Perhaps you are retiring or entering a different venture, so you have sold your business. Now, what happens to your records? One of my clients did not keep them, and now 12 years later, he needed them.

Here are some more examples I have come across over the years.

1) Many such as courts have no holding period. If you do not have the records, their view is often fair enough that you do not have them. But the other side often then will ask the court to assume that it is reasonable to think that these records would have supported their view. Now prove that they would not. 

Here my client had little proof to argue against this view. So they said it was a long time ago. They then admitted that they did not remember that much about it when questioned. Okay, here it is their word against the other side.

2) I have seen the situation occur with the ATO, where you only have to keep the records for seven (7) years. Yet, they can still sue you after this period. No figures. Well, they are happy to do estimates.

3) I have also seen a person who brought the business take the old owner to a small claims tribunal because the carpet was allegedly older than claimed. The old owner claimed they were looking at records of an old carpet they had replaced. But they had no evidence to back this up.

4)I have seen old owners taken to court because they claimed the historical business records supplied were wrong. That one was costly. I do not know how it went.

It is better to be safe than sorry when it comes to record-keeping. You never know when old business records can be helpful. It is advisable to keep all business records as long as possible. 

So keep all your business data, especially your POS backup. 

Worried about space, buy a heavy-duty corrugated cardboard box. Store it in a safe place, in a location protected from the weather, fire, flood, theft and other loss. In my garage at home, I have a stack of boxes. 

Your POS Software has, in many places, the ability to produce graphs. See above.

These graphs are a faster method for examining information. This is because most of us are used to getting most of our information from vision.

So I suggest that you give these graphs a shot.

If we use Ad-hoc reports in our system, there is a much more extensive graphical system built.

Regardless of how experienced you are at overseeing stock, there will be times when goods do not move. Some of your goods are sitting on your racks using up cash that should have been used stock that moves.

This is where in retail the  'Gross Margin Return On Investment - GMROI' is used in retail. It tells you exactly how much gross profit you make on each item in your shop over time. It tells you how successful your goods are in turning into cash.

The formula for calculating GMROI:

GMROI = Annual Sales $ / (Average Inventory at cost) x (Gross Margin %)

Say, for example, an item A sales per annum are $54.00 with a margin of 30%. You have generally about 40 that cost $0.2, so your holding cost is $8.

So the GMROI = ($54 = yearly sales)/($8 holding cost) x (30% Gross margin) = 2.0

So you are getting $2.00 for every $1.00 you invested in this item.

Nice figure, but looking at all the goods in the shop, it is a big job to calculate this for every site.

No, it is not, as your POS System can do it automatically.

What we do is give you the figures. This allows you to see where every dollar invested in your stock inventory be at its greatest productive?

This allows you to look at another item, B which has sales per annum are $78 with a margin of 20%. You generally have about 30 that cost $0.21, so your holding cost is $6.30.

So the GMROI of item B = ($78 = yearly sales)/($6.30 holding cost) x (20% Gross margin) = 2.5

So this retailer is getting $2.50 in back for every $1.00 invested in this item.

The retailer would have done better over the past year in pushing item B even though the gross margin was less.

If you go to Register reports, you will see an item "Sales by return on Investment (GMROI)" marked in red here.

Now select an appropriate date range and department to consider. A year is suggested to give the report enough time to provide meaningful figures.

Now I used here five years, to show, in practice use 12 months.

This report can be beneficial.

The green shows the GMROI%.

The red items are the traps, the GMROI is high, but there are few sales.

In Orange, you will see the stock on hand; this is a quick way of verifying that you have enough stock.

The amount it costs you now, the holding costs are displayed in blue.

Altogether, this is an informative report. You will find the summary at the end is loaded with some instrumental figures to examine. Also checkout Diet Coke - High GMROI and low stock holding.

The GMROI recipe is not a magic fix. What it is, is a straightforward computation that assists you with deciding on your stock.

Why are you waiting? Give it a try now?

Back-to-school is an important shopping occasion. In 2022, the importance of the season is increased by the unique environment we find ourselves in. 

Let us start.

Your POS System has an advanced Back to School system. 

Tip 1: Check it out

It would also be a good idea to check that you have stock for the items that parents are likely to buy for their scholars. 

Tip 2: Have the right products.

Because of the supply chain shortages, most shoppers will be planning early. So now is an excellent time to start getting ready.

Tip 3: Have stock, do not count on being able to get stock at the last minute.

