Do you have a Solid Information Distribution system that providing your staff with the tools they need to do their job?

This means ensuring they have all the resources they need to do their job. For example, someone is laying out the stock for a department. If they have a current sales report of what is moving now, they can do better. Just moving stock that sells well into a prominent position is a proven method of increasing. If so, would it not be helpful for that person to have that information? If they do not have it, the odds are they will go on feel, not data. That will cost you!

How can your staff give high-grade customers help if they do not have quick access to relevant information? Customers want results fast.

To efficiently perform in your shop, your team need access to such knowledge. Informed employees with instant access to necessary information can work better.

With our system, you can do all that securely.

Make sure your POS System is used to its fullest.

We call dead stock, products that sit unsold for a long time that will never sell in real-time without deep discounting.

These are terrible for business, especially when you consider the additional costs to keep them.

In most cases, you will have to make a clearance sale sooner or later. There are many innovative ways to get rid of the dead stock. My favourite is making a bundle with a dead stock item together with another stock that sells well and selling them as a unit. Generally, you get more than a clearance sale, but it's still a loss most of the time. The goal here is to get as much cash as possible and make room for future, more lucrative chances.

The ideal solution is to have order controls to minimise the problem in the first place.

How do we mark Dead Stock?

What we want to do is once you've identified the dead stock, mark it. This will stop others from ordering it, and suppliers who know it's dead stock don't try to provide it to you underhandedly!

Well, here is a simple and effective method.

When you receive stock items in the shop that you'd rather not see again, press edit in your POS Software, see image.

Then mark the stock item where the red arrow is.

Our system will no longer automatically order the product from that time. If it comes, when processed, the stock item will be automatically recorded in the instant return file. As a result, you will be forewarned and have the opportunity to act before accepting the dead stock.

Give it a shot, it works!

Each retail business needs a solid inventory control system. This often requires the use of retail labels. The is, as products you sell may be impossible to scan without explicit identifiers. So, you need bar codes tags.

There are many other advantages besides scaning if there is no available bar code:

-Easily count

-Instantly consult many details of the product

-See the quantity values

-Customize their prices

-Track the products on a shelf.

Our retailer labels are perfect for doing this in your store. Usually, they are adhered to the products by the adhesive on the back of the label.

If the RFID encoded required can be added to help prevent theft.

Above is a sample of our most popular label and the details that are put on it.

Our software allows many methods of producing such labels but the best and most professionals labels and in the long-term cheapest method are using direct thermal printers rather than ink cartridges or laser printers.

If you look at the big retailers now, you can see that they are taking advantage of their vast amounts of data to build muscle to run their business. Here is an interesting piece of statistic. 35% of Amazon purchases and 75% of Netflix viewing now are based on computer-generated recommendations.

Ask yourself if they use it, why are you not using it? You have AI, too, in your POS Software. In our market space, it's the best and it is *FREE*.

So why are you not using your data to make decisions?

To be successful today, retailers must stay in tune with their stores' unique preferences and behaviour. Yet, there are too many stock lines and marketing seasons to do it properly manually. The best way to do it is with your AI. These tools are generally too expensive for small to medium retailers. This is unless they have our point-of-sale system as we have incorporated it into our software and issue it free. Using it, you will find it intuitive and straightforward to do. It does not require a lot of training. It is less work than the manual order.

Let's say you have a shelf for toy soldiers. You can not ask for unlimited amounts of toy soldiers. You have to decide how many to carry. So, our users can get a focus order. This is an advanced type of stock control method. It gives you an estimate of what you should order based on the time of year, the product current selling history and suppliers terms.

The AI follows the stock on hand and its business history. It then estimates the stock level required for these goods in the coming period. If it deems that the stock on hand is too low, it will recommend an order to a supplier. This is done with the speed and precision that no one manually can match.

 It is easy to set up and use for details. Please, click here

Data-driven ideas can create value throughout your business. 

More than a year has passed since the coronavirus outbreak shut down theatres. This has placed many blockbuster release dates in jeopardy.

Today we are already beginning to see these lockdowns worldwide going. Soon some blockbuster films, such as The Matrix 4, Dune, and The Many Saints of Newark are expected to be released... maybe we will go to the movies soon.

Check here for the dates

In the hype already we can see Dune toys are selling exceptionally well. This is expected to be released this month. 

