Most of the calls we receive inquiring about POS Software comes from small retailers with limited budgets, but have the same problems that the big retailers have. They complain that most POS Software companies will not even talk to them because they are a small retailer. That is the exact reason we specialize in small retail stores. You can call us about any problem that you are having and you will get someone that cares. Small retailers need to select a POS Software company that can act as their technology staff and consultant them on correct retail practices that put them on a level playing field with the big guys, all on a limited budget.

Because most small retailers can’t afford a huge staff for implementing and maintaining new Point of Sale (POS) /Retail Management Software, they will need to rely on a company that looks at their customers as partners in their business. All POS software companies have their strong points which made you select them in the first place, but the difference is how they handle calls about procedural issues and adhering to good business practices.

POS Software doesn’t do everything by itself; it takes a partner to help you. Make sure you select a quality Point of Sale (POS) System that has all the functionality you need and the support you expect. Then invest the time you once spent drowning in paper to making use of your new POS Software, and you’ll soon enjoy increased margins, sales and profits.

Alan Fisher, President, Retail Business 101

This is an important retail distinction that your POS Software system should handle properly. A markdown is a devaluation of a product based upon its inability to be sold at the original planned selling price. A discount is a reduction in the price of an item or transaction based upon the customer making the purchase. Examples of this would be employee, senior, and frequent-buyer discounts.

If you use the retail part of your POS Software system for analysis and making decisions, the inability of the system to properly account for this could lead to bad decisions. Let’s say that your buyer finds some really great shirts at a cost of $20 with a planned selling price of $50 (60 % IMU).

However, several employees find these same shirts to their liking. With an employee benefit of cost plus 10% for personal purchases, several of these shirts were sold at $22. Later, the buyer performs an evaluation and discovers that ending gross profits were closer to 35% instead of the planned 60%. Since the POS Software system could not distinguish between markdowns and discounts, inaccurate information was given to the decision-maker. Perhaps the buyer should have been buying more of these shirts, but his POS Software said it had poor gross profits.

Several years ago, a good friend, who was director of golf of a resort in the US, called me to say that his buyer was under the gun due to lower than expected gross profits. I asked him if his POS Software system could distinguish discounts and markdowns and he said no. I suggested that he take all employee discount transactions, require that they take place on one day of the week, and that they be entered in one transaction at full price with a lump sum item reducing the amount collected.

After seeing the true picture, it turned out that the buyer was exceeding expectations. Hopefully, this person never found out how close to termination he/she was. Furthermore, it was discovered that some employees were going overboard with purchases and selling to friends. While not illegal, it violated the spirit of the benefit and the policy was changed to limit purchases for personal use.

If your POS Software does not handle this, then discuss a workaround with them until it can be fixed. As I said earlier, the inability to handle this results in inaccurate information.

When you establish your department structure in your POS Software, think of each department as a profit center you would like to look at from time to time and make some good informed buying decisions. If department ‘A’ is 30% of your revenue and only 15% of your inventory, you might think about increasing your inventory in this department and decrease inventory in a poorly performing department. The only way you are going to know about these trends are with automated reports that track through the POS Software. The departmental comparatives, retail stock ledger and open to buy plans are all part of the ProphetLine POS Software System that are totally automated, work in unison with each other and require no maintenance or large time outlays.

One of the premises of an explosive new book titled The Secret is positive reinforcement. If you think good things, good things will happen. The Secret takes this much further and also states that ‘thoughts become things’. If you ‘think’ about a new car, it will be materialized for you. Wouldn’t it be nice if it really worked that way?

Imagine thinking you had a million dollars and poof, there it is. Why operate a business when you can ‘think’ success into existence.

At ProphetLine, we understand what is actually required to succeed. Yes, positive outlooks will help, especially when followed with rolled up sleeves and a commitment to some good old fashioned hard work. At ProphetLine, we also understand the value of time and have built time saving features into our Point of Sale (POS) Software. We know you work hard, but why work harder than you have to? Shouldn’t your POS software be able to assist you in making smarter decisions? We at ProphetLine think so!!!

Multi-Store Ordering, Customer Marketing, Retail Stock Analysis, Best/Worst reporting, Reorder Suggested values based on Stock Levels, Sales/Special Orders, Automated Transfers of Inventory, seamlessly integrated Accounting and Payroll.  The list goes on and on. Give us a call to find out how you can use ProphetLine’s POS software to use your time more wisely and give your business ‘The Secret’ of success.

When your POS Software Sucks, You Feel Trapped, Don’t You?

We Have Some Simple and Cost Effective Solutions!

1) You can subscribe to ProphetLine POS Software for a low monthly fee. No long term contract. You have an option to purchase when you find out ProphetLine is the right POS software for your business and subscription money spent will apply toward purchase. If you decide to purchase, you will receive a trade-in for your current POS software.

2) Stay on subscription and let us be your technical and support staff.

3) Purchase and we will give you a liberal trade-in for your current POS software.

4) Hold status quo, do nothing and be unhappy. Your choice!

Only a quality POS Software Company with great support can be confident enough in their product to give you a no risk, month to month rate without a contract.

If you are reading this, you have probably tried just about everything, however, we need to check the basics first. The first thing to do is remove the 1.1 framework using the control panel uninstall. If this is successful, reinstall the 1.1 framework and then SP1 if it was not included in the version you downloaded.

