We now have extensions of COVID-19 lockdown in NSW with new restrictions.

As a Victorian who has gone through a few lockdowns, I can assure you that these snap suspensions are wearing everyone down. It starts its stops, etc. It has a name now *lockdown fatigue*. We all feel it.

Now as a person in retail, I can assure you that click and collect are excellent. You should have it. An online shopping website is also great. Again you should have it. As our software is has a unified commerce retail platform, there is no reason why you do not have both now. No one else in our market space can make such a claim.

The problem here is that most retail needs people contact.

So the big question is, when will these COVID lockdowns end.

A reasonable guesstimate based on this terrific tracking site for Australia is COVID LIVE here

So far, we have done 8,255,473 vaccinations.

Our current rate of vaccinations is about 800,000 a week.

On world figures, governments are looking to get about 2/3 of the population vaccinated. This seems to be their herd immunity figure. We have about 25.36 million people.

So we need to do 25.36 million people x (2 vaccinations) x 2/3 = 34 million vaccinations.

That is about (34 - 8,255,473) = 25.5 million left to do

So we need in weeks (25.5 million / 800,000) = 31 weeks or Jan 2022

This is not good enough for retail as most retailers want at least Nov 2021 so we can have tourists! 

To do that we need 1.5 million vaccinations a week, can we do it that high? I doubt it so I would not count on a great Christmas tourist season this year.

Some points here to consider:

- Covid variants are a real wild card. 

- A significant limiting factor now in vaccinations is the Pfizer vaccine. Its availability should increase, so maybe the vaccination rate will go up. I hope so because no one wants to go through another six months of this.

- The first shot gives about 70% immunity so that we may open up the country earlier. 

- We do not know yet how long the COVID-19 vaccine protection lasts. Clinical trials are currently underway. If so, this calculation may be way off as we all may need a booster shot too.

- The kids need to be done, but these can wait till we get the adult population done.

What is clear is that the vaccinations will continue for a long time.

Let me know your thoughts.

After you do a stocktake, it's time to do something with it. You will need the following numbers for your financial figures.

1) The value of your stock (Perpetual stock value) that your computer thinks that it had before you did the stocktake. Print out a report of your stock valuation before starting the stocktake. 

If you do not trust the figure in your point of sale software, then you can, or your accountant can give you an estimate. This is NOT recommended.

2) The value of the stock (Physically Counted Inventory Value) you have at the end of this financial year that you. 

Now do the following calculation.

Shrinkage% = (1- (Physically Counted Inventory Value))/(Perpetual stock value)) x 100% 

A familiar figure here is about 1.4%, but it does vary a lot. I have seen figures between 0.1% and 6%. What COVID will do to your figures is anyone guess.

3) Value of the damaged goods you counted. (Damaged stock value)

It would be best if you looked at is your damaged goods too. These have a different story, and it can be an exciting story to tell.

Damaged% = (Damaged stock value)/(Sales of stock product) x 100%

Once you get these figures, please let me know as I am interested in this stuff.

The potential bomb is the inflation rate. Those of us that lived through the massive inflation of the 1970s can relate to how destructive inflation can be. Current at 1.1%, it looks alright now, but I am sure we will hear much about it soon. The reasonably strong Australian dollar will help here. The Chinese GDP growth figure is impossible, no way it is going to be anything like that. It is pleasing that we are doing much better than our peers like Canada, France, Italy, UK, etc.

The unemployment rate is higher for retail than we would like, but it is going down fast. Average weekly earnings are slightly up. Household savings are up. So we can say the Australian public has money to spend. This should help retail as the number of new customers will be going up.

These figures are better than we would have forecasted at the beginning of the year. 

Still, it would be nice to get those tourists back. The earliest we can start to see them back if everything goes well is the end of this year.

Hopefully, you have finalised enough of the stocktake, gone through the stock. Now it's time to unload the stuff that did not sell.

The best way of doing it is a stocktake sale. Take the items, put them around a stand, put a sign on top and see how you go.

Others are doing it, why not you?

I attended an online lecture for retailers on what stock items a shop should select for sale. Some of the points I thought were pretty good, so I took down some notes. Here are a few

- Seasonal items are trouble. If you handle them, what you are buying is products for a short time. For similar reasons, avoid fad items. The fad goes, and you are stuck with the goods.

It is better to take products that give you a whole year of sales. 

- Delivery is one of the most significant problems in retail in Australia. Our delivery system is expensive and not particularly good. 

Avoid large and heavy items as they have high transport costs that will eat into your margin. 

Fragile goods are trouble.

- You need to know your price points that people are comfortable in trading with you.

- You want products that people like, so check the online reviews first. Any problems will reflect badly on you too. You want products with good reviews.

