Doing Things His Way
I was talking to the owner of an auto parts store the other day. His store is in a town of about 5,000 and is very profitable. He remains profitable because he is constantly changing his business to deal with the changes from his competition. In the same town was a store owned by one of the large program groups. The program group corporation took over the store a few years ago from some partners that couldn't make a go of it. A few years later the corporate store closed. I must assume that the store was not making money for or the corporation would have kept it open. After the corporation closed the store, representatives of the same corporation contacted the owner of the profitable store. These representatives tried to convince the store owner to take over the failed store or to convert his profitable store into their program group.The whole idea is insane. Twice people have tried to make money running a store the way that the program group says to run a store and both times they failed. Now they are asking somebody who is making money doing things his way to change and do things their way. That means that will tell him that he must spend an incredible amount of money on one of their signs boosting their business image. They will tell him what parts that he must buy and what items that he can't sell. The will tell him how to lay out his store. They will offer him many add on options from the corporate plan all of which cost big bucks. They will force him to buy their store POS system which makes it easier for them to control his business. Every one of these things that he must do limits his ability to make more money. To be fair, for every store owner that does things his way and prospers there are more that fail and they usually fail quickly.
Labels: changing a business, doing things his way, insane decisions, Program group, Store POS System
Special one time orders
A common special one time order is the yearly order for lawn and garden items. Come spring time when love is in the air you had better have sent in your spring order for lawn and garden items long ago. Otherwise, you are going to take a beating on freight charges. A first cut for ordering a part number is to order what you sold last year less any that might be left over from last year. The next step is to look for lost sales on the item and to maybe order more to cover any lost sales on the item from last year. You also have to look for supersedes and order the new part number if the old one has been superseded. Your STORE POS SYSTEM should have all of this information immediately available for you in a format that your supplier can use. Finally, you have to look at your latest bank statement and figure out what you can afford to order.
Another type of special one time orders is as follows. A wholesale supplier may offer their customers special prices on fast moving items with an extended payment schedule. For example, they might offer a 10% discount on some minimum purchase of lighting items and the terms might be 30-60-90. That is, you pay 1/3rd in 30 days, another 1/3rd in 60 days and the final 1/3rd in 90 days. Assuming that you don't have plenty of extra cash, you want to make sure that you sell what you ordered before the 90 days is up so that you can afford to make those payments. Here again you would look on your STORE POS SYSTEM at the sales of the specially priced items over the same 90 day period last year. Depending on your financial strength and sales outlook, you might order more or less than you sold last year.
Labels: lost sales, sales history, Special one time orders, Store POS System
Buying a Cash Receipt Printer
Invoices are a cost of doing business. However, you might want to think about also using paper tape receipts for cash customers. It is a simple calculation to figure out if adding a paper tape receipt printer to your STORE POS SYSTEM is a good investment. When all is said and done, you have to figure that you will spend about $300 to buy and install a paper tape receipt printer for cash sales. Beyond that your expense for paper tape is nil compared with invoices. You take the price of your invoices in pennies and divide that into 30000. For example, if you pay $.02 for each of your invoices then you would get 30000/2 = 15000. That tells you that you would need to run 15,000 cash receipts to make the printer pay for itself. Since any STORE POS SYSTEM will tell you how many cash invoices you run in month, it is simple to figure how many months it will take for the cash receipt printer to pay for itself.
Labels: invoices, paper tape receipts, Store POS System
Selling With a Smile
There is a lyric for an Eagle's song that goes something like "Some women know how to open a door with just a smile." These same women can do wonders selling with just a smile. In particular I think about an associate that owned and operated an auto parts store for several years. She had a woman working for her that had a special talent selling with just a smile. Even now some 25 or so years later she talks about this woman's ability to sell. When a man walked in the door of the store, this woman had a talent for estimating how much money he had in his pocket. She made it her goal to take every cent of it. What is more, she did it and the man walked out the door a happy customer and a smile from the woman. Often she was able to sell at list price. Of course, she was allowed to set the selling price on their STORE POS SYSTEM at the time of sale.