Soon many of you will be getting goods early that can't be sold before the official release date. 

For this, we have a *secure* category to mark these items.

How to mark items as secure.

Go to stock maintenance in your point of sale software -> Edit marked them as secure in the red box.

Just another example of how our software has useful items that you can use.

Or why is Stock Control Important to your Business Operations ...

Please take a closer look at the benefits of integrating inventory management with your POS system.

1) An Integrated POS system with an inventory management function will save you a lot of time.

2) Your POS system tracks inventory levels.

3) You don’t need to spend days keeping manually controlling your stock.

4) You can also choose our integrated inventory management system. You can set your system to automatically place orders as you need them.

5) You will have fewer shortages as the computer will not forget to order.

6) Know where stock is. If you have a storeroom in the back, a few stock locations in the shop where an item is placed, where is the item? In your POS System, you can see where the stock is in the many locations in your shop. Suppose a customer comes to buy something. You look at the place where it should be. It is not there. So you now can glance at your POS system. It may tell you that you have one in another location in the shop. You have saved a lost sale.

7) Get the figure of shrinkage.

8) A POS system with inventory management functions will tell you what is selling when it was selling and to whom. You can then order more hot-selling items and divert your business from less popular items.

9) Save money on not needing a professional stocktaker.

Christmas measured interest using Data Source: Google Trends.

At the best of times, getting organised for the Christmas season is a big task. Now an added problem is that with this crisis with deliveries, it is now so undependable. Click here for a compelling article.

Looking at Google Trend, the public mood is as good as Christmas last year. If so, the interest is there, alright. 

The other matter to consider is that we are vaccinating under 2 million people a week now. This is brilliant. Based on this, by Christmas, Australia will make the 70%+ immunised. This will put us up there with leading countries like Malta, UAE and Israel. 

If you want an idea of what to look for, use your Point of Sales Software to see what worked well and what did not last year.

This is a step by step method for doing this.

Go to register reports and select the top stock report as marked with the red arrow here.

You get this screen

Now it is best to work by the department as it makes it easier to study related products.

Now you need to review this list to see what did sell. You may find many items that did not sell; it would be best to explore these too.

Retailers that prepare well will be in a good place for Christmas.

After the stocktake, many of our clients discovered that they are carrying many old items. These items are clearly not moving fast so actions need to be taken immediately. If not, then you may be forced to make large discounts in clearance sales soon to free up cash and space as above.

There are two other points here.

1) There may be much more missed.

2) You may have overbought.

Say, for example, you had last year ten items. You sold eight. Then you purchased five more, so you have seven now. You have overbought as you did not need to buy the five.

In your Point of Sale system, we have a quick analysis in seconds to identify your old inventory on the shelves. Click here for a training video on how to identify such stock.

Please check immediately for any stock you are carrying that are over 12 months old.

Days of Supply KPI is how long will it take for a product to run out if sales continue as expected. It is evaluated in the periods based on your order cycle. This is as say you typically sell 20 items a month, you have 15 Days of Supply if you have ten items. But if your supplier needs 30 days from you sending them an order, the odds are here, you will run out.  If your supplier needs seven days, well, you should be okay. This is why knowing your supplier's delivery time is here critical. 

Calculating the *standard sell rate* for every item in the shop is impractical. But, not to worry as this is what your computer can help you do. 

Here is an example.

If you go to stock maintenance, call up an item, now press ordering as above. The product here has two (2) on hand. The focus (which is the standard sell rate per week) is on (4) sales. Thus, we can say that you can expect to run out in a few days. If my ordering cycle is weekly, you need to place an order as soon as possible. Otherwise, you will lose sales.

Our system gives you the information you need! 

Check it out. You will find it very useful.

 Refrigerated items such as packaged foods products require you to do special handling.

- It also requires sometimes for you to prominently mark on your label something like “Perishable - Keep Under Refrigeration.” 

- It often requires close monitoring of these items once they pass a certain date. Then they must be transferred to a secondary location so they can be sold at a discount price. Then this has to be monitored as after a certain time they often require to be tossed. 

So what can you do about it?

What we recommend is that you identified and mark these refrigerated items. 

This is so you just by looking at the item on the screen know that these items may require special handling.

