Quite a few of clients are in the city and in malls and unfortunately have made a painful decision to make a temporary close.

If so here are some tips for your Point of Sale system and a bonus one for the shop.

Unlike many other POS systems, it is quite safe to turn off our equipment with our system

1. Make sure that you have a backup of your system which you are going to take home.

2. Note down all your passwords, in a few months. You may be surprised what people can forget.

3. Put labels on everything before you disassemble it so you can reassemble it later. Some pictures here are a good idea.

4. Any electronic items that you intend to store in the shop, cover with something to keep the dust off except for the cash draws. Leave them open and in plain view so some undesirable people can see that it is empty.

5. Turn off everything electrical you can.

6. With social media, you have a perfect tool to keep your clients informed, you need to tell them what you are doing.

Customers will likely have many questions and take to social media to get answers — keep up with your accounts to not only react to customer inquiries and concern but also proactively provide updates on your business' current situation.

Bonus tip

Finally, take photos of everything in the shop after you empty it from inside and outside. That includes the front windows, doors, toilets, etc. everything. If possible email some of these to someone else so you have these pictures dated and time-stamped. You may need this if something goes wrong.

This is a community service and marketing tip that you may want to consider that is now being tried overseas and in Australia.

To help people in the high-risk category for the Coronavirus e.g. elderly, some shops are announcing special hours for these people scheduled just after the shop is cleaned and disinfected. In the USA, it is being done in many stores now.

In Australia, Woolworths will be open for such people starting Tuesday, from 7 am to 8 am for such people, before the general opening at 8 am.

It would be easy to implement as most of us have a regular cleaning service time, so introduce the special opening straight after that; of course, if you have a Woolworths nearby, you probably want to piggyback on their times.  

If you try it out, let me know.

PS

I found this movie that seems now almost too real about what an outbreak of such a disease, Coronavirus, looks like, which I do recommend. It follows the path of the spread of disease and the attempts by medical researchers and public health officials to identify and contain the disease and its effect on the public. I enjoyed it a lot, and now it is worth a look.

I was asked today by one of my clients about coffee as we used to have a strong association with a large coffee machine distributor. Plus this is also a subject that I do claim much expertise. I am a certified barista. I worked as one during my university days and am an avid coffee addict. 
 

Coffee is a huge market in Australia and its not a hard market to enter. Years ago, when I was a kid, if people wanted to talk about business, they went to the pub. Now they go to a coffee shop.

Here are some basic economics on what if you are thinking of going into the coffee. Now firstly let me say, I do believe that if you are going to do something, you need to do it properly. 

The first point is to check whether you can have coffee, some shopping centres may not allow you to have it. I know people that have looked into coffee machines and had an argument with the landlord as it was mucking up another tenant they had nearby so the landlord said *NO*.

Now you need to determine what is your selling price. Coffee prices vary today from a $1 to about $4.50 a cup. You will need to investigate what you can get. If you can give people a place to sit and drink in your shop, do you have free wifi available to them and can you provide them with something to do e.g. read magazines as long as they buy coffee you can charge a little more or whether you can only do takeaway? Ask yourself what you would pay for a good cup of coffee in your proposed settings. It has to be good as Australians are serious about their coffee and have a high standard for their coffee.

Now, what sort of coffee machine are you thinking of getting?

Now the machine, the minimum, I think you could get away with commercially would be a $1,000 for a second-hand machine and a decent grinder (if you are going to do it commercially I do recommend a separate grinder). That one would probably get you about $3.5 a cup. If you are looking at new you are looking at about $7,000 to $12,000 and if you want something and those will get you about $3.50 to $4.50.

An automatic machine is about $2,000/year but you are not going to get as good a price for coffee from these machines probably about $1 to $2.50.  The big plus here is you can often negotiate a trial period to test it out.  

I do recommend that you get a machine from a place which fixes them as these machines frequently break down. You will need to check how quickly their support is and who pays for it. One of my clients told me that if they were not close to the service bay for the machine, he would have pulled out of coffee. The machines break down often.

The unit profits are excellent. 

A kg of coffee will vary in price, on the bottom end is the caterer's special which I would avoid. I brought some a while ago and threw it in the bin as it was that bad. In the supermarket, you can get decent coffee for about $20/kg. You may do better but let start with that for a first-level approximation. Now it depends on how much coffee you use for a cup, I use double most use single, but I would say for a 1kg bag of coffee beans, you will get around 60-140 cups of coffee, so that is 20 cents a cup. 

