The reality is that many suppliers do not offer EDI invoicing even though EDI invoicing saves you a lot of time. The problem is increased if you order frequently to save resources, but the problem is the increase in management costs in controlling a large number of orders.



Our system provides a solution to this problem by giving you an automated stock control system which can run either manually with its replenish or Min/Max systems or the completely automatic focus ordering system. It also creates an electronic order that can be printed, faxed or sent by email. It can then create an EDI file that when the goods arrive can like any other EDI invoice be adjusted and imported after you check the supply when the stock arrives. There is no need to enter all that stock anymore. This will save you considerable time and resources.



If the fully automatic ordering system is adopted what the point-of-sale system will do is consider the ordering cycle (designed to reduce carry costs), the purchasing cost and lowest order quantities to produce the maximum profit for the minimum outlay in your store. This is unique to our system unlike the many manual systems out there, which end out in getting you to place orders that are larger than your immediate needs so tending to increase purchasing costs and produce overstock, which requires discounts on sales to get rid of extra stock.

Overall it releases resources, which allows you to respond to unexpected market opportunities. This will also reduce the number of stockouts on many items and its associated costs leading to increases in your clients' satisfaction.

 

If you want to learn more, please contact us, as only we offer at present focus ordering in our marketplace.

If you look at our report screen what you will notice is that many of them use excel.

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The main reason for this is that it allows ad-hoc reporting.

Conventional reports are standard reports written based on standard requirements. The biggest problem with this is that people rarely need these reports. What they generally do is print out a long report, search for the small piece of information that they require and then trash the report.

It is time-consuming and messy. In an effort to overcome this problem, what some systems do is create reports with heaps and heaps of options. So in some systems, when you go to print a simple report, you need to go through a page or two of options just to get the information you require. What you have to do is run through all these options first.

Not with us, as our system has many different ad-hoc reporting systems available.

What I am going to talk about here is one of these. Instead of looking through a 100-page report for the information you require, what you can do is use these excel reports to do the searching plus if required you can make your own reports to be exactly what you want.

Now the big problem here is that few people have excel. Not to worry as our point-of-sale system can use a free office suite - OpenOffice.

The main reason we picked OpenOffice is that after Microsoft, it is the leading office suite. It is extremely powerful. It has a large support group with heaps of documentation.

The licence is both free and open source.

You can get it from their website here: http://www.openoffice.org/

What you will find is that it has four applications of which two most of you will find, I am sure very useful.

1. A word processor that can handle nearly all formats available. It is similar to Microsoft Office 2003.
2. A spreadsheet that can integrate into our system and almost nearly all other spreadsheets.

Load it up, have a play with it. I will discuss here how to produce ad-hoc reports with it in a later post. Then you will see part of the power of our software.

Today we had a user meeting in Melbourne which became a source of much discussion here. One point that I was going to discuss was that what our system has is ad-hoc reporting but somehow it did not come up.

What this means is a person using our system can create almost any type of report they like limited only by their imagination, for example, say you wanted to investigate customers who have not purchased off you recently but used to, with ad-hoc reporting you could create a report of those customers that purchased a significant amount in the last two years but not in the last three months.

Many people supply single dimensional reports in their systems that do their standard reports while ours allows you to go way beyond that to what you need now.

However, to make ad-hoc reporting, what you need is an office suite such as Microsoft Office. The problem is that many people cannot justify the purchase or even the subscription to Microsoft Office. A common problem is when people need ad-hoc reporting on many computers.

So for these people what we allow is an alternative Apache OpenOffice which is free.

It has a word processor (Writer) which is roughly equivalent to Microsoft Word, a spreadsheet (Calc) which is similar to Excel, a presentation editor (Impress) comparable to PowerPoint and some other programs.

OpenOffice can be loaded onto any computer in minutes from here.

In use it regularly as it is a hassle even if like me, you have a copy of Microsoft Office, to get the disk to install it on a new computer.

In my view OpenOffice it is not as good as Microsoft Office, but it is still is a fine office suite as long as you really do not need to do too much. As it is fairly close to Microsoft Office, if you know one, it is not hard to use the other. As I said, I regularly use both with few problems.

Best of all OpenOffice integrates directly into our point of sale so allowing you to do ad-hoc reporting, and since it is free, you can do ad-hoc reporting on any computer.

Enjoy the flexibility of ad-hoc reporting.