As a rule here, electronic items are trouble. Returns and queries are much larger with these products than most other lines. 

- It is better to get a branded product with a large existing market than get an exclusive deal with an unknown product. In other words, it's best to be a small fish in a big pond in retail, then a large fish in a puddle. 

But check first if the brand gives you a fair chance to break into their product. If others are selling at prices like what they are offering you, what is the point of handling the item? 

- Before buying items over $50, people want to see them first. This is a significant problem for many online stores but a big plus for shops.

- At any one time in the shop you need new products to experiment with, as a rule, you always need 15 new products in the shop. 

Let me know if these tips are helpful. 

This is what your POS Software looks like under Windows 11. We are starting to turn our software into Windows 11.  

What is the big and entirely unexpected problem is that it appears that many computers will not run Windows 11. When we went to check some PC running Windows 11, we got messages like this.

This was true on computers that should be based on the Windows 11 System Requirements page be okay. Double-checking with the Compatibility for Windows 11 documentation we found some disagreements with the requirements page. Now it appears the new PC Health Check app is removed till they work it out.

When we went and checked further, it appears that some computers still being sold, like Microsoft's Surface Studio 2, will not be upgradeable to Windows 11. This is unbelievable as this computer is a $7,500 PC actively sold now by Microsoft agents. It is considered now classy and expensive computer yet it appears that it cannot run Windows 11, it is stupid to buy them. So just in case, we are actively reviewing all the computers that we are marketing now as we do not want our users running old software. 

So at present, my suggestion is not to rush into new computers as it's a mess.

Hopefully, this will all be sorted out soon but don't count on that.

We are still going through the effects of the recent storms on the east coast of Australia that happened recently. Quite a few systems not protected by Uninterruptible power supply(UPS) were severely affected. Interestingly no one with a UPS got any damage. If you do not have one, please consider getting a UPS.

However, one point that caused some shock to us is that some commercial insurance policies do not protect the damaged equipment here. What you need to check is what happens if you get such equipment failure due to risks beyond your control eg weather.   

Some points to consider: 

- Costs of equipment failure, including repairing and/or replacing items and cost relating to repairs, e.g. transport costs.

- Temporary equipment rental costs to ensure that your business can maintain normal operations 

- Other fees related to this loss

- Business interruption, if you cannot invoice, how can you pay bills. 

Please check this.

Is this question you should be discussing with some of your clients? 

The converse may be of importance too. What if you delay sending invoices until after 30th June. This may mean you will have an obligation to pay the tax owing on these invoices in the next financial year.

It would help if you talked to your accountant now.

Have a read of this paragraph.

I have 1700+ newsagency clients..... I am the biggest supplier to newsagents... I am the market leader....

If I said this, would you not think I would have an obligation and responsibility to provide evidence for my claim! I would say *YES*.  What do you think? 

It is called the burden of proof. Click for details. 

If it is not done, why do you think of my statements?

Furthermore, please consider that if I responded to a claim made by someone else like this and my response was censored. That publishing of it was refused when I queried it. Do you think these secret and hidden censorship actions are legal? Do you think it's right or proper? 

Surely if censored the correct way of handling it as Google does, see the example above. Another example would be that the Federal Court ruled that ISPs should block many sites. So they block them, but you notified that they are blocked when you try to go to them.

Tell me what you think?

Our Point Of Sale Software gives you all the stats in real-time now instantly!

What is happening?

What your staff are doing?

What your customers are buying?

How much profit are you making now?

Info like this is what modern stores need.

With our point of sale software, you can instantly find out these questions and much more. Here I will show you how to set up and use your location dashboard in your shop.

This form of analysis is Same-store sales. Every major retailer uses it that I know.

Here I will show you how our system can do it.

In a shop, each part of your shop has different value to the business. On the front, a product to justify itself needs outstanding sales. While in the back, often much lower sales results are acceptable. So what professional marketers do is set a budget for each area of the shop. Then they compare usually monthly sales in that area. Anything dramatically up and down raises flags.

So let us do it!

First, we set it up.

Look around your shop and divide the shop into locations.

Generally, a shop is divided into departments already. As this is logical I suggest using the departments.

Now check that your stock has location entered. If not, do not worry. It is easy to do.

Go to stock systems> stock editing> stock level editing.

Give all your stock a suitable location.

For each location, you adopt, calculate the area it takes up, which is simple to do by pacing it out. Now decide what weekly budget you would like for each location to have. This the end of day figures will tell you.

Now go to system maintenance> Dissection maintenance > Location

Put in the location and give it a weekly budget.

Now when you go to register reports>stock>weekly location targets.

You will get a detailed report full of comparisons for each location.

