MI Pro

Don’t have an epos? Get one, now.

If you don’t have an epos, tough times are exactly the right time to make this investment.

At it’s core an epos will help you track revenue and profits, provide historic data on customers’ purchases, reduce time and increase accuracy of purchases and inventory and provide powerful reports to help you buy profitably and promote more effectively. Additional tools help you track receivables, manage services and rentals, market to customers, track loyalty points, manage used inventory and more.

You can greatly increase net margins to help offset sales declines or merchandise cost increases. With financing over three and five years, an epos can be affordable and earn money from the very first day you turn it on.

Have an epos? Conduct an epos review
An epos is like every employee at your store. Each year, it needs a performance review. The New Year is the perfect time for this. Here are several key areas to analyse.
– Data inputs
– Inventory updates and management
– Sales reporting
– Staff education
– Accounting costs
– Equipment issues
– General improvements
– Data: this time-consuming task is over

Here’s a true conversation we have every day with prospects for our services.
“Do you have an epos?”
“Yes.”
“Are you using it?”
“No, because it will take too much time enter the data.”

Or there’s a second version, frequently prefaced by a sigh:
“It’s so time consuming to enter data.”

Your data struggles are over. Obtain pre-loaded and ongoing management of the data for your system. That includes pictures, descriptions and pricing – so at the counter your staff members can be just as smart as, say, your customers.

Evaluate the time you spend entering data. In most cases a subscription service will be less expensive.

Inventory updates – on the run
A truck pulls in loaded with gear and thousands of music books. Every moment you spend to check in and stock those goods is one less minute you can spend with customers.

Avoid this problem. If you don’t have a back office station, add one. If you do (or are adding one), don’t use desktops. Put the software on the new netbooks (less than £500 each or rugged versions around £1,000 per unit) or laptops.

Now you have mobile units that can reduce check in, bar coding and stock shelf placement time significantly. Increase your savings (and accuracy) when you use these to count products and generate purchase orders at the shelf, run more frequent stock counts and even use as a back up cash register during busy periods.

Reports – your profit lifeline
Reduced margins mean you need to increase the use of reports. This is an area widely overlooked by users, but it’s the single most important reason for an epos in the first place.

Typically, the most used reports are minimums and maximums – the establishment of order amounts, missing items reports (to see what items haven’t come in) and accounting reports – such as daily cash, tax and credit card reports, general ledger items or receivables reports and so on.

You can, of course, go a long way beyond these basics. Have a brainstorming session with your team to determine what reports will help with each department of your store. Start with these five ideas and come up with others that work for you.

Top down/bottom up
On a monthly basis what are the top 50 sellers by sales and ranked again by margin profits. What are the bottom 50? And the least profitable? These are candidates for a discussion with your suppliers. Why they are not selling or producing margins? Should we eliminate them? (Probably, yes, unless seasonal.)

Turnover
What items could not sell through within time limit of the credit terms of your suppliers? Are the margins worth keeping the items in stock, or do you get rid of them?

Customers
Sure, you identify your top customers from every month for the past year, assign them to your sales staff and provide Nordstrom level personalised service to them – but here’s another idea: Run a report by category of ‘indicator accessories’ (for example mouthpieces, strings, drum training manuals) and find out who bought those, but nothing else.

Now you have a key target group. Why didn’t they buy? Are they going to buy? From whom?

This is only one idea (what about those rental customers?) and there are many more ways to use customer history to determine sales and promotion efforts.

Historical
Nothing is the same. So it follows to compare last year’s trading with the current retail situation. You can get clues for top sellers from previous years to see overall customer preferences. Be sure to build margins, not just sales, into these reports. Maybe last year you sold a lot, but it wasn’t profitable selling. Don’t repeat mistakes.

Employee hours versus transactions versus walk-in traffic
A recent Wall Street Journal article about grocery stores detailed how new software tools measure the number of transactions and SKUs processed every hour by employees. You probably have far less transactions than a grocer, but the idea is a good one. Run reports to analyse hour-by-hour transactions and match them to scheduling. You will be surprised how many times you may be over or under staffed and lose sales as result.

Staff education: it may be the training – or the technology
Training is critical to epos success. The year end is a great time to review all the skills needed for each department and to make sure each employee is re-trained for any additional skills needed.

Touching
Have you used an iPhone or an ATM lately? Touch-Screen technology makes it easier to navigate. If you want your staff to generate more reports or use your epos more effectively, consider this option. With a touch screen you reduce training time and increase effectiveness.

Accounting – a potential hidden cost
90 per cent of all accountants know the major accounting software packages: Quickbooks, Sage, Navision and others. If your system uses another system, that can cost you hourly fees for accountants to learn new systems. Use epos systems that export to major accounting packages to avoid such hidden costs.

Equipment – your epos can’t run without the good stuff
A slow running computer, server or printer can hold up even the best epos software, so you need to review all your equipment and make sure it is up to date. Put together a replacement schedule and add it as a necessary item on your annual budget. Skimp here, and you will lose more profit than you can imagine.

General issues – track them, elevate them
Take a moment to make a list of all the improvements your epos system can use. Divide these into categories: reports, features, navigation and functions. Have a candid talk with your epos provider to determine whether they need to be customised for you or implemented system-wide. If they can’t or won’t, then start to look for a new epos system.

Your epos – your partner in profits
In difficult times you need to meet customer needs with less cost and expand revenue opportunities. Your epos provides the platform to reach these goals.

Make sure your ‘lean, mean, profit machine’ helps you overcome any lean times ahead. Install one, or conduct an epos performance review – the sooner the better.

Gordon o’Hara is a managing partner for Retail Up website service and touch-screen epos.

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info@retailup.com
www.retailup.com
020 7096 4216