Milk is now about $1.20 per litre, as you need about 150 mm, so that is about 20 cents a cup.

Then there are cups and cleaning costs, about a third of barista time is taken up cleaning, you always have a rag nearby, just for the machine I would say every 200 coffees you are looking at about $2.50 in cleaning agents.so you are looking at a few cents a cup just in cleaning.

Then there is cleaning cups, tables and the rent on the area. There is some work involved.

Now in your costings, you need to add a bit because of lost coffee, people demanding fresh cups for some reason, e.g. not enough milk, the taste is not right, etc.

So a typical scenario here would be a fixed cost for the hardware, labour, rent and a variable cost of about 60 cents a cup.

Now you need to do your figures. People who charge a $1 are doing okay in coffee as the margin it there so if you can get $3.40/cup that is almost $2.80 profit. Plus there are heaps of addon sales if you want it eg cakes and biscuits. 

Finally, I do suggest that if you are going into it that you do a course. There are plenty around, the one I did years ago was 6 hours, is overkill as most barista today do much less, but it did give me a good rundown on coffee, so I suggest that you do it.

As far as your software is concerned, do not worry as our point of sale system is widely used in coffee shops so you have the perfect software to handle a cafe now.

I was speaking to an insurance assessor over one of our clients who is working in the region.

Its quite weird the damage they suffered, the shop is generally fine but they have some cows as an investment, the cows are fine but the farm is an almost totally burnt out. How did the cows survive unharmed when everything was burnt is a mystery?

Anyway, what it does appear is that many people in the area devastated by the fires were underinsured. My client is too. So they are likely to get enough money to pay to rebuild all the damage. Part of the reason is that building costs have gone up a lot recently.

This is a tip. You may, when the insurance is due, look into this.

Over the years, VIP points have proven the most successful way of running a VIP system. It is by far, the most cost/effective.

However, one problem with VIP points is that many potential customers cannot use them for some reason. So offering in your VIP system, points will not tempt them

If this is your problem, here is a solution that may help. 

Let your VIP customers use the points they collect for charity. Select a charity to support and make a clear message that your customer can elect to donate their points to this charity. It works better if its that charity official drive as the charity advertising will drive your business too. It will also give you something to talk about.

If so please select a non-controversial charity, the last thing you want to do is offend someone. So I would suggest a medical or child charity.  Who is going t complain about medical rehabilitation? I can guarantee you will have problems with climate change as one of my clients found last week.

If you are doing special orders in your shop, what I suggest you do is put the special order into the computer and bill from the computer. Here are some reasons why:

1) Your pricing is transparent and everyone can see how it is calculated,

2) You charge the right amount for it, one of our clients told us that since he put a computer in, they have picked up a lot as they were often not charging for some options.

3) It makes it easy for the person working the till to run through the current options to the customers.

4) The computer makes a professional worksheet for the person doing the job to follow.

It looks like now the worst of the bushfires are over. Although most of us were not directly affected by the actual fire, the smoke was everywhere. Although we have all experienced plenty of bushfires, I have never know the smoke to be so bad as this one. We did here what most people did, double-checked that the air conditioners were on at work. 

Today almost all the smoke is gone although people today in Queensland told me that there are still problems with the air there. They then asked me if there were any detectors that I knew that could monitor the air quality as I had spoken about it earlier. I thought if they are interested others might be too. 

The one we use is Airrater, and although I am not sure how good it is, it seems to give good results. You can get it on both android and from apple.

It is very easy to set up. You put in there, the places that are important to you, eg work, home, etc. and as long as your mobile phone has an internet connection, it will report the air quality in real-time and also you can set it to give you a warning if the air quality in one of those places goes bad. 

It is also good if you or someone you care about suffers from asthma, hay fever or some other lung condition that impacts their lives.

It is estimated that about 20% of all retail loses come from faulty and bad data entry. Here is one of the biggest item. Items that are no longer on sale but still marked as being on sale. If you visit the bargain hunters sites online, you will notice this is frequently what they are reporting. This sale is over but if you go here, you will find that these item although marked at $X will show on the till this 50 to 80% reduction.

