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 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.