This is something you can use.

Put an end to guessing in your business and make fact-based decisions.

It was funny last night. Microsoft goes on about what a great cloud provider they are, and their presentation on Windows went down. So most of us to listen to their presentation went to youtube (Google) to listen to this presentation. 

Anyway, as I stated, Windows 11 is coming, late 2021. For many of our users, on Windows 10, the switch will be free. I would suggest that our users remain on Windows 10 till Microsoft bed down the product. If all goes well, I expect that most organisations will start to switch over about 3 to 6 months later. It all takes time. 

The good news is that it is faster. It will load and display faster. I particularly liked the new Direct Storage, allowing us to upload to the graphic card directly. This will give us shorter load times and instant graphics. Soon you will have less waiting for our software to load. 

The graphics are better so we should be able to make clearer screens. This will be a big plus for people who have poor eyesight. 

The other exciting point is that we will be able to load Android apps into our software directly. This will help a lot with our growing integration with smartphones and tablets. Imagine soon you will just be able to find a product in Google Play and then just using it in our software.

They also have added an improved voice to computer text. I am not sure whether we will drop dragon speak yet. This is important as our system is the only one in our marketplace that I know used by people in the MS community. I will get back to you about this.

Overall it's good news, and many of our clients and we cannot wait to check it out.

No matter how accurate you keep control of your stock, manual stock counts are a must for any business. These stock counts verify your system. Besides giving you a verified figure for the ATO, it allows you to investigate discrepancies. 

Here are my top tips so you can have a smooth and successful stocktake.

Have as much as possible worked out in advance. For example, do you have access to detailed records of your inventory first? Questions will come about while going through your stock, and you will need a quick answer. 

Also, what are you going to do about damaged goods? They need to be divided into write-off, discountable and return to supplier.

Decide how you will count? 

I suggest you count from bottom to top, left to right. 

Each staff member should have a place marker to mark what they have counted. This helps people missing stuff. While counting, why not check the pricing too? Often, you can clean too while items are being removed and counted.

Now have a backup at the start in case. Do backups a few times during the stocktake. If something goes wrong, you may not lose all your work.

If possible, count everything. Be aware that sometimes you will need to estimate. Once, I had to count a big pile of underwear, I got about 50, and my supervisor said there should have been 55. we wrote down 52.

In the end, do a backup again. We have had people enter everything in. Someone not knowing what to do pressed the wrong button and wrecked all the figures. This stocktake had to be redone.

Once the stock is counted, the next step will be to process and analyse the information gathered. This will be the subject of another post.

Windows 11 looks all but inevitable. It is expected that it will be announced at the Microsoft Windows Event tomorrow at 1 am tonight.

If you want to watch the LIVE stream, click here. I will be watching.

That a new version of Windows was coming was a surprise. With Windows 10, Microsoft was adamant that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows. Now it announced that Windows 10 would be supported till 2025. If you are wondering what your Microsoft product's status is, you can find your answer here.

What is the situation with Windows 11, I can only guess. If it moves forward like Windows 10, we will soon get an official trial version to test very soon? We and just about everyone else as a result of the leak now have a Windows 11 developer version. What we did notice that it ran faster than Windows 10. Although there is more to this, this alone is a critical point for us. Soon more advanced copies will come as time goes along. Sometime in October, it will be mass released unless something goes terribly wrong. Then we expect that some people will be able to update free to the latest copies of Windows for a limited time. But it will only be after a few months that manufacturers of computer and components will release their new firmware and drivers to run on the latest version of Windows. Some equipment we will be told they are dumping. This last bit has always been the major problem for us, as many people switching to the newest version of Windows suddenly discover that much of their equipment no longer works and/or their equipment does weird things, etc. Then a significant upgrade of Windows is released, which is mainly a bug fix. It takes time before things are worked out.

Almost certainly, more information will be released tonight.

Click here for a webinar on End of the Financial year reporting from your point of sale software. It discusses in detail

Sales reports
Stock Valuation (you will need to do this after your stocktake)
Customers Outstanding
Creditors Outstanding
Subagents Outstanding (use only if applicable)

Although not required from our software, I do recommend that you do make a special End of Year Backup to store in case you need to refer to it. The 30/June this year is Wednesday.

What tends to happen here is that a person rings us up and announces that somehow their figures do not add up. As a rule here, our system will say something that does not add up with the accountant.

Okay, this invariably is what has happened. Note the steps that cause the error. Like many problematic errors, every step along the way is correct. It's the overall result that is wrong. That is what makes it so hard to find so stumping the accountant.