The problem is that many of you will have so many items in the shop that although the sale is over, some may be missed, so they are still marked as being on sale either on the label or in your point of sale system. As such you could now accidentally have to sell items which are at the wrong price.

So here is a quick way of finding these items.

Go to the stock system.

Select Sales Promotion here

Now out pops up a screen, put in the appropriate dates say from the 01/01/2020 to 31/01/2020

You will get a report of the items that you can investigate.

As unbelievable as it seems, 2019 is almost over and its time to start detailed planning for 2020.

The problem here is that many of the next few holidays are traditional, which means many use the old lunar calendar, not the solar calendar we use now. This all means that they move every year and you are going to look pretty stupid if you advertise a holiday and its the wrong day.

This happened to one of my clients last year, who ordered in cards for Chinese New Year thinking it was the same as last years date, so he got his cards alright a week too late.

So I suggest you click here. This site that has a great list of holidays in Australia, what I particularly like about it, is if you require an explanation on the holiday, all you need to do is click on the holiday, and you get a description.

If you have clients from other countries, you can select these to see when their special holidays are too!

Here is a tip.

I was with a client, and we had to sign some documents and send them off quickly. So we signed them. Then I went to the post office to send them. Once at the post office, I realised that we had no copy of what we signed. If the letter got lost or was delayed, there would be no evidence that we had signed or sent it.  

Standing in the queue in the post office, I could see it was a lousy environment to take photos, so I decided to experiment with the free Google PhotoScan app. So I took pictures of the documents, the addressed letter, then the documents partly in the letter and then the sealed letter. Overall I was stunned how good the quality of the scan of these documents produced considering the bad lighting and lack of space. So I thought that if it was useful to me, that many of my clients here who need to scan documents and do not right then have access to a flatbed scanner would find it useful too. 

It actually what it does is get you to take five pictures of the document from different angles and using its smarts to fix the photos to make one good scan. What stunned me was how well it reduced the light spots that regular photos so often produce.

It is the best app, I have come across to scan documents via phone.

If you want to investigate, click here.

Note I tried it on photos with mixed success.

In your point of sale software, it is straightforward to change prices.

What several of our clients do, eg cafes and hairdressers have specials at certain times of the day! For example, after 2 pm, a cafe starts offering the remainder of the sandwiches and a coffee on a special deal. The sandwich that is not sold today, will probably be in the rubbish bin tonight. 

A hairdresser if she is quiet in the morning often offers a special on haircuts for seniors.

Make a Happy Hour 

If you want to experiment with such a limited-time promotion which last on a few hours, then it is worthwhile looking into the price changing facilities in our POS system as it can handle such changes effortlessly on the fly. 

Just a few taps and you are ready to go. 

Good luck and let me know how it goes.

_{Note the Image is by Gerd Altmann}

People if you are close often, as a retailer in a shop lose sight of the big picture and stare at the details. It is easy to do.

Here is a quick report that can instantly show you what people/companies are essential in your business. In register reports go to > stock sales. Now you will find the following report

Click on it. Now although there is a lot of options here, let us make it simple and just put in last financial year

Now, will pop out a report showing which suppliers contributed the most to your business. Often they stand out as it is not uncommon nowadays for two or three suppliers to give you 80% to 90% of your business. I suggest the figures you concentrate are the number of sales and profit. The number will show why people are coming into the store and the profit will tell you where the money is being made.

An interesting exercise here is after studying this report say to yourself "I am a ..... seller"

After a while in any retail point of sale system, you are going to get on your print smudges and lines appearing. Also, the number of paper jams will start to increase. If allowed to continue the printer will become unusable. Cleaning your printer is required.

Here are some steps.

What you will need

I recommend you make a solution of white vinegar and water rather than any of the prepared cleaning solutions.

Some cloth, e.g. a cleaning cloth or an old cotton rag

If you have a small vacuum cleaner which you can get in most electrical shops.

Some small brushes again which you can get in most electrical shops.

Some mechanical attribute

Please do not use compressed air; if you do not know what you are doing what you might end out doing is blowing the dust and moisture into places it should not go. It is just adding problems.

Steps to do:-

Turn off the printer, take all wires off it before attempting to clean

Wait a while some five (5) minutes before starting to clean. 

Dim the lights, as in some printers the internals do not like bright light.

Now throughout the clean, avoid any electrical items and all electronics. Only there use a dry cloth. Do not touch anything electrical. You can damage it.