If, like me, during the unistall, the framework is not removed and no notice as to why is displayed, you will need to use a different method to do the uninstall. A .NET removal tool is available, Click here to download. For more information on the tool, you can read the blog entry of Aaron Stebner at Aaron Stebner’s Weblog

Once the framework is removed, proceed with a normal installation.

How many times do you see an article in the paper about a loyal and trusted employee that is caught stealing? Unfortunately, it happens every day and the only way you can stop it is to make your employees accountable for their actions. The best deterrent is strong exception reporting functionality in your Point of Sale (POS) Software that makes you aware of every unusual action taken at the transaction level. You will never be able to totally eliminate theft, but you will be able to catch it early and minimize the damage. If you have an employee that is always voiding, backing out of transactions, excessive discounting or doing anything other than a normal,full retail sale, he or she is either poorly trained or stealing. If your POS Software is programmed to automatically print the exception report every morning, you can see immediately who your silent partner is.

Potential employees can be divided into three groups; the ones that would never do anything dishonest, the ones that will be dishonest given the opportunity and the ones that stay awake at night trying to figure out how they are going to steal from you. If you do not have accountability built into your POS Software, you have reduced the labor pool down to a third. If you do have accountability built in, you not only have the third that are totally honest to pick from, but you also pick up the third that are honest if they are accountable for their actions. Our POS Software costs less than a trusted and loyal employee can steal in a week.

Sounds like tennis to me; point, set, match, game over! You don’t have to break the bank in your IT spending, but you do need to spend enough to match or beat your competitors. Depending on the size and type of retail business, anywhere from 1 to 3 percent is a number that should be set aside for your technology budget. Most growth in spending for small retailers is in POS Software, supply-chain solutions, warehouse management, CRM applications and business analytics. I think most small retailers should spend closer to the 1 percent than the 3 percent. That means for a small retailer doing $500,000 a year in business, a little over $400 a month should be budgeted for in-house retail systems.

ProphetLine Point of Sale (POS) Software has all the above mentioned components in one seamless application that will allow you to beat your competitors. You can subscribe to the software for less that most POS Software vendors charge you for support and updates alone. Our subscription model gives you software, support, updates and upgrades for one low monthly fee of $187. There is also no long term contract to sign, which guarantees that we will work hard to keep your business. Call today to enhance your business and keep your technology budget under 1 percent.

Everyday retailers ask “Does your POS Software do certain critical things? In the case of ProphetLine, our POS Software is a very rich and proven software package that has been on the market for many years. It is designed for retailers of hard- and soft-goods, such as apparel, sporting goods, and specialty retail. These retailers typically have certain features that are required, such as size-color matrix, serial number tracking, customer tracking, accounts receivable, and multi-store support. Any worthwhile point of sale (POS) software on the market will have these features and others considered mission-critical for the specialty retail market. If your business is mostly accounts receivable, then it is imperative that the software properly manage accounts receivable, such as invoicing, statement generation, and reporting. ProphetLine also has many features not found in other systems, especially for many micro-verticals within specialty retail, so it is literally designed for hundreds of different types of retailers and is usually a good fit for most of them.

However, sometimes retailers get caught up in insignificant function points of the POS Software, thinking that every single thing about their business must be automated, and forget that there are enormous gains in automating just the larger parts of their business. Often, and regrettably, some get so consumed with finding this perfect software package (that often does not exist or is cost-prohibitive) they spend months or years searching without success to find POS Software that performs this function exactly how they think it should work. I have known some to search for years, and every year I ask them if they have found what they are looking for. Invariably, the reply is “Not so far, but there is this new POS Software company that looks like they have it right.” Next year, same story, and they never buy. Their clerks fill out invoices by hand, he has no idea of what is in stock and merchandise and cash walk out of the store every day. If you’ve been searching for months or years, spoken with over 5 or 10 companies, and have yet to find the perfect software, you may be over-analyzing function points – RELAX.

As you evaluate software, when a feature is missing, ask yourself how important that feature is. Weigh this feature against the big picture. In fact, you should make a list of features that are mission-critical, needed but not critical, and nice-to-have. Assign a weight value to each so that you can score pos software packages as you evaluate them. Features, while certainly important, are not the only things you should evaluate, either. Ask the vendor what platform the software runs on; what database; how long has it been on the market (for the current architecture), programming language, support hours and costs, upgrade policies, and most importantly, a list of references from other retailers in your market. Try to obtain your own references as well. Manufacturer sales reps are a great start – they can turn you on to retailers just like you that have pos software systems. Choosing and buying a point of sale (POS) system is an important task – just don’t be obsessed with doing business exactly like your father did it.

While Microsoft’s Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel (download from MajorGeeks here) will work in Windows Vista, it only works for Administrative users. If you need to mount drives for standard or limited users, you must either run the program with administrative rights (less secure) or find another solution.

One such solution that works extreamly well is Virtual CloneDrive by Elaborate Bytes software. CloneDrive can be found under their free software download located at Free CloneDrive Download.

The free version allows a maximum of 8 drives in parallel, you can change the icon for the ‘clone’ drives to display Elabrate Software’s ‘angry sheep’ and you can have the last image to automatically be loaded when Windows starts.