While gaining new customers can help your business grow, a lot of times it is not enough. Imagine gaining 20 new customers each and every month, but losing 25 existing customers every month during the same time frame. Just getting new customers would not be enough in this situation to keep your business going. You must find a way to gain more customers than you are losing.

This is where your Point of Sale (POS) Software can be a valuable tool. ProphetLine POS Software has integrated customer marketing. With the availability of customer purchases, user definable fields you can easily give your customers that personal touch that will keep them as a valued customer even if you don’t have the best prices in town. High quality customer Service is something we at ProphetLine know is valuable and is one of the reasons our POS Software makes it easy for you to give higher customer service to your customers as well.

There are many ways to use the Retail Stock Ledger built into ProphetLine POS Software, but the one often not used is the vendor comparative. When you carry inventory from different vendors for like product, you need to know how these vendors stack up against each other. If Vendor A gives you better margins, turns and sell-through percentage than Vendor B, you now have the information needed to approach Vendor B for better terms and pricing or you can’t afford to carry their line anymore.

Many retailers feel this is a cost of doing business if Vendor B is selling them high visibility, branded goods. If you are armed with instantly obtainable information on how poorly they perform against their competitor, they will work with you and probably be amazed you had this data available to you. Your relationships with your vendors must be profitable for both of you for this to be a win-win for both sides. If it’s not, the terms of the relationship must be renegotiated.

You can be sure that if Vendor B was not happy with their arrangement with you, you’d be hearing from them. If it’s not profitable for you, they need to hear from you. When POS Software takes your sales history and purchasing history, then automatically runs it back to the Retail Stock Ledger, the battle is won. If you don’t have this ability in your current POS Software/Merchandising System, call and find out what you are missing.

Most small retailers have one main thing to worry about and that is their inventory. Their inventory assortment tells the public who they are and quantity of inventory says if they will be profitable or not. Not enough of the proper assortment will tend to reduce the chances of your customers coming back and too much inventory will ruin your profits. POS Software with built-in merchandising functionality, like open to buy and a retail stock ledger will give you the information needed to make informed decisions on assortments and availability. The cost of inventory is the largest expense item on a retailer’s income statement. If not managed carefully, the cost of excess inventory can be the difference between a small retailer being very profitable and losing money.

Many small retailers think that they need more inventory to be sure they don’t miss any sales, but the truth is that too much inventory almost always will cost you more. When retailers bring their inventories in line, clean up their assortments and make it easier for the customers to shop, sales will go up. The cost of slower turning inventory is much greater than the cost of faster turning inventory. These costs happen from lost sales, lower margins and increased expenses. Retailers that properly manage their inventories, the assortment their customers want and not being overstocked are going to be much more profitable and good POS Software with built-in merchandising will get you there.

With today’s business being conducted more from a mobile view, it makes sense to have a POS Software terminal on a laptop platform. You can take it with you to trade shows and place orders on the floor, sell your products at a customer’s site and even tender the sale to a credit card using a wireless PC card. When you return to your store, you can remain on the wireless card, hook up to a wired network or use a wireless router with Wi-Fi connectivity. With ProphetLine POS Software, you can also use the laptop to create transfers or purchase orders in the warehouse, do customer sales orders and price quotes on the sales floor and use the laptop as a data capture device for doing your physical inventories with our built-in stock check functionality.

The best part of all is the price of a good laptop has gone down so much; it is now affordable for any retail business. Make sure you buy one with enough USB ports to handle all the peripheral devices you will be connecting to it. The next time you add a POS Software workstation, think mobile.

Keeping up with changing retail technology can be a costly investment, as retailers need to have the latest, greatest technology and not get antiquated. Your POS Software provider should have a well thought out plan for future updates that will enable their customers to stay on a path that will keep them ahead of their competitors. The transition from current POS/Retail Software should be seamless so that the only training required is on the new feature you are upgrading for. Many retailers don’t understand that keeping up and maintaining older POS Software is costing them more money than to replace with a new POS/Retail Software System that will be flexible enough to meet their needs now and in the future.