Remove and open what you can, eg the toner cartridge and clean those items.

Look for dirt and gently lift it. The brushes and vacuum cleaners can help here a lot.

Where there is nothing electrical use the moist cotton cloth, make sure that it is not wet.

The spilled toner, dust, hair, and built-up old paper fragments can gum up your printer and sometimes will need some real elbow grease to remove.

Do not worry if you have only done say 70%. It should be enough. Better too little than too much.

Now put it back together again.

Now clean the outside, with a moist cloth, I find for hard to remove stains AJAX very good. 

However, make sure that nothing is wet.

Now dry the outside.

Wait a few minutes to let any residual water dry off and only then turn on the printer.

A clean printer beside being less of an eyesore in the shop, will print better and also last longer.

I hope this helps.

If you want to improve the look of your front counter, then this idea is sometimes done and it is quick.

Replace when its time the old computer screen like this one.

and put in a coloured monitor like this.

It takes less space as the printer as you can see is under the screen. 

This will enhance your shop. 

If you go this path, what you need to consider is that you are not looking to create the most beautiful shop in the street, but one that has coherence so pick a colour that matches what you have so it can match your company colours. 

If you have not thought much about colour or you want to review what you have, click here for a quick introduction on this subject.

The recent cold and wet wave sweeping across Australia show how weather can affect retail sales. The effect is stated to be 3.2%. 

Which I can believe as a while ago, I did a study of my clients sales data and the weather. What I showed was that changes in temperature much more then the rain made impact sales of many products. I guess that people can reschedule in the day when they go shopping or pick a place which is covered if it is raining but if its too hot or cold many will cancel going shopping today.  Also, I found that specific products do sell well if the weather is appropriate.

This a smart retailer can take advantage of, for example, have a stand filled with goods that are suitable for a hot day, another if it is raining, etc.  In the appropriate weather, bring that stand to the front and move the inappropriate one to the back.  Also, they can check that their drink fridge, is full on a hot day. I have seen figures of 200% increase in drink sales during a heat wave.

This is all too easy to do as seven-day forecasts are reasonably accurate nowadays.

Here is a step by step plan to take advantage of the weather.

Create a list of your products based on the weather; all you need to do is check the days that were unusually hot, cold, wet, etc. Now see what happened using your sales report from our system and your experience to see what sold well on those days.

Now bundle these products together by hot, cold, wet day etc.

Now every week, get the seven-day forecast here, select your area and see what coming days are abnormal.

Now you have a coming sales window, make sure you are prepared as by matching your product to match the appropriate weather conditions, you can increase conversions and sales. 

A lot of you now, preparing or having done a stocktake are looking at a lot of stock that you no longer want. One solution often recommended is to discount it heavily and clear it out. It usually works, but it costs.

Here is another alternative to try out.

Have a word to your supplier of this stock, you are buying off them, and they want to be in your good books. This stock may be useful to them even though it is not to you.

I had a client that made a big order and the supplier agreed to credit most but not all of these unwanted items. So yes the rest went into a clearance bin, but the bulk was replaced with sellable stock. They did not even get charged a restocking fee. My client stated to me it was to them, it was like this money they found in the street.

Food for thought?

Years ago, there was a stocktaking sale, rapidly however this has expanded, and now we have an EOFY sale too. If you look up google trends and do a search on "EOFY sale" in Australia

This is the graph you will get. In the past seven years, it has grown dramatically from nothing 

Ask yourself, why do companies, like us do it? Mainly because of supplies as they are doing deals, why?

) They are budgeting for the end of the financial year, they know they need money to pay taxes, payroll tax, insurance, etc. So they want to liquidate stock to pay the tax bill.

) Managers need soon to justify to their stakeholders what they have done. This is their last chance as soon the financial reports will be done and with it their annual performance report card. They need excellent performance if they want their promotions, jobs and bonuses. You do not want to be a sales manager with a flat sales figure what you want to do is show I have sold well and now sales are going up. If their sales are low, they know they need to get cracking.

) Organisations are starting to implement changes to the next financial year. We see, for example, a supplier will say to us, we are moving out of these lines and going more into these lines are you interested in......

