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ProphetLine POS has been our lifeline for seven years in our four retail stores. The software is robust and offers many more functions and ...
Read MoreSuccessful retail strategy is revolved around price, service and product. You need to be better than your competitors at one of them and competitive with them at the other two. You can’t be something to everybody, so pick a potential customer type that you wish to cater to and build your business around those customer demographics. This will enable you to more clearly understand and put in place your merchandise buying plans. If you have collected sales history from your POS software over the past couple of years, half the battle is won. If this information is not available, you will need to use an educated guess to come as close as possible to the monthly department and class sales over the last year.
The inventory buying process is 90% analyzing the data and 10% your instincts on what will be the fast sellers for the year. It takes work to achieve success in merchandising, but you will be rewarded for this effort. In a successful retail operation, buying and merchandising is the name of the game. The merchandise plan will revolve around who is going to be your best customer type, learning their buying habits and building your business around that person. If you are a new business, install quality POS software that will analyze the data and if you are an existing business with poor inventory analytics, change or die.
With the rising gas prices, you may find your business being effected negatively. What can your POS Software do to help? Enter ProphetLine, POS Software with integrated Web Shopping. ProphetLine for Windows allows you to quickly and easily setup an online store your customers can shop from the comfort of their homes 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.
Call ProphetLine Sales at 800-875-6592 ext. 310 or send an e-mail to sales@prophetline.com for more information
Inventory in your retail location only puts money in the drawer when it is sold, a simple statement that tells the whole story. The better the margins, the more it turns and the less it is marked down, the better the profitability of the location. POS software can give you the vital information to make decisions on the type of inventory to carry, the quantities at a specific time and the optimal price that will give you the best performance.
The most important part of good purchasing is having adequate inventory in stock when needed. This requires planning to determine the needs that will satisfy demand during a certain time period. Before your buying plan is finished, a level of inventory must be determined that will ensure the sale of the greatest number of units. POS software that takes historical sales data and automatically updates your retail stock ledger and open to buy plan will give you that edge that makes your buying efficient.
There are other options to pre-planning your inventory purchases; a visual check (there goes the day with the family), a weekly physical count (no sleep tomorrow night), stub control (pre-computer days). Procrastination is saying to yourself, if only I had not put off the decision to buy that POS software that did the merchandise planning for me.
ProphetLine POS software is designed to maximize the benefits you need to grow your retail business. Your small business is your livelihood, a way of life and retirement fund. We would like to think, ProphetLine POS Software/Retail Systems can help you add to your financial strength in these tough economic times. We work hard to develop a relationship of cooperation with our customers and strive to help improve their profitability.
At ProphetLine, we spend most of our time trying to figure ways to enhance our POS software to better enable you to maximize your profits. 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.
ProphetLine is not perfect, but we strive to make it better every day. When you purchase ProphetLine, all the bells and whistles are included. We do not sell an entry level, stripped down version to entice you buy and then nickel and dime you to pay more and add-on functionality. We build in all the functionality you would expect to find in quality POS Software, accounting, customer marketing, internet communications and much more. Start your business out right and make the decision to improve the quality of your business and life.
I would like to have a dollar for every time I heard that line when showing ProphetLine POS software to a prospective client. You go through the whole demo and the client gets hung up on one little thing there other system did and yours does not do. 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. The make it or break it of a POS software implementation is not so much the function of the software as the willingness of the client to change and adapt their business processes to fit the new POS Software/Retail Management System. 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. When you look at the new POS software, look at the big picture and the improvement in productivity and financial reward. 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.
– By Jeff Haefner
After helping thousand of retailer businesses select POS/Retail Management Software over the last 12 years, guess what I’ve found to be the most common (and critical mistake) that retailers make when choosing their software?
They don’t spend enough time evaluating the company!
Surprised?
Don’t be. It’s easy to overlook the actual company that will be providing you with service and support.
Most retailers fall into the trap of simply evaluating the actual POS software and considering the price, but they don’t come close to spending enough time evaluating the company.
So why is this so important and what should you be doing about it?
For starters, just recognize that you’re buying a relationship, not just a product. You’ll be in continual contact with your POS software company for software updates, support, training, hardware and consulting.
This is extremely important!
There are thousands of POS software companies, and dozens come and go every year. It’s important to find a company that has been established and has a solid customer base.
In addition, the company’s level of support could be the difference between a good experience and a bad one. When computers are involved, you’re bound to have problems. There’s nothing more frustrating than implementing software and having problems that the software company can’t help you with.
Let me ask you a few questions to help you understand why the company is so important…
Trust me; it’s not fun to work with a software company that doesn’t have good service.
How to select the right type of company
In order to choose the right company, there are several important questions to ask your self.
Is the POS Software Vendor Financially Stable?