At ProphetLine POS/Retail Software Company, we will even give you a competitive trade-in from your old system to new technology that will streamline your retail operations and lead to: Smarter business decisions, better inventory control, minimize retail fraud, increase customer loyalty and those ever elusive, increased profits. New POS Software does require initial work, but the long term gains are enormous. We have a POS Software product to fit your budget!

Fraud can occur when an item is stolen and then returned. The thief returns the merchandise for a cash refund, gift card or has the money returned to a personal card that wasn’t used to make the purchase. A printed receipt from ProphetLine POS Software to an Epson TM88 IV thermal printer will put a barcode on the ticket that will bring up the original transaction. If they cannot produce this receipt, the POS Software can easily reproduce the original copy and returns the money to the card used in the purchase. If you are using bar-coded receipts, the customer using the fake receipt is stopped dead in his tracks. POS Software receipts with barcodes allow you to have in place a customer friendly policy that will not create any misunderstandings. Your POS Software created receipt speeds up the sale process and eliminates the chances of fraud, all for a more profitable business.

Several weeks ago, my DSL Internet service quit working at my house. I called support, which was located in India, and two hours later a simple problem was resolved. That’s not good service and I should expect better from any product, including POS Software that claims to have a responsive help desk. When you buy POS Software from a vendor that prides itself on great customer service, your experience will not have the frustrations and your business will perform better. Procedural issues answered promptly should not be a luxury, but a standard to expect. On-going training on your POS Software should also be an important issue to fully understand the features and functionality of the POS Software you purchase. You need to learn all of the POS Software capabilities after the initial set-up training; not just the getting started functions. Take your on-going training in short sessions on-line, which will give you a much higher retention rate than trying to absorb everything in a two to five day training class. At ProphetLine POS Software, we realize that one more frustrating thing is not needed in your life.

What are you waiting on? Everyone is looking for additional revenue and it’s staring you right in the face. The Wall Street Journal said that holiday gift-card sales would jump 25% to a record $35 Billion in 2007. Folks, that’s a ‘B’ as in billion they are talking about. That is a perfect reason to put a gift card program into your retail outlet. Not only is this gift card income, money you get to use interest free, but a majority of gift card users spend more than the balance on the gift cards and portions of the balance are never used at all. ProphetLine POS Software builds a gift card program into their product through their credit card processing partner, Mercury Payment Systems. If you use the credit and debit card functions of Mercury, you incur no transaction fees on the gift card usage.

POS Software systems evolved from mechanical cash registers in the early 1900’s. The early systems were little more than hand cranked making change cash tills that produced a ‘Z’ Tape. The cash register ‘Z’ tape was a journal that gave you a broad overview of the day’s transactions. The ‘Z’ tape did not give you a lot of in depth information, but was the start of departmental reporting and exception reporting.

ProphetLine POS Software still produces a similar report that gives you a five second overview of your store activity. Some functions and ideas are still relevant and have stood the test of time. The first computer-based POS Software systems were introduced in 1973 by IBM, which were large mainframes with proprietary client/server software. That same year was also the beginning of UPC/EAN barcode readers and in 1986; IBM introduced PC-based POS Software systems.

I guess the point of this blog is that most of the POS Software ideas have been around for a long time, it’s the speed and how you use the information gathered that is important and is it affordable to small retailers. Retailers need to do what they do best, which is be on the floor selling, and not be confined to a computer in the back. Your POS Software should do more than just simple point of sale tasks and fully integrate all the essential store functions. Even small retailers can now expect fully integrated accounting, inventory management, open to buy forecasting, customer relation management (CRM), integrated credit, debit, gift card service, rentals, and small business financials. Because of this wide range of functionality, today’s POS Software is truly your full functioning Retail Management System.

When you are looking for the good or bad in your retail business, first look at it from a broad perspective. Good POS Software should have some reporting views that allow you to look at the overall health of your business at a quick glance. This quick glance is a departmental view that gives you a comparative on how each department is contributing to the company profits when compared to the overall percentage of investment in each department.

A good business person cannot micro manage from the item level. ProphetLine is constantly finding ways to make available valuable information for the busy small business person so that they do not have to sit behind their computer all day. All of these new reports are based on departmental and class comparatives that derive their information from the comprehensive Retail Stock Ledger. ProphetLine POS Software puts you on the retail floor taking care of your customers, not stuck in your office.