You’d do it like this:

Go to stock maintenance in your point of sale software -> Edit marked them as in the red box.

Just another example of how our software has useful items that you can use.

- Still manually tracking inventory and sales?

- Are you trying to decide what your sellers are? 

- Need to know how many you need of an item?

Try this. It will take you one second.

Go to stock maintenance. 

Call up an item and then press Summary.

Here you get a detailed historical figure in real-time for any item for the last 24 months on that stock item. View the historical details of the stock item. See its sales trends over the past 24 months. It is excellent for reordering. 

Having our POS Software will make it much easier for you to provide your clients with what they want when they want it.

The unfortunate fact is that we all have old stock sitting in the shop. As a rule, they say that you should look into cull the bottom 20% of your stock. 

You can look at the sales by GMROI, profit and numbers as I showed earlier. But you can also look at those products that are just sitting on the shelf. This is very easy to do and will take you only a second to do.

Go to register reports> Stock> Old Stock on hand.

Now pick a department and get a list of when this stock arrived and the quantity you have on hand.  I am sure you will find some are very old; this will be costing you by just sitting there.

Now please decide what to do with this stock.

Note: You can also run this report by a supplier, which sometimes is handy as some suppliers will allow you to return old stock.

As I stated, GRMOI is one of the foundations of modern inventory management today. This is why we have supplied our clients with this powerful tool. 

Hopefully, now, you have been trying out Gross Margin Return on Inventory (GMROI) in your shop. If not, look at my post a few days ago and only then come back to this post.

What GMROI incorporates in one figure, stock turns and profit. It allows you to focus on margins and turnovers.

The significant advantage of GMROI 

1) It is consistent and widely used. Other systems, such as Direct Product Analysis (DDP), need you to make assumptions. They take much longer to work out. Different people using it come out with other figures. So their analysis will give various figures depending on who runs the report.  I will show you DDP in our software in another post soon because it is also excellent. 

With GMROI, everyone is looking at the same figure.

2) It is quick and easy to use. All you have to do is run a report. The computer can do the calculation.

GMROI is simple.

3) It allows you to compare widely different products quickly.  

Using it, you can compare every item in the shop in seconds.

4) Overstocking is highlighted.

This is one of its best functions so it will cut your stock levels.

Let us discuss the problems.

1) A minor product can have a terrific GMROI, but its effect on the shop can be zero. For example, if a product that turns over a lot has a decent margin, it is pretty useless if it made you a profit of $2/week. It would not even pay the handling and rent that it takes up.

So you are not going to get out of using our profit reports, which need to be considered.

2) If you understock, you can often drive the stock turns up, so giving you higher GMROI. Yet that will cost you sales.

High GMROI is not always good.

3) It does not consider other costs, e.g. handling and shipping costs or suppliers terms.  

4) It does not take into account that often you need a range of products. For example, people may come to your shop because they know you have an extensive range. If all you have is one title or brand, they may decide to go elsewhere else. After all, they can buy in a supermarket which also has a common brand. 

Range often sells.

5) It may show you problems but not what you can do to fix the problem. There may be only so many you can sell. There may be good reasons why your low margin items are low: price-sensitive, set by suppliers, etc.

Often its conclusions are not actionable. 

As a rule, I recommend looking at the extremes of the GMROI, both the high and low results, first.  Once used to GMROI, you will find it an indispensable tool.

Enjoy and let me know how it goes.

Current figures, well figures based on the last survey done in August 2019, in Australia and New Zealand Retail Crime Survey reported total crime-related retail losses to 0.92% of revenue.

If you want to read the report yourself, you need to register here.

Looking at the figure from many of my clients, I think it's higher. But as a first-level approximation, it's a start.  Put in your turnover and get a figure.

It is impossible to check everything all the time. So  I decided to put together a point list to determine which items to checked more often. 

Do it by department and give them a score based on 1=Low   2=Average   3=High. Then add them up for each department and look at the high scores.

Then divide it up the departments that need to check by priority.

1) Number of items you have. People tend to try to steal things that you have many of as they think you will not notice a missing one. Give priority to those departments you are well stocked.

2) Easy to count. If it is quick and easy to count, why not do so?

3) How often does it get touched. Every time someone touches it, it is open to temptation. This is why I guess items that are regularly purchased tend to be stolen more.