Currently, we have 16 million smartphones in Australia, about 25% use them to make retail purchases. When asked 61% stated that they would use a mobile to make payments. So I am sure that lots of people will soon be dumping the credit card and replacing it with the mobile. No card and no PIN to remember as it uses face recognition. There is also no need to pick up the receipt either as it is in the mobile.

It is available now in our software.

What can happen is that while selling and ordering stock is for some reason you are stocking large quantities of poor seller in your shop.

Obviously you want to review why you have so many of these items There are a few ways to do it but I want today to show you the power of ad-hoc reporting.

So what we are going to look for is items that have a low return on investment (GMROI) and have reasonable high stock quantities.

Go to reports and select "Sales by Return On Investment (GMROI) see the red arrow.

Now I am going to use the stationery department in my example,

When my report comes up here, I select the export option to put it into excel as I showed you the other day. Once in excel, I sort my excel sheet by the holding $ field. I then deleted everything under $500. Next I sorted by my ROI%. I deleted everything that was in negative there because these items normally mean the data is wrong. I do suggest you review them but this is a different excercise. I then deleted all items with a GMROI of more then 10% which left me with this over $160,000 worth of stock with an average GMROI of 2.45%.

I can review these items see what I got. It is pretty awesome report which I could invent myself. I did not need to convince a programmer in my computer supplier to produce for me. This is the power of adhoc reporting.

Now if there is significant interest in learning excel to enable you to do ad-hoc reporting like this. please let me know, and I can schedule a webinar to teach you.

It is now starting to go public about a faulty price adjustment for magazines by a competitor to us. I am not going to name anybody.

What happened is a magazine distributor issued a price adjustment, a software supplier trying to do the right thing made an advice sheet; however, it is being claimed now that this advice was faulty for their software so the claim is that they did not test it properly. As such their users had a mucked up magazine price. However, the software supplier probably quite rightly stated that it was their users who mucked it up not them. The fact that many of their users did not have a problem suggests that this is true.

Neither situation can happen with our system as we do use automatic price adjustments so our price adjustments are done automatically. If like us, this company had used automatic prices rises their users like ours would have had no problems, in fact, few of our users probably knew a price adjustment had occurred until they started to sell the magazine.

I would strongly suggest that if you are looking to purchase a software system, make sure they have automatic price adjustments like ours does.

Automatic adjustments = Work smart + Work fast.

Now what is being stated is that newsagents to fix the problem of Network EDI files is to select the "late option" and print the items alphabetically as this is very easy to do.

You can try it.

Simply go into the print manager of our software.

Now select A-Z, see the green arrow here, press it.

And off it comes out alphabetically as here.

In practice though it does not save time, as its quicker and easier to handle in bundle order.

Even in bundle order there are problems as there are duplicate invoice numbers and printed labels are often not in the same order as magazines in the bundle. There are other issues too such as the "late option" means the invoices comes late; some complain that they get the invoices after the magazines arrive.

Yes, you can do it, but I do not see it as a solution.

I do recommend that people get behind the ANF push now as it the best hope at present to get something done.
 

This time of the year, while you are collecting information for the accountant, and you are in that frame of mind. It would be a good idea to check your sales security indicators. This is a good check and if something is wrong, you may find it there.

What these indicators do is gives you a detailed breakdown for each operator on no sale, voids, count, totals, refunds, negative items and discounts. In my experience, unusual no sale and voids for each operator are the most important of these indicators.

Go to cash register reports

Open Staff and click on "Sales security indicators"

Select required period, in this case the last twelve months.

See how you go.

The report comes out in excel so you can edit it.

Already Easter is starting to confuse people with their accounts. If you have a query with a customer over understanding his account, we have a help sheet.

If you have subagent, you can put credit terms and credit limit on their accounts.

Once set, the credit terms for each subagent will be checked when you end the week, and any subagents that have exceeded their terms or credit limit they will automatically be stopped.

Regards

Garth

Yesterday I was talking to some newsagents when the subject came up that some magazines are just getting too expensive.

I decided to use posbrowser to create a table of the average price of a magazine sold yearly sold in a number of newsagencies.

{table removed]

The line in pink shows the average sale price of magazines, the yellow line would be the price assuming a magazine sale price only followed the CPI. This is based on the reserve bank figures here.

