is of course these newsagents as we wanted them to have category analysis.

After many months of meeting, discussions, emails and some test trials we meet GNS today and they have decided to release their category system. No doubt it will be a challenge for them to adopt categories made for themselves with their wholesaler needs and those of their newsagents’ clients.

Some fine details are still to be determined but I cannot see any reason for it not to happen soon.

The main advantages to the newsagent is that it will be easier to organize their stationery stock, find it on the shelf and it will provide you with a new level of reporting. At no extra work for you!

It will enable you to better manage and understand stationery performance.

I have been following for a while the story of World Square Newsagency.

What happened is that two winners of the lottery came into the newsagency. There they were served by a trusted employee of the newsagency for two years who filled out for them a claim form. Later he substituted their claim form for one of his own and sent this form with their winning ticket, to NSW Lotteries. 14 days later he was paid the $574,000 then he disappeared, possibly to Indonesia.

At this point, it is interesting to point out how the newsagent Michael Pavellis described his trusted employee: "He was a religious person; he went to church twice a week ….I know it sounds strange after what has happened, but he was an active member of the church band. He was a well-liked person".

Anyway a week later the rightful winners contact NSW Lotteries inquiring about their prize. After a legal battle, the NSW Lotteries paid the prize money again, this time to them.

Now the part that is interesting to us is that NSW Lotteries started proceedings against the newsagency saying it was negligent. Consequently, the owners of the newsagency are liable for the loss and should repay it. The lawyers have been debating in court just who is responsible for employee theft. Or whether what it does sound to me was the NSW Lottery systems that are at fault. Now we are waiting for a decision.

Like most of us, these newsagents do not have $500,000 plus court costs spare, so this newsagent has said he may be forced to sell his business and home if he losses and may go bankrupt.

Note I bet even if the newsagency wins the legal fees will be a real ouch.

Here is the newspaper report on the case.

I really feel for his problem. From my own experience with newsagencies, I think that this newsagent, Michael Pavellis, who I am sure I have met and is a good client of ours was just unlucky as what happened to him could have happened to many newsagents.

For us what works the best is direct mail.

So we get people to sit a little room, work through the weekend to print thousands of brochures and pack them up into letters send them off to newsagents all over the country. So to start our launch of a new marketing campaign for our Newsagency software we sent out this brochure for posbrowser which is the best Newsagency system out. I am not prejudiced!!!!

It has some brilliant features all designed for a newsagent by an organisation that knows, lives and is focused on that market. It is a major business management and time-saving tool that enables you to be more competitive in your business. Some of it features would be

1) Fully integrated multi-shop capabilities. The ability to run multiple stores from a central location with added features like stock transfers, centralised reporting and transferable customer rewards.

2) Touchscreen registers that support integrated EFTPOS

3) Stock on hand control using electronic order generation based on Replenish, Focus (sales trends and Min/Max methods (Dynamic & Fixed)

4) Automatic electronic ordering/invoicing for most major wholesalers and simple tools to help others get started

5) The power to add new stock items to your database automatically when receiving goods

6) Customer membership loyalty features including automatic redemption vouchers, gift vouchers, discount vouchers, automatic emailing, register lucky numbers and birthday alerts

7) Automatic Group Sell features calculated at the register (Buy 2 get third one free etc)

8) Notes and alerts for stock that prompt at the point of sale. (Free gifts etc)

9) Built-in register cashup process

10) Statements that support BPay and credit card payments that can be emailed directly from Pos Browser

11) Wireless PDA support for stocktaking, order generation, label printing and stock enquiries

12) Stocktaking that works while your trading

13) Automated backups and program updates – just leave Pos Browser to do it

14) Limitless combinations of automatic discount structures for customers and business groups

15) Complete remote management so you can spend more time away from the store without losing control of your business. Check out page two to see how this all comes together.

16) Complete tracking and recall of every transaction

Regards

Bernard

http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/pep-bids-to-open-book-on-borders/20…

http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/pep-bids-to-open-book-on-borders/20…

It is quite possible that Angus & Robertson could end out owning border. That should give them a lot of buying power in the book industry.

Also Angus & Robertson now owns the Supanews newsagency chain. So if this article is correct we may see soon the first publicly listed newsagent in Australia.

I was reading this story about how the suddenly now after so long the newspapers are agreeing that their readers find the large formats difficult to handle on public transport or on a plane.

I would have told them 20 years ago. If they had asked me!

Today where every sale counts, I think there are good reasons to go to the smaller tabloid format. That is what the Courier-Mail did in Brisbane. Interestingly Courier-Mail decided to call it compact rather then tabloid as in newspapers tabloid has a bad connotation. It is now used in many good papers in many countries as this article shows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid

When the latest copy of the MPA - Magazine Publishers of Australia came along today that advertising is up by 7%. My first thoughts were cool as it helps the industry.

My next thought was recently a director of a magazine publisher came to see me about getting sales data. He told me that circulation dollars are not worth much. So I asked, “If advertising is so important to you and since advertising dollars depend on circulation, as you can increase circulation by just giving it away, why charge for the magazine?”

He just looked at me, then gave me a strong hint that I should not ask this question and that we should back to the subject.

So while scanning the MPA newsletter as I am a curious person, I would like to get an answer. Since newsagencies rarely deal with un-audited magazines the figures here are perfect for me to get an answer.

The MPA newsletter stated, “Magazines increased ad revenue in 2006 by 3% to $749.2 million.”

Okay, so what is the circulation dollars. So I went to the MPA website where it states “Australians spent an estimated $1.06 billion in 2005 on ABC-audited consumer magazines.” Say about a 3% increase for inflation which every business got but POS Solutions that has not increased its fees in ages. We now have 1.09 billion dollars in 2006. There is a slight increase in magazine sales so say the same so we have about 1.12 billion dollars about in 2006.

