If you have your payment card processing running through your point of sale system at your business, make sure the 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. 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.

In Windows 7, Microsoft has worked out the Vista problems that kept many retail people downgrading back to Windows XP, but now Microsoft must fight the economy and the fact that many companies are cutting way back on IT spending and capital expenditures. Many consumers and businesses will upgrade to Windows 7 through new PC purchases, but they're not likely to upgrade existing systems until there is a better feel for what retail is going to be like in the near future. Windows 7 may be a tough sell for the foreseeable future, but it is a good upgrade from Vista and all its problems.

It seems that all that goes around will come around again. Layaway was thought to be a thing of the past until the soft economy forced customers and retailers to look at different ways to keep business up. Layaway gives customers a chance to purchase an item that they possible could not otherwise afford. It is a win, win situation if they can shop and pay for the items they need over time. You the retailer are retaining the item and receiving deferred income until the merchandise is paid for. For this process to work well, you need POS software that will accurately account for all payment activity and inform customers through a layaway statement how their account stands. If it is a cumbersome process, the benefits of offering layaway is negated by the poor accountability of your current POS software or obsolete paper trail you are using. What’s old is now new again.

We have all heard the question ‘is the glass half full or half empty’, right? The answer has been debated for centuries if not longer, but does it really matter? Some would say it does and projects your beliefs or your outlook on life (half empty and you look at life from a more pessimistic point of view). When it really starts to matter is when you are trying to solve issues. Being in the Point of Sale Software business for almost 12 years now, I have heard many causes of ‘it’s the software’s fault we are not getting more business’. While poorly written software can disrupt business it is rarely all ‘the software’s fault’. Business success is much more than just ringing up sales and moving customers through a line. It is much more about the experience of the customer. How big is a deal is the customers experience – did you know that XP in Windows XP is short for eXPerience? Microsoft knows, at least in naming, that the experience can make or break an application.

Case in point 1. I just returned from a trip to Antigua. The white sand beaches were amazing, the food was wonderful, the resort (all inclusive) was nothing short of impressive. How could anyone have any issues in a place like this? Well, let me tell you. Our luggage didn’t quite make the trip all the way with us. Now this was not the resorts fault, but American Airlines. The resorts answer, ‘you will need to check with the airlines and it might get here tonight or tomorrow’. While this is valid, the resort could have said something like ‘what can we do till your luggage gets here? Do you need a toothbrush, robe, etc?’. The luggage arrived the next day and things were better. The next customer service issue came with getting a robe to the room. I called, the concierge said it would be there shortly and when I called back 4 hours later (after a swim in the ocean, I didn’t wait 4 hours just for the robe), they said oh, we will get that right over. This time it only took 30 minutes. Where is the customer service at this point? Now you might be saying ‘they are on Caribbean time’ and yes, I expect things in the Caribbean to be a bit slower, but this was too far to even call it ‘Caribbean time’.

Case in point 2. I went to the gift shop for a snickers candy bar (sometimes you just have to have a snickers). I had bought the last one on the shelf the night before. The clerk looked at me when I asked if they had any more and then looked puzzled. She looked at the shelf and stated ‘I don’t know’. She then picked up the phone and called the other gift shop (small remote shop about 100 yards away) and checked with them. They had them, so I walked over and made my purchase. Again being in the POS Software business for a while, I wondered if their software had the ability to look up the quantity on hand at the remote location. I know it was a centralized system as the data was summarized from the different places I had ordered items and billed them to the room. This lead me to believe they could have easily looked the item up in their POS Software and answered the question without ever calling the other location. The call could have still be made if the stock quantity showed a low amount of stock which would go back to the customer service side ‘let me double check as the computer says they have a couple, but I want to verify before you walk over there’.

POS Software is not enough to keep your business afloat in today’s economy. Know you customers and show them you understand they are having a tougher time as well and make them feel you care enough to take time with them. Know your Retail Software so you can better assist your customers in decisions and or yourself in knowing your stock quantities, turn rates, profits, aging, etc. Business success is not about how little or how much you spend on your POS Software, but more about how wisely you invest and how wisely you use your investment.

At ProphetLine, we understand your need for value added features. We include features in our Point of Sale Software that many other charge thousands of dollars extra just to enable such as a Retail Stock Ledger, Open to Buy, Customer Marketing, Inventory Matrix, Order Tracking, Push Selling, Touch Screen, etc. We want to help you grow your business by empowering you with the knowledge needed to use your Retail Software to the fullest and assist you in better customer service because you know your stock, margins, and have more time for your customers.