) Companies are now starting to organise their stock for a stocktake. They can see now stock that is getting old, looking obsolescent, that they have ranges of stock that is fragmented - a lot of one item and not enough of another item, damaged stock and were slow selling/overstocked assortment items. They are very conscious of the stock they need to lose. I had one come to see me a few days ago, "Bernard, we have a $300,000 worth of old monitors, can you move some of them?" 

) If you are into seasonal products, it is the high selling point of winter, from now on winter stock will start to drop. Now is probably the last chance you get to get rid of this stock in bulk, so it is a good time to clear stock from this season to make way for the new.

The result is that the consumer does see real deals here, so it becomes to them an exciting time. Many have tax reasons why they should move now e.g. Instant Tax write off. They can see retailers trying to move stock. The trick here is that consumers have to navigate through the deals to get to the ones that are good for them.

So it does work.

What I suggest is that consider doing all the above, look at your stock, see how it looks then support, run and promote your 'end of financial year' sale. I can tell you that it works for us.

The Techopedia explains here, Ad Hoc reporting as "reports that are put together creatively by users in real-time, rather than pre-designed according to a template." and for "one-time reports that are done in a customised way, to provide results for one specific question or objective." 

What it is that as the demands on businesses are incredibly varied, all the time, the business is being asked answers to specific questions which are hard to get from standard reports. 

For example, a stationery supplier, might be asked by a customer can you get the  BIC Australia pens that are about $6? Yes you could probably print a 20 report on BIC Australia and look through it, it can be done, but it is going to take time. Plus if the customer wants the purple one, it is going to take more time. 

As a rough approximation, I would say 80% to 90% of your reporting needs are of this type. A person has to find a specific piece of information, an invoice on a date, which item had the $2.30 discount, who served a person who brought this item, etc.   

Now if you ring your point of sale software provider, they might be prepared to add some options to do this, but it will take time by then the customer is long gone.  Generally, Ad Hoc reports are needed now, and for single use only so it is not worth the time and effort to do it.  In fairness to the developer of your POS System, there is a limit to the number of business questions that can be anticipated and programmed in advance. So the solution is that you spend some time, probably over a telephone call to your software expert and sweat it out.

This is what Ad hoc reporting helps as it allows almost unlimited flexibility enabling the information to be easily found instantly.

Let us do an example to show you the power of our software.

Above was a simple example; that I want the code of a stationery product that is about $6 for BIC Australia.

So what I could do is go to the register reports and select a full listing.

I now ask for BIC but note it does not have a question cost price, with ad-hoc reporting you do not need to worry as it is not required.

I then get this excel listing.

I go over the column labelled Wholesale price.

Press on the top Sort & Filter

Then press select turn off all the costs.

Then I click on all the costs that are about $6.

In this case, there is only one, and it is listed immediately here.

The code I wanted was 41330, pretty nifty. It took me about a minute.

Ad hoc reporting reaches beyond your static pre-defined software that traditional software provides, allowing you an enhanced interactive end-user experience.

Research indicates that customers want simple rather than complex and if it starts to get too complicated that many people tend not to choose, so giving you a no sale rather than a purchase.

Now with this in mind, consider if you make a hamper or pack name.

In stock pricing, you will find this under hamper packs. See the green arrow.

Naming your hamper or pack is a good idea (see red square) as long as you make the name understandable and straightforward. Say you are in office stationery why make a name like "The flying carpet pack". Besides this name telling your customer nothing and so confusing them with something meaningless, it makes it complicated.

Make it simple with something they can identify with, eg "Secondary Student Plan", "Home Office Plan" or "Kindergarten Pack."

Another idea that works very well is to make a "Starter Pack", "Small Pack", "Medium Pack" and a "Large Economy Pack". 

The same idea applies to syndicates.

It is a great way to upsell.

 People go to a lot of trouble and expense to make their shop and front counter. Sometimes what you see on the front counter an old computer screen like this one.

It is firstly taking up a lot of room on the most valuable and best spot in your shop, that space should and could be used far better. A monitor can often, for example, be raised on a stand, so take up no room on the front counter and be better positioned for the cashier too

More importantly, it is making a wrong impression to your customers on your business. With such an ancient monitor what are they thinking of your software and technology? 

I would suggest getting a monitor that is modern, stylish and sleek. This will enhance your shop and move the old one to the back where no-one sees it.

Here is an idea get a monitor in colour, now that makes a bold statement about your shop, matches your shop colours and a cool talking point.