4) Stock that has a history of going missing. If you have items that go missing a lot in a count, that is a sign that something is wrong. Move it.

5) Small, easy to grab items. 

6) How valuable is it? If it's valuable, it is worth looking into it. I found it unexpected that low-value products will go missing almost as much as high priced items. 

7) Anything to do with computers, cosmetics, and sex items tends to be high on the list. 

Give this a try. If you have any good ideas on how to change the list, let me know.

If we get a lot of interest, we will look to automate this process.

Here is how by using real-time inventory management. This is so you can get many such benefits, such as having the optimal amount of stock in your shop.

Say a rep is in your shop or on the phone, and you want to discuss your inventory! They have a good overview of their product overall but what they need to know is your shop situation? The odds are that they like you have much to do, so you need to find the answers immediately. 

It would also be best if you showed that you are in control and know what is happening. If a rep thinks they have a person who does not know what is going on, they can use and will use you to dump their unwanted stock. 

Go to your stock performance report. You will find it here.

Go to register reports>Suppliers>Suppliers sales trend, see the arrow in green

Now put in them and set a date a year ago.

A report like this pops out.

Let us go through it.

Marked with a green arrow is a negative stock item. This is a sign that your stock quantities are not wholly right.

Look at the arrow in red, you have 19 of this item now, but you never sell any of them. It is a worry. Ask what happened.

Also, as you go down, you will see an item with a blue arrow. You have none in the shop. See how you have no stock, but you have sold heaps of these items.

Where is this going?

Retailers can get ahead of the competition by using real-time. If they do, it will enhance their efficiency and increase sales.

This is a question that I get a bit. How do you do, I get real-time stock warning monitoring?

The problem: 

With so many different lines in a shop, that it is almost impossible to know which items are starting to run out or have run out. 

No doubt, you will know when a customer asks you, but it's often too late by then. 

Answer:

It is simple, you can check in seconds your stock levels, and here is how! 

Go to reports > stock > Sold Out or Selling Out Stock Lines

Note if some of the stock comes out with stock on hand figure in negative. It shows you that items that are not probably entered into your system, so it's a check here as well.

So I would recommend running this report regularly. It will alert you to both out of stock situations and errors in invoicing.

This is a step by step your google like stock search.

In the Cash Register, press on the search button - see red arrow

Out pops out the following search page.

Now first look at the bottom of this image where you will see ? [x] searchtext. This is your advanced search.

Now imagine that a customer is looking for a particular book but does not know the title exactly.  He knows that in the title, it has the word "roof" in it.

So you are looking for a book that has the word "roof" in the title.

? [x] searchtext

So its

? - because you do not know

B - as its a book

ROOF - that is what is known.

So I put in 

?B ROOF 

Now see what I got in the image above.

All titles with roof, plus several other details like the on hand and the retail price, etc. is displayed.

Now click on the one you want.

Enjoy!

Today with all these automatic imports and transfers, it is likely that errors are in your GST rates in your stock. Sometimes these are due to rounding errors which can cause some weird figures. Often they are attributable to mistakes made by you or your suppliers. Sometimes it is due to some GST ruling which may or may not apply to you. In any case, you need to examine these rates. 

Here is a quick way of doing it, that will take you seconds to do.

It requires either excel or you having OpenOffice, which is free and available here. 

If you have one of these installed, go to:- Cash register> Register reports > Stock > Details Listing (Excel) Although it is faster to check if you do all departments at once many prefer to do it by one department at a time. Now you will get this report. 

Now where the red arrow is, click on "Sort & Filter". Now click where the blue arrow is for the "Tax rate" and click all the rates that are not 0% or 10%. Now review these products. For many of you, it pays to do it again only for 0% tax items and check them too. Omit, I find this particularly useful is in tracking down GST errors.

Try and let me know if you have problems. 

Now, the stock levels in many shops are a mess. The reality is that the world is moving on and you need your stock right e.g. summer clothes in winter do not sell well. 

This needs to be addressed. 

I suggest that you look at a report that contains the sales of the stock items and the stock on hand figure. Here is one such report, the top N stock report which you can find in register reports here.
 

Put in the last two months and ten million-selling lines to include everything.

Now you will get a report, that has current sales figures and stock on hand.

Now you need to review these items ASAP

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.