There is a large amount of big companies gobbling up small companies in the POS Software arena. Every time we turn around, one of our former small competitors is being bought by a large publicly traded company. What does this mean for the small retailer? You will probably lose that intimate relationship you might of had in the past. The publicly traded companies are only interested in quarterly results and this leads to a lack of innovation and a good long term strategy.

ProphetLine is a small to mid-sized POS Software company that works at customer relationships and the long term goal of improving the retailer’s technology advantages. We have no pressure to meet quarterly goals which can hamper the quality and innovation of the product. When you think about buying your first or next POS Software product, ask yourself if being just another number is adequate or would you prefer to have a company that thinks of themselves as your business partner and friend.

ProphetLine POS Software is a high performance all-in-one retail management solution that makes store technology simple. When other software companies tell you their software integrates with other applications, it usually means complicated, technical knowhow is needed. Forget about import/export, "integration" and other technical procedures, because ProphetLine POS Software is one complete system.

All sales and purchasing data is automatically/seamlessly moved to the Retail Stock Ledger to give retailers quick views of the vendor, department and class level performance of their inventory. If a department is under or over stocked, or certain vendors don’t perform as well as others, you know immediately. Open to buy plans can be built with full confidence that all the data is concise and factual. Open to Buy plans are also updated continuously by the system as months pass, resulting in truly perpetual plans. All these functions are built into ProphetLine and not add ons that require the "easy" integration and technical procedures that other POS software companies promise.

In our fast paced globally connected world, I find myself asking potential meeting attendees ‘what time is it where you’re at?’. This is just a common question these day with us conferencing/doing demos of POS Software with others in multiple time zones and/or on the other side of the globe.

This year could make that question a little more difficult to communicate as the change to Daylight Savings time has been moved. Although the effect sounds minor and most computer systems already have an update available to keep your time correct, the update may or may not be applied to all computers involved.

When you schedule that conference on March 11th to demo the new ProphetLine POS Software, will it be at 11 CST, 10 CST or both (if some computers are unpatched and don’t change the time correctly)?

Want to make things worse, what about your VCR and the recording you are counting on of ‘Heroes’ or ‘CSI’. Will the time be right or will you get to find out what comes on after the show you wanted to see?

Install updates for your computers and cell phones if available. Verify the date on the computer, in your POS Software, your calendar software and other time sensitive applications. Most vendors will have some utility to check/update the dates you already have. Microsoft advises heavy calendar users to download a small program known as ‘tzmove’ (time zone move). It is designed to retrofit all previous appointments to the new daylight saving rules.

How many retailers look at an exception report daily? My guess is probably very few. You need to know everything that goes through your Point of Sale Software that is outside the normal, full priced transaction. When I look at this report, I would like to see which clerks are discounting, marking down, backing out of transactions, trying to void or anything outside of a normal full retail sale. If an employee shows up on the exception report many times, this will tell me that I ether have a poorly trained employee or they are attempting to manipulate the POS Software. Looking at the exception report will give you the ability to isolate a problem in a day, rather than finding the problem a month down the road and thousands of lost dollars. Every day you should look at a sales summary report, an operations summary report, exception report and a stock evaluation report. After you have done this and had that second cup of coffee, you can feel good about being a well informed business owner.

In today’s highly competitive retail environment, today’s hottest selling item can be tomorrow’s old news. If your current Point of Sale Software does not give you inventory views for all of your retail store locations, you are playing the game blind. Visibility across your chain is vital to keep the fast moving items fully stocked. Automatic re-order points are critical to maintain adequate inventory and to prevent overstocking.

Controlling inventory investment is the primary reason retailers should purchase POS Software/Store Retail systems. You need a retail stock ledger to give you the precise information to understand the movement of your inventory and a well thought out Open- To-Buy plan to forecast your future needs. A well-planned Open-to-Buy program lets sales revenue pay for incoming merchandise rather than having to borrow money. With ProphetLine’s Open-To-Buy, built into their POS Software, you will be able to develop and execute your buying plan easily and accurately. You can now have a managed buying plan, which will improve your stock turn rates, cash flow, gross profits and return on inventory investment.