There are a couple of other out of the ordinary selling situations with women that I can remember. One woman would lean forward on the counter when talking to men. She got a lot of attention and brought in many regular customers. However, sometimes that attention can cause problems. One parts store had a young attractive woman delivering parts to repair shops. When she arrived at a repair shop, all work stopped until she left. That was all well and good until the wives of the repair shop owners noticed this and complained to the parts store owner. The young woman was soon history and the replacement driver was a pleasant lady in her 60s.
Labels: Selling to men, Store POS System, using a smile to sell
Watching out for problems
The other day an associate was telling me how she looked for problems when she owned an auto parts store. She scanned the daily summary from her store POS system examining the gross profit margin for each invoice. Those invoices that are below or above the threshold that she established for her business were a concern. She looked closely at the items on the invoice, the customer that made the purchase and the clerk that ran the invoice. Sometimes a low profit margin was related to a pricing error, an employee giving a friend a price break at her expense or the customer received a rebate. Rebates are a necessary part of business for some products and hopefully your store POS system will account for your rebate when computing your daily gross profit margin. Also, store POS systems will often tag invoices on the daily summary when a sales clerk sells an item at a price different from what should have been priced to that customer. Tagged invoices beg for your attention. Scanning through invoices on a regular basis is not fun, but it helps you stop small problems from becoming big problems.
Labels: daily summary, gross profit margin, Store POS System
Keep Control While on Travel
Many store owners or managers want to control their store even when they don't show up for work. It is easy to do and the cost is minor. This can be a real godsend for those that have to be gone for health problems, family matters, long overdue vacations or whatever. You only need a fixed address for your internet connection, any of the widely available inexpensive software packages designed for this application, a laptop computer and an internet connection where you are staying while away from work. The biggest expense is the laptop and there are many new ones that are under $400. If you want to print reports, you will have to bring along a printer and you can get good new laser printers for under $130. Be sure to save the boxes so that you can ship them to your destination with minimal hassle. Most hotels and motels, many restaurants and even airports have wireless internet connections available. Sitting in your home, hotel room or vacation home you can use your Store POS System to do almost everything that you could if you were sitting in your office working on the computer. The one important thing that you can't do is to remove your backup media and put it in a safe place. Hopefully, an employee will do this for you. Oh yes, the users that I know of that manage from remote locations have not had any problems with computer viruses. However, one would do well to resist the temptation to surf the web on either your server computer at the office or your laptop for remote computing.
Labels: backups, computer viruses, Manage while you are gone, Store POS System
Another Different Way to Make Money in the Parts Business
Something that I have seen on a few occasions is people opening a store with the intent to sell the store once they have turned it into a profitable business. Essentially they are banking on their superior business skills to allow them to create a thriving business where many others will fail. Of course, some of the success of these ventures came from the real estate boom over the last several years. However, they study the area where they are going to build their business and do their homework in order to find a good location at an excellent price. An important part of the plan is to have sufficient money to buy the land and building for their needs. That fixes a major part of the cost to do business even before they open their front door. Next they work on containing the daily costs to do business. Their buying decisions for the products that they sell are based on quality and price not on convenience. They may buy from as many as a hundred or more suppliers. They work hard to keep their expenses at a minimum. They work with a minimum number of employees, they have a minimum number of phone lines and cell phones, and they keep their Store POS System cost to a minimum. You name it and they spend the minimum amount that they need. They are usually knowledgeable in the business that they plan to open. In these days most auto parts stores are struggling to survive. However, I have seen a person with no experience in the auto parts business open an auto parts store and turn it into a money making business. He paid good wages to hire people with experience in the parts business to teach him the business. Most important, he knew how to run a business. I hate to say it but it seems clear that in the parts business, knowledge of the parts business is not nearly as important as management skills.
