Tuesday Tips – Reprinting Receipts

It happens from time to time – a freshly printed customer receipt is eaten by the receipt printer, ruined by a spilled beverage, or somehow damaged. Once great thing about point of sale systems is that you can quickly reprint your most recent customer receipt.

Microsoft RMS Store Operations users can press “Shift” plus “F11” from the point of sale screen to reprint the most recent receipt (no screen shots this week as these instructions are pretty self explanatory).

NCR CounterPoint users can have a reprint button added to the point of sale screen – simply click or press the reprint button to print the most recent receipt.

Are you in the US and in need of no cost retail point of sale advice? I'm happy to help and can be reached on my cell at 208-340-5632 (mountain time) or via email at kevinantosh@gmail.com.

New Fraud Prevention Requirement

Another credit card fraud prevention requirement is in the works specific to MasterCard.  The requirement states that your point of sale system must be able to send a unique identifier where credit card transactions take place.  It is hoped that this unique identifier will allow for a quicker understanding of whether problems might be specific to one merchant or more of a wide spread issue.

There is no deadline set yet related to when this will be an actual requirement but most experts feel that the end of 2014 is a likely deadline.

You can contact me or visit http://www.counterpointpos.com/news/news-counterpoint.htm?do=news&id=862 for more detailed information.

This again stresses the need to stay current on your software maintenance each year - otherwise you no longer qualify for important software updates and could fines or other problems.

Are you in the US and in need of no cost retail point of sale advice? I'm happy to help and can be reached on my cell at 208-340-5632 (mountain time) or via email at kevinantosh@gmail.com.

Cash Registers and Raceways

OK - so I have worked with quite a variety of businesses over the last 14 years to help them implement the best cash register or computer-based point of sale system.  I can add raceways to my list now as we wrapped up the installation of multiple cash registers at Firebird Raceway in Eagle, ID (awesome place!).

Firebird needed some cash and item tracking for their consession stands and gift shops. We'll look at adding ATM's and registers for admissions/ticketing as well.  I have to say that the family that owns and operates the raceway has been a pleasure to work with and this qualifies as one very exciting business to work with.

We went with the Sam4S line of cash registers since we have future options to connect each register together and/or to a computer for centralized reporting and programming. This also gives us future options for integrated credit card processing as well.

If you happen to be in the Boise, ID area, here is a link to the schedule of events at Firebird Raceway - this weekend kicks off some of the more major summer events:
http://www.firebirdonline.com/schedule/Major_Events/major.htm

Be sure to contact me if your venue is searching for a cash register or computer-based point of sale system - we even have systems that allow for assigned venue seating!

New Features in NCR Customer Connect

New Features Added to NCR Customer Connect

I promised to pass along some of the new features added to NCR Customer Connect which the 'behind the scenes' pro-active email marketing part of the NCR CounterPoint point of sale software.  Customer Connect is unique in that it tracks the full marketing cycle down to showing how much revenue was generated off of each email marketing campaign  - something that you can not easily do in Constant Contact.  Here are the new features in Customer Connect:

• Create unique item groups to help target the customers that you want to reach
• Progress on allowing for two way communications within Customer Connect (should be ready by the next Customer Connect release)
• New support phone number and email address include within Customer Connect
• Continued improvements in the speed and efficiency within Customer Connect
• Web tutorials to help you fully utilize Customer Connect

Are you in the US and in need of no cost retail point of sale advice? I'm happy to help and can be reached on my cell at 208-340-5632 (mountain time) or via email at kevinantosh@gmail.com.

Tuesday Tip – Prompt for Price

Microsoft RMS Store Operations and NCR CounterPoint allow you to set up an inventory item as being open when it comes to pricing. This is generally done for items that you really don't want to track individually for inventory and sales reasons. Think of the $1, $2 and $5 grab bins that you see at Wal-Mart – it would be too time consuming to track each and every item so an open-priced item sku is used.

This may seem backwards since a major reason to use a point of sale system is for detailed inventory tracking and sale reporting. However, most stores still have some general items that generate so little profit that it would take too much time to track at an item by item level. Make sense? If not, contact me  and I can give you some additional examples.

RMS Store Operations can go to “Database” then “items” from the manager screen. You can double click on the item or click on the item and then click on “Properties”. Under the items “Options” tab is the checkbox “must enter price at POS”. Here is what the screen looks like:

From the NCR CounterPoint manager screen, go to “Items”, select the item, and the “Other” tab will have a checkbox for “Prompt for Price”:

As to whether it makes sense to use an open priced sku/plu or not depends on your own personal preferences for how detailed or generic you want to be when it comes to tracking each inventory item in your store.

Are you in the US and in need of no cost retail point of sale advice? I'm happy to help and can be reached on my cell at 208-340-5632 (mountain time) or via email at kevinantosh@gmail.com.