What I am sure of is that this year, retailers that get a good back-to-school market will have a great jump start for the year. 

Don't let this opportunity slide!

Picking the right bookkeeping programming is important for a business. So we closely monitor what accounting programming, in our yearly review see what programs the vast majority of our customers are using. In our marketspace, these results are most likely the best ones in Australia. What we found interesting is that in some ways the marketplace has gone backwards more are not using anything, this is not good.

In my view, all have their devotees, you will talk to someone, and he loves one. Then he will tell you that it is so much better than the other they have used. Then you meet someone else that uses a different accounting program and hear a similar story.

Reckon big plus is that it is the cheapest but it can be chunky and difficult to use. Support is good. After a while,  you learn what you need to know. 

Xero is more user friendly so making it easy to use. Yet it can be slow, and in use, you will get a lot of downtime/non-responsive clicks, which can become frustrating. I have been told their support has issues. MYOB can undoubtedly do the job. I find it too regimented, but many people like that, including accountants.

They are all exemplary systems. Use whichever one is easier for you. They all have their quirks, and they all will take getting used to whichever system you choose.  They all can do the job. 

I will warn you to make sure that what you use is in your name. If it is in your accountants name your bookkeeping program, well there can be problems if you move accountants as some of our clients have found.

A bad way to analyse your promotions is by guesswork and instincts in business.

What you need is proper KPIs with metrics to compare the sales for each promotion. For example, do a $20 item with $2 off do better than 10% off?

The only way to find out is what we call A/B analysis. You do option(a) for a week, then option (b) for the next week.

Then here is a quick way of finding this out.

Go to the stock system.

Select Sales Promotion here

Select reports

Fill in the dates, and now you can investigate.

Thanks for all your support and your valuable interaction in 2021. We hope for a lot many fruitful interactions in 2022.

See you then.

Many years ago, the Victorian Chamber of Commerce decided to analyze how good Australia Post was on deliveries. So they asked many of their members to send them a return letter on a particular day. They concluded that the letter probably would get through on time, but you cannot count on it happening on time. If there was a problem then, it is much worse now.  

Due to COVID, we are all facing problems now with deliveries. I think it's made Australia flawed delivery system worse. Years ago, I was told that it was cheaper if you had many items to send to many places in Australia to package it and send it to China. Then have them separate it and send it back to Australia to the many places. That was then and now, I think we have had worse service and higher prices

Today Australia Post uses a measure that states if a parcel is three days late or less, it was delivered on time. With that measure, they are at 90%. Tell me, if you were three days late would you consider yourself on time?

So I was pretty impressed when in Townsville, I was given this analysis of 352 taken over seven months.

If you look at it, Australia Post in Townsville is doing well, that shocked me. Tip: If you send a parcel to Townsville, Australia Post looks like a good choice based on this. It is often the easiest too although rarely the cheapest.

Unfortunately, this sort of analysis is only suitable for what we send out. For what we get often, we have no control over who sends it.

Our experience now in Melbourne is pretty mixed, we have not broken it down by couriers, but we often face late deliveries now. One of our engineers was so upset recently. So he jumped into his car and delivered it personally. When I complain, I have noticed that even Australia Post now subcontracts much of the deliveries. Many problems are caused by most freight in and out of Australia going through consolidators. These consolidators wait for a container to be full before they ship it. This causes significant delays.

This is something we are living with now.

More than else, what a retail business needs is fast action at the point of sale. There is too much danger of people leaving if your counter is slow.

This Christmas is evident that people do not want to wait. Each second is a demise for retailers. The more it takes to be served, the more your client keeps thinking about whether they genuinely need your things. Plus there is the worry of COVID.

You want a fast checkout.

Here is ours, the quickest one I know.

See the image above and see where it is marked in green. Transactions were being done at a rate of four a minute. 

Using our system, your payment times will accelerate. Therefore, their queues will be considerably reduced.

The time has come to begin planning for 2022. 

The first place to look at is the holidays. The issue here is that many of these holidays dates are based on the lunar calendar, not the solar one that we use. This caused them to move in our calendar. A few years ago, this happened to one of my clients when they ordered cards for Chinese New Year. They thought it was the same as the previous year, so they got their cards too late.

So I suggest you click here. Here there is an impressive list of holidays in Australia. If you need clarification on a holiday, click on it to get a description.

If you have many customers from other countries, you can select that country to see if they have any special holidays!

I am sure you will get some good ideas here.