It’s extremely important that the software is supplied by a solid vendor who will be around for many years.
If the software vendor has financial issues, that could affect their ability to deliver new products in a timely manner. In addition, you need a company that will be around a long time.
How can you tell if the company is financially stable? Here are a few items to consider:
What is the POS software vendor’s vision and future direction?
Every business has a vision and an idea for their future direction. Does that direction include marketing to your industry? Will the company continue to provide software enhancements for your industry?
You should find out the vendor’s vision and future direction. This could tell you whether this company is a good match for you.
Does the POS software vendor provide great customer service?
Many times too much focus is placed on the functionality and technology of a software company and not enough on its character. One of the first things that happen after purchasing POS software is you establish contact with the support staff.
Will the support staff answer your questions in a timely manner?
What are their hours?
Is there a manual or on-line help?
Do they have a service oriented attitude?
Does the company have honorable ethics and character?
Is this a company you will feel comfortable doing business with?
In addition, I would ask the POS software vendor all of the following questions, and then ask some of their references the same questions:
Jeff Haefner is a nationally known author and retail software consultant. He has past experience as a programmer, business consultant, network administrator, and POS software salesmen. He’s also the author of "The Point of Sale Software Buyers Guide – How to Choose POS Software and Avoid Problemsâ€. You can learn more about his consulting services and software selection tools by visiting: www.possoftwareguide.com
By: Alan Fisher, President, Retail Business 101 alan.fisher@retailbusiness101.com
Last year, I conducted a system search for a large retailer at a municipal golf facility and I found that most POS software companies still do not understand what inventory management is. The golf course selected ProphetLine, a system that specialized in retail because the typical golf POS products could not provide a small percentage of their inventory needs. Most of these companies believe that inventory management is (1) replenishment and (2) sales and gross margin reports.
Sales and gross margin reports may be important information, but it rarely leads to any future decision. It is too much detail. Good retail management does not start out as detail management.
Could you imagine a controller or yourself wanting to review the financial performance of your business and then looking at the general ledger entries? Of course not. You review a financial statement that provides summarized comparative data to either previous periods and/or a budget. Then, if advertising and marketing expense has increased 15% over the acceptable numbers, you would try to determine what had specifically led to the increase and then decide if it was acceptable or not. If it hit the target, you would probably not be searching through the numbers. Reviewing a sales and gross margin report is tantamount to reviewing general ledger entries.
By now, I am sure you are wondering what is important for managing retail in the golf industry. The most important statistic in all of retail is the Stock Turn Rate (STR) and you should hear the Hallelujah Chorus in the background when these words are spoken. The STR measures how many times an invested dollar is sold over a year.
To simplify the understanding of this, let’s look at the life of one solitary item in a fictitious golf shop. The buyer selects a supposedly great golf shirt that costs $25 and she (since most great apparel buyers are female) intends to sell it for $75 (a planned margin of 66.7%). However, that shirt sits untouched in the golf shop throughout the entire year until someone comes in on Christmas Eve and buys it as a last minute gift for an unloved relative. On the gross margin report, the buyer can pat herself on the back about how it earned that planned $50 and 66.7% profit. Since STR is not a part of the system reporting, it looks good for profit percentages.
However, a second buyer bought the same shirt for her shop and, after four months, decided that the shirt was a mistake. So she reduced it to $40 and was able to sell (unload) it. However, this shop was able to pocket $15 in profits and reinvest the original $25 into some product that had a higher likelihood of selling at a reasonable profit. So the second product sold at $60, earning another $35 in profits and giving the shop the opportunity to reinvest a third time. At the end of the year, this shop actually looked worse on the gross margin report because it only earned 53.1% in profits. However, there was $85 in profits instead of $50. The second shop had a STR of roughly 3.0 while the first shop had 1.0.
This is the same concept as investing in the stock market. As soon as you realize that your investment is not going to earn the return by the time you need it, you dump it and reinvest in something that can accomplish both the time and the return. Your POS software should accomplish this for you automatically.
I received the following Dilbert panel (click here for full Dilbert)today from a friend stating ‘this is you’.
He’s right, but how many times have we all receive that documentary e-mail with more pages than War and Peace, no paragraphs or line breaks and is a massive clump of plain text? Then to top it off, once you finish reading it you are still unsure what it said, why you received it or even if it was to you. Miscommunication, lack of a common terminology and vague information can cause/cost lots of damage. Here are some tips from Lee Froschheiser of MAP (Management Action Programs) Consulting on communicating clearly. Read the full article and get more detail on the below points by clicking here.
Here’s the primer and some of its salient points:
1. Prepare how you will communicate.
2. Deliver the message.
3. Receive the message.
4. Evaluate the effectiveness of the communication afterwards.
5. Take corrective action as necessary.