Labels: containing costs, Parts store, Real estate, Store POS System
Different Ways to Make Money in the Parts Business
If you are an independent retailer selling mass produced items such as many types of light bulbs, your competition is mass retailers. Mass retailers are going to win that competition every day of the week. Their cost for product is way below yours, their employees need minimal training and get minimum wages, and their store hours are much longer than yours. Time and again I have seen independent retailers spot a niche and make a good profit filling a niche. For example, suppose that there is an item that only one person in 10,000 will need in a year. A knowledgeable retailer talking with a customer can determine the need for that item and a mass retailer doesn't even want to go there. In that situation the independent retailer might stock the item and sell it for 10 times what he paid for it and the customer is happy to have it. If you do this enough times, you have a business with no competitors. Equally important, your customer will immediately think of you when they need another rare item. A similar business is ordering specialty items for customers. It is a labor intensive business. You must develop a fool proof routine on your Store POS System for tracking deposits, tracking the special orders, contacting customers and returning those items ordered by mistake. Over the years a retailer will learn where to buy those hard to find items. However, even so a retailer has to be willing to search for those odd items that customers sometimes need.
Labels: Independent retailer, mass retailers, niche market, Store POS System
Problems with Electric Fuel Pumps
A knowledgeable gentleman that works for a major automotive parts manufacturer told me the other day that his employer loses tens of millions of dollars per year because of new fuel pumps that are returned as defective and they are not defective. I know from personal experience that this is a problem. A local mechanic charged me $1200 in parts and labor and was not able to fix what turned out to be a fuel problem. Another mechanic chased the problem down to either a corroded connection or a relay in the fuel pump electrical system. He cleaned the corroded connection and replaced the relay and it has been running perfectly since then. When we on site working on Store POS Systems, we look for ideas to help other customers. The other day I saw a fuel pump tester in a parts store. It was quite a gadget. It had a pressure regulator, a battery and connectors for the fuel input and output of the pump. You merely set the pressure regulator for the operating pressure for the vehicle, hook the battery to the fuel pump, hook the hose connections to the fuel pump and start the fuel pump running. Assuming that the fuel pump is good it will pump a specified volume of fuel in a specified time. In reality it will pump a lot of fuel or it won't. At this time there is no doubt as to whether the fuel pump is defective or not. Needless to say this parts store does not send back any fuel pumps unless they are really defective. They also save the mechanics a lot of labor.
If the fuel pump is not the problem, it requires a lot of labor to chase down the problem in the fuel pump electrical system. You have to drop the tank and make several voltage measurements on the fuel pump electrical system with the fuel pump under full load. You are usually looking for a measurable voltage across some part of the electrical system. In reality the only measurable voltage should be across the fuel pump itself.
Labels: Electric Fuel Pumps, Fuel pump electrical system, Store POS System
Using Bar Code Scanners
Bar code scanners can save labor in many situations. Checking in deliveries is much faster and more accurate than counting items by hand. You merely pick up an item, pass it in front of a scanner and put it into a tub to be shelved. Taking inventory also is much quicker and more accurate with a bar code scanner. You merely pick up items from the shelf, pass them in front of a scanner and put them back on the shelf.
I was interested in how automotive mass retailers sell with bar code scanners. The employees working the counter look up the parts using electronic cataloging on their Store POS System. Once they find the part, the employee goes to the shelf and picks up the part. The customer looks at the part and makes a decision whether to buy the part or not. Assuming the customer chooses to buy the part, it is put on a sell shelf and sold by a cashier using a bar code scanner. This guarantees that the part going out the door is the same part as is on the invoice. If the employee grabbed the wrong part by mistake the customer may be annoyed, but at least the Store POS System's inventory is correct. Contrast this with how many parts stores sell the same part. When they look up the part with their electronic cataloging, the Store POS System usually makes it convenient to put the part directly onto an invoice. If the employee picks up the wrong part by mistake not only is the customer annoyed, there are two mistakes in the Store POS System's inventory. One might think about using a system that is similar to that used by the automotive mass retailers.
Labels: Bar Code scanners, counting newly delivered stock, Store POS System, taking inventory
Computer System for Warehouse with Captive Stores