Some of the nation’s top retailers are named as defendants in a lawsuit that claims about 50 retail chains are violating a provision to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) that makes it illegal for a retailer to print more than the last five digits of the credit or debit card number and they also can’t print the card’s expiration date on the receipt. Most of the phases of the act took effect on December of 2006. A majority of retailers and the POS Software they use are compliant and the consumer has nothing to worry about. If you are a retailer that is using non-compliant POS Software, you need to have this resolved immediately.

Probably nothing, except for the fact that all the concession stands and souvenir stands use POS Software. One day in the near future you will probably see the roaming concessionaires with wireless portable devices that can alert the concession stand when they will be out of product and when they will be returning to replenish. It will also include credit and debit cards for payment in the stands and pre-paid value added cards that can be purchased before the event.

This blog is just a lead in to wish you a great Super Bowl Sunday. This is almost like a National Holiday with all of the hype surrounding it. To cut down on the too many men on the field penalty, we can put RFID tags in the players jerseys and know who is in and how many. Monday I will try to blog on something a little more relevant to POS Software.

I recently exhibited at the National Retail Federation Show in New York. Mostly this is a show for the big retailers and the vendors that service them; like IBM, SAP, etc. Every now and then an attendee would come by and complain that no one would even talk to them because they were 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 as well as furnish them software. Small retailers also want a product equal to or better than what the big box retailers use, but at a price that can fit their budget.

Because most small retailers can’t afford a massive POS Software deployment, they must be willing to change and adapt their business processes to fit the new Point of Sale/Retail Store Management Software. All POS software products have strong points which made you select them in the first place and small deficiencies you were willing to overlook in the selection process to get the new and improved functions. To try and have the new software work just exactly like the old is a recipe for disaster. By the time you program for the old functionality, de-bug and go way over budget, the gains in productivity are mostly negated. The POS software you select to improve your business should be 95% of what you are looking for, straight out of the box and return on investment must be your top priority.

Look around at your retail store and one obvious conclusion you can draw is this: you are NOT Wal-Mart. But you do have more in common with the mega chain than you might think. You may be surprised to learn that a so-called “Big Retailer” tool, the computer, may bring you even better dividends than it does the big box discounter down the street. The right POS Software in the hands of a diligent retail store owner can give them a return on their investment in as little as six months and provide at least a 10 percent boost to their bottom line. Just installing a point of sale/retail management system imposes certain controls on your business that improve profitability. Spending the time to learn and take advantage of its many capabilities brings even more.

Of course, POS Software doesn’t do this all by itself. It takes commitment, not just of the dollars required (which you’ll quickly recover) but of the time and resources to learn about and use your new system. First make sure you select a quality Point of Sale System that has all the functionality you need. Then invest the time you once spent drowning in paper to making use of your new system, and you’ll soon enjoy increased margins, sales and profits — probably even better than Wal-Mart’s!

Every POS Software company has to continue their upgrade path to keep their customers on the latest and greatest. This said, how many of them keep their customers on a path that does not make all of their existing hardware obsolete? ProphetLine is a POS Software/Retail Store Systems developer that always makes an effort to keeps their customers on a backwards compatible path for all existing hardware. We have three printer set-ups which support older drivers for legacy peripherals, Windows drivers, USB and network support.

As a responsible POS Software vendor, we look at this as an opportunity to maintain good relationships with our customers. The idea behind this is to keep them on new, improved POS Software that does not obsolete itself each time we have a new upgraded product. The only times we have failed to keep backwards compatibility is when some customers have upgraded to a new operating system that did not allow for this backwards compatibility. It is much easier to not worry about programming around older legacy issues and write only for new accessories and peripherals, but would we have happy customers?