The magazine business model in Australia is the magazine publisher gives it to the magazine distributor and the magazine distributor gives it to the newsagent and the newsagent sells it to the public. I don’t know where printing costs come into the equation.

Since everyone in the chain gets a slice. If the magazine distributors are given newsagencies and other retailers 25%, I presume that they are talking about as much. This I don’t know. It is a guess but it sounds about right. The problem here is that they are public companies and these companies do not release their cost of good sold figure.

So as a punt, I would say that circulation sales in 2006 would be about .6 billion dollars to the magazine company. Much probably goes into other indirect costs involved in production and distribution.

Since advertising is giving than about .75 billion dollars a year, I suspect the magazine publisher are correct when they say that they make more from advertising then circulation. It also explains why magazine publisher are interested in the number sold rarely the circulation dollars and rarely bother with newsagents. It also explains why the MPA concentrates so much on advertising dollars and little else. It would also explain their strong interest in the internet.

Now it looks like Coles is being sold. I wonder what will happen about Officeworks. Harvey Norman, Wesfarmers and Woolworths are interested in buying Officeworks.

Wesfarmers is likely to be given access this week to Officeworks figures supplied by Coles note they have to sign an extensive confidentiality agreement. Soon the others will get the figures, I bet it will cause them all to do some real number crunching.

For newsagents, I suspect that Harvey Norman purchase is probably the best. They handle at least half of Officeworks products already. They are not into office stationery selling. Woolworths also will be more of the same. Probably the worst is Wesfarmers. I have dealt with them before and they are an extremely professional company. With their stress on technology, huge stock inventory shops, high volume and low prices they could be a real challenge.

However whoever buys Coles and if they lose out on Officeworks will probably be tempted to try to get back some of this stationery market.

Also, both Harvey Norman and Woolworths are saying if they don’t get Officeworks they are considering starting a rival stationery supply chain.
So it is quite likely in what is already a competitive stationery market at least a few new players will enter.

Newsagents have to work out where they want to position themselves in the market.

I went to a client today and I see plenty of proof that we are still getting products coming in with no barcodes.

The problem is that unless the supplier of the product is thinking of selling into Australian supermarkets who demand barcodes, they often don’t bother as it costs. Most other retailers, as this newsagent showed, will still take it. Although it must be a real pain to him as he print barcode labels and stick them on to the item.

It is 2007 and it still happens!

In business, half the time, people chase you up, and the other half, you have to chase them up. So off I am to a computer show soon, CeBIT in NSW, to see the other half I have to chase up.

The last time I went, it was great to run into some clients who were also checking it out. We had lunch together.

I am particularly interested in seeing some of the new printers because we are having problems sourcing printers for DOS and because I think we have a big need for banner printing for retail signs.

I am particularly looking forward to hearing from Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman of Firefox. She is giving a speech there, and anyone who can beat Microsoft has to have plenty of interest to hear.

Yesterday I was talking to a family friend, a colleague of my wife. He told me how impressed he was, when he went into a newsagency. His wife asked him to get a magazine and since he had not written it down, he was unsure of the exact title of the magazine. So he asked at the front counter. The people at counter were immediately able to look it up. Then tell him that they had two in stock and where it was on the shelf. They then took him to the magazine. Then when he went to pay, they told him when the next edition was due.

I said yeah, where was it?

My face lit up when it turned out to being one of our client’s Middle Brighton Newsagency.

I was listening to a politician seriously saying that Australia should follow Ireland and introduce a levy on every plastic shopping bag. Seemingly there it led to people cutting down which plastic bag use by almost 90%. I believe it. I can see in Bunning’s how few people take plastic bags when they have to pay a few cents for it.

I think these people have some good points. I am sure we have all seen these waste plastic bags somewhere having an undeniably negative effect on our environment.

Anyway if you go to supermarkets now and you see these green bags. People often use them in the street to cart everyday stuff. It is giving good PR to some big companies. You can see this one in the picture thought so!

I don't see many newsagents doing anything. So they cannot even argue that they are doing much to help this problem so being good business citizens. Most don't even have a plan B if such a levy appeared soon what are they going to do? So what happens if suddenly we need something besides plastic bags?

Even offering an alternative would look good to many newsagents. For example now what if in your VIP system you give some free VIP points to any client over a certain dollar amount that brings their own bag or offer them extra points for buying a non-disposable bag.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-luddism

You push and push and get somewhere. Then suddenly slowly we get dragged backwards.

A well known supplier in the newsagency field almost every time they produce a file for import into a newsagency software changes the format. They don't bother checking. Then they broadcast it immediately to thousands of clients. So often, we get phone call swamped when our users get a file from them. I don't see them care as it happens every time.

That is why we tell our users to use these files which we have checked

For this and other supplier files please visit here

So this is a list of good suppliers. That is not to say these are 100% correct but at least they will import without errors and look on our inspection to have correct information. The advantages of doing this are that they are easily downloaded into your system. When you processing stock you don't have to input the product you have received as all the details are there. This makes it easy for our clients to put their suppliers stock items into their systems rather then manually type it in.

However another example of a bad supplier is one in virtual products for newsagents who used to provided our clients with a standard stock format. Now suddenly they produce a different file and announce "with the best of intentions, we cannot provide other formats at this time. We are hopeful however that systems developments going forward will enable production of specialised formats." After years, who are they kidding! Because they don't care they have gone backwards so their agents now will type in manually the stock.

Luddites! Because we do nothing so they get away with it!!!!!!!!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-luddism