As you can see magazine prices did exceed the CPI but not by much. Although there are problems with some magazines, overall the public is paying about the same allowing CPI.

I will be doing a presentation on benchmarking to some newsagency suppliers. So I decided to adopt newspapers as an example of how different newsagencies can be to determine, how much is this red part of the shop worth?

Here is a chart of two newsagent stores with a similar turnover and both are in suburb strips yet look at the difference newspapers have. Click on the chart for more detail.

This is why our benchmarking system has so many choices as you have to be very careful about generalising from one newsagents experiences to a community.

If this sounds obvious to you, believe me, it is not so obvious to many of your suppliers.

[Charts removed]

Although generally in newsagencies when we look at the magazine department we use quantities unlike most other departments where we look at total sales, I am not so sure this is right.

I decided to look at magazines that deal with house improvements. So using our system I created an instant category for them. I then examine them for July/September quarter 2008 and compare that to July/September quarter 2009.

What I first noticed is the dominant magazine in this category is AUST HOUSE & GARDEN which had 57% of this category. Here are the raw figures.

This category did well over this period for this newsagent. By quantity sales grew by 33%, revenue growth was a respectable 19.8%. As you can see, there were major variations in quantity sales by titles. This you can often see in benchmarking when the quantities of sales are low. You might see it better in the graph below

You can also see dramatic changes in total sales because of changes in prices of magazines.

Now I leave it to you to decide what would be the meaningful result by quantity or total for you?

What I find fascinating is that with our program you are not restrained to just the reports that we provide as you can make your own reports.

I decided to create an example by checking how efficient different magazine suppliers are in their distributions.

So I decided to created a chart with several categories.

The first category was the number of deliveries by supplier. If for example, twenty magazines came at once that would be one delivery. If another ten of the same magazine came the next day that would be another delivery.

I then created another category which I called oversupply. Those were deliveries that had either more than 25% returns or one, whichever was the highest. So if say twenty arrived if the number returned was greater than 25% of 20 = 4 then that would be an oversupplied delivery.

I then created here a special category called NO Sale where a delivery came and nothing was sold.

Finally I created a category where there was not enough in the delivery. That was where the computer estimated that if it had received more in that delivery the newsagency would have sold more.
Then I decided to display them in excel. It makes an interesting report.

Then I graphed them here.

As you can see, there is little difference between magazine suppliers using these categories as they tend to keep place with the number of deliveries.

It is just an example and you can, of course, create your own categories and charts using our software.

Today I was asked about setting a subagent's credit term, the client had seen a newsletter about it but could not find the video as he had deleted the newsletter.

What he wanted to do was know how to put a credit limit on this accounts.

He then suggested that since training videos are now popular and that we should create a special section for Garth's training videos.

So I sent him the link for a video, that Garth created last month. Then I thought that he maybe be right, so I decided to post this video immediately and possibly create a new section for training videos on our website.

How it works is once the credit terms and credit limits for a subagent are exceeded, the account will be automatically stopped.

People with old versions of POS DOS may need to update to the latest version on the net if they have problems with Gordan and Gotch on XchangeIT.

You will know if you need to update as the software will ask this question when importing a magazine

Return style is marked as (T)op, (F)ull or (C)over

We think it is a problem somewhere in XchangeIT, not our software but rather then wait for a fix from them, we changed our software. It is available for immediate installation

[Images here have been removed]

Since we released the google map integration a year ago, much has changed. So recently, we upgraded our integration.

Now when you call an address in our software, you can see now, a directions box (see the blue arrow).

Once you enter your starting or ending point, up pops a screen with directions how to get there. This is handy for someone that is not sure of the quickest way to get there.

Now note you notice the little man in orange with the red arrow pointing to him. If you click the arrow and move him around, he shows you a picture of what the location looks like. I find it useful going to a place to see this so I know what my destination looks like.

ACP is introducing Sales Based Replenishment. We expect it to start in less than a week.

It promises to be a huge advance on the current method of magazine orders. The heart of it depends on getting accurate sales data from XchangeIT. If you are on posbrowser and are not sending sales data, could you please follow the instructions we have sent. If you have any problems doing so, please contact us ASAP.

If you need any invoice files to electronically enter you will need it supplied with the DDO industry standard specifications. If they can do it, it will save you plenty of time.

So I have mounted them as an information sheet so you can get them.

The EDI Specs Release 2v9.doc is available