This is how to measure how you went over the Christmas period. Let get some facts.

In your point of sale software

Go to reports and click on sales.

Now select the last seven days. For the first run, ignore all the extra options you can examine here. Once you see what it does, you can expand for more detail. So use a previous date for 2020. Most people are telling me anyway that they think this is better for them than 2021.

Now a report with the simplified options here.

Now there are lots of details for you to examine. If you want to look at one department, click on the left.

Let me know how you went.

Today's retail season is boxing day. This is when retailers usually try to shed the remaining stock of 2021 before the product is currently due in 2022. This is probably the most important day on the Australian shopping schedule. What is needed is something bright and colourful to attract their attention. So what is recommended is that you fill their entrances with colourful merchandise to brighten the mood and bring them into the shop.

Anyway, I hope you are ready. If you want some more ideas at the last minute, then look at my previous post titled "Last-minute shoppers" here. It should give you some ideas.

In 1987, you got on a super special for $2250 a DOS computer, with a 20 meg hard drive, a cheap printer and a black and white monitor. From memory, $20,000 was a decent salary, so it was worth about two months after-tax.  

We expect to be very busy today, so we have extra staff today. We know we have to provide the last minute services that our customers need to deal with before Christmas. This is imperative as this shopping season needs to be good for many of our clients.

The outlook for this Christmas season looks very good. People have money, jobs, etc., so it has the potential to break previous records. We hope it does.

Have a good one!

Christmas is a difficult time for all our clients. There are many risks of something going wrong for them. This is when you need us the most. So we do not close over the period, as a Christmas shutdown has the potential to do more damage than good.

As this festive period isn't limited to the week surrounding Christmas, so we stay open always. We work 24 hours, seven days a week. Our company never sleeps.

Besides, we are as busy now as usual. Currently, support calls are coming in at a regular rate. Only the urgency is now considerably more. Overall there is a lot more work for us. The administrative and engineering staff are working as usual.

I hope our clients are happy knowing they are getting their money's worth with their support contract as they can be confident that we are here if they need us.

Computers do go down during Christmas so test all your computers for the coming holidays. It is much easier to get your computers fixed now than over Christmas. Every computer will fail. It is a matter of time, and the time they like by Murphy's law is the worst possible time: Christmas!

Give all your computers a test run now.

Also, make sure your backups are working. Worst case, your computer is replaceable, but your information is not without a backup. With a good backup, we often need to replace the computer, and you can be back up and running in a day.

We need to read fast barcodes. Yet we have a prevalent problem with lousy barcodes. We did a study on one site recently and found that about 3.5% of all barcodes were defective. Of that with some manipulation and angling of the reader, only half could be read. The rest were totally useless. It was maddening that most of the unreadable ones were the result of suppliers making poorly made barcodes. This results in many no-reads. I told a retailer to consider that maybe they should argue that an item is defective as the barcode was that bad and return it.

Anyway, retailers often have to create their barcodes to solve this problem. If so, here are some tips to help you.

1) Use a suitable roll or sheets for labels. I have seen where the glue is so runny that they were useless.

2) Choose a light colour for the barcode roll. I like white. This increases the contrast between the barcode and the label, making it easier to read.

3) Do not put labels on the product next to anything that may reflect light.

4) Clean the printer and code reader and the barcode label. Dirt and grease make it harder to read.

5) Put the barcode labels on the product as flat as possible you do not want the barcode to fold or, worse, crumble or break.

6) Keep your barcode away from other barcodes in the product. This may cause the scanner to misread.

7) Do not let the sun hit the barcode for a long time.

8) Try to keep the barcode label dry.

9) Put the barcode in a position on your item that has blank space around it.

10) Ensure that nothing obscures the bar code

If you have followed the above steps and still have problems, send a picture of the barcode to our support team to be assessed for possible problems.

Because of competitiveness, sometimes retailers have to do a particular price change. For example, one of our clients in a bike shop was confronted by a customer showing them that another bike shop had a lower price than them on the mobile. Okay, what can anyone do? A cheaper sale is better than a zero.

Fortunately, our POS System has a quick way of changing such details. When ringing up the sale if you are running up in the sale cash register and need to adjust a price or a discount, no worries.

Click or touch on a touch screen the item. If the price, for this reason, I would suggest instead of changing price, you adjust the discount. It will enable your reports to have more meaningful values. Then an override window will appear. Now you can edit that item.

Now click OK, and change it.

Another useful function in your point of sale software!