Say you have a credit with your supplier of $200. The supplier sends you $1,000 worth of goods on invoice A100. You claim the $200 credit and pay the supplier the difference on invoice A100. What can happen is that you enter that these goods on invoice A100 cost $800. As such, the profit owing is now incorrectly calculated.

You need to differentiate the credit which is easy to do in our POS system. Otherwise, you will cause an error in calculating the cost of goods sold which mucks up your profits figures. This also will produce an error in the analysis of your gross profit and net income, which is why the accountant picks it up.

Today CBA has started to register people for its Buy now, pay later (BNPL) system. This will compete with other BNPL such as Zip, Afterpay and many others.

The advantage to the merchant and customers is that this BNPL has no fees for them and no extra commitments other than ordinary bank changes. More details here.

Once the four major banks enter this market and bed it down, I cannot see why we should continue to support the other BNPL.

Let me know your thoughts, please.

This is essential, to find out what has been going on with your stock.

Now to do this, you need some planning. A typical client of ours tends to need about four working days to count their stock. So budget accordingly, e.g. one person four days or four people one day. This is a personal preference. Some prefer to do it in one hit and get it over, while others prefer to do a rolling stocktake over a few days.

I suggest that if you are going to do it in one hit, do a trial stocktake a few days earlier. Pick a tiny department to acquaint yourself with the procedure first. Although you may have done many stocktakes in the past, it has probably been a year since you have last done one. Lots have happened in the meantime, so things do tend to have been forgotten. Go over the correct computer procedures. The more you know, the less time and money it will cost you while extra staff are counting. 

We will be doing some webinars on this all soon.

Try and move now as much stock as you can out of your shop. Return to a supplier, have an EOFY sale, etc. The less you have in the shop, the less to count.

Okay, you need to schedule. Set actual dates and times for the stocktake. Pick quiet periods to avoid distractions. I recommend that you break down the shop into manageable units. In my experience, it is best to make these units smaller than bigger. You can always do more units in one day if you have time. It's a pain to half a unit left for the next day.

Now make sure that your point-of-sale system is up to date. All the relevant stock receiving and sales information is entered. The last thing you want to do during a stocktake is hunt around in your files for correct stock information.

Go over the shop and make some order. Check your stock is tidy and in logical order. This will make it much easier to count.

To be continued...

Good preparation is the key. Stocktaking is a length and often expensive operation. So now the stocktake season is upon us again. It is time to prepare.

We have now updated help documents available in posBrowser's help files. To get them press F1 in the register.

There are various Stocktaking methods

Pick the one that is best for you.

Stocktake = Standard stocktake doc using Posbrowser on its own to run the stocktake.

Stocktake with a PTD = Stocktaking with the help of a PDT

Stocktake with the stock management system = Stocktaking using the mobile PDA browser program.

3rd Party Stocktake guide = This is a guide on uploading stocktake data to and from another program. This is if you use a specific stocktake software

We recommend doing the stocktake while the shop is trading as there is no reason to shut the shop from trading.

I suggest that you have a quick read of the steps required, and then watch this Stocktake training video

If you have any questions let me know.

I am not an accountant. So please review with an accountant but here are some immediate ideas for you to discuss before the End of the Year.

1) If possible, hold off depositing monies till July. This often pushes the tax owing on these to next year. 

2) Review the coming expenses some if paid now will give you a deduction now. Commonly done here is to pay a big supplier now. 

3) Review your BAD Debts - no point in paying taxes on these debts if you do not have them anymore. Doing this you can claim back on GST credits too. To do this they need to be outstanding for over 12 months or have evidence that they are bad debt, e.g. the debtor is bankrupt. As a written record must be kept, I suggest that you make a dissection called bad debt and issue a credit note to these debtors for the debt. This will adjust your GST and sales ledges in our system. You can also as such adjust it back if by some miracle you do get paid.

4) If you have been working from home due to COVID-19, you may have more expenses you can claim a tax deduction. Better check here as there have been cases here of people overclaiming, e.g. claiming 100% of internet charges for business and none for personal use.

So we have here an item with three sizes, cups of soft drink.

The small cup cost is $4

A large cup cost $8.50

A medium cup costs $8

The positioning is not an accident here as the purpose here is to sell the large cup so we want it in the public mind. 

Now studies show many people will go for the large cup since it is *only 50 cents* more than the medium cup. The only purpose of the medium cup is to boost sales of the large cups. To make this strategy work, you need to be able to offer people three alternatives to similar products. The two cheaper options must be priced lower than the target. The marketing idea is that the target is better value or quality for only a little extra.

For a more detailed example and studies done on this idea, see the Decoy effect in the Wikipedia here.

This strategy is widely used. You can use it for just about anything eg pens, cards, dog food, cosmetics, etc.

Give this idea a go and as always, let me know how it goes.