All improvement and innovation is brought about because of competition. Technical improvements, like cellular telephones, grew because competition forced the wireless phone manufacturers and carriers to improve or vanish. The same thing probably happens to you in your business. Something changes in your competitive landscape, the technology in your business is different, a new store opens, or the demographics in your community changes and this means you must change your business and fast.

Your competition causes you to take action. You have to study your completion and anything they do that is better than you, you must improve on. If you understand your competition and evaluate your business objectively, your business will improve and you will be a leader and not a follower. After the improving and redesigning, maintaining can be accomplished through quality Point of Sale (POS) software. Don’t complain about your competitor, but do something about it and kick their rear.

Choosing the right point of sale product is only one step in achieving retail success. Learning to properly implement procedures and then learning to manage and react to the information provided is every bit as important as finding the right features in your system.

Without exception, studies show that customer satisfaction with a computer system is directly related to the quality and quantity of education. One study a few years ago determined that upon completion of training, a customer retained at most 80% of the training. In many cases, it was closer to 50%. If that trained person leaves the organization and trains a replacement, the new employee has only 25%-64% true knowledge of the system. A new employee who has to learn the system by guessing may have less than 30% knowledge of the capabilities of the system! Because training is so important, ProphetLine offers training for now and for later.

Therefore, selecting the proper method and amount of training is one of the most important parts of your decision. The training services we provide with ProphetLine POS Software will provide your company with the tools and knowledge needed to understand and utilize your new point-of-sale system to its full potential. ProphetLine offers three methods of training to suit our customers needs.

Controlling inventory investment is a primary reason retailers purchase systems. Properly “timing” inventory means gaining control over cash flow. A well-planned Open-to-Buy lets sales revenue pay for incoming merchandise rather than having to borrow money.

An Open-to-Buy serves as the “budget” for inventory, sales and purchases. The Open-to-Buy report is the “financial statement” for your inventory.

Open-To-Buy has helped many retailers gain financial control of their businesses. With ProphetLine’s Open-To-Buy Module added to your system, you will be able to develop and execute your buying plan easily and accurately. With a properly managed buying plan, you can improve your stock turn rates, cash flow, gross profits and return on inventory investment.
At the end of each month, you can identify and respond to trends as they develop. You can achieve optimum stock turn rates, while keeping inventories at the proper level to support expected sales. Isn’t that better than kicking yourself at the end of the year?

The ProphetLine Inventory Matrix module offers a key feature for retailers who need to keep track of styles of items that are ordered and sold by color and size such as men’s shirts, ladies dresses, golf gloves or shoes. It allows you to easily build a two- or three-dimensional inventory record to track the individual items. It is a true inventory matrix in that you can vary costs and retail within it.

For example, you can order casual shirts by color and style in a small, medium, large and X-large size matrix or order dress shirts with neck size and sleeve length in a two-dimensional grid.

The Inventory Matrix makes it easy to track reorder points by each style, color and size, inventory on-hand, and performance for each item in a matrix group. You may add as much or as little detail to the matrix as you need. For many systems, creating six styles in six colors with thirty-six possible size combinations can take hours. In ProphetLine, it only takes a few minutes.

With the Inventory Matrix Module added, your ProphetLine POS software will automatically print thermal pricing tags and labels each time items are received. You can now verify that you received all the items ordered, in the mix ordered, and ensure that each item has a bar code pricing tag or label on it before it goes on the shelf.

To call up and state that you are looking for POS software and not have a list of priorities is pointless. What then happens is you will buy a glorified cash register and not get the return on investment that should have been your number one objective. If keeping your customers informed of your sales and special events is a priority, then automated email marketing built into your point of sale system would be the number one priority to save you time and money over the year. Make you a list of must have features and what it could mean to your bottom line. A bundled solution for in-store and web store with one low monthly price might be your goal and how that will affect your end of year sales. Have a strategy and plan and do not settle for anything less.

As if retail wasn’t bad enough, credit card companies are raising interest rates on individuals and business that have in the past been good credit risks and paid their bills on time. The banks and merchant service companies need to make a little money to handle the transaction, but the credit card companies are almost a monopoly and do whatever the hell they want. Every time, you as a retailer take a credit card through your POS software, you are probably being charged a rate dictated by Visa, MC and AmX that is too high.

7-Eleven is fighting back and using its 6,300 U.S. stores to send a message to Washington and the credit card industry. Starting this week, the Dallas-based convenience store operator hopes to solicit 1 million signatures on petitions calling for Congress to change what the chain says are unfair and excessive credit card transaction fees. Credit card companies charge retailers a fee for every transaction. The size of the purchase doesn’t matter. And retailers have no power to negotiate the fees, they say. Don’t blame the POS software companies that work hard to keep you PCI DSS compliant and give you good value. It’s the big boys and their lobbyists that are the problem.

Good inventory control is critical to ensure the survival of a retailer during these difficult times. Adequate levels of inventory in relationship to the anticipated sales can’t be accomplished without a plan, preferably an open to buy plan. Having too much or the wrong type of inventory during certain seasons can drastically hurt your cash flow and reduce profits which lead to markdowns and on sale items. Using your departmental comparatives, vendor comparatives and your open to buy planning will ensure you have the best mix to maximize your bottom line. Make sure your point of sale software has these features built in to simplify the inventory management.

If you have your payment card processing running through your POS Software at your business, make sure the POS Software provider has passed all the testing to keep your business compliant.  We have spent tons of time and money making sure our product meets or beats all the standards set-up and you can be comfortable knowing you are compliant if you use ProphetLine POS Software.  The passwords and encryption process are getting a little more complicated as characterize by the Dilbert cartoon below.

The following is a brief explanation taken from Wikipedia. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is a worldwide information security standard assembled by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC). The standard was created to help organizations that process card payments prevent credit card fraud through increased controls around data and its exposure to compromise. The standard applies to all organizations which hold, process, or pass cardholder information from any card branded with the logo of one of the card brands.

Much is being written about internal theft in these trying times. It’s hard enough scrapping out a living without sharing with your silent partners, your employees. Exception reporting is the magic key to stopping a majority of this shrinkage. 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 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. If you don’t look out for your inventory and cash, your silent partner probably will.

Small retailers need to select a POS Software company that can act as their technology staff as well as furnish them software. Never let price be the first question asked, but how is your support and service followed by functionality of the product and will it fit my budget. Small retailers also want a product as good as the big box retailers use, but at a price that can fit their budget.

To try and have the new software work just exactly like the old is a recipe for disaster. This is where the term change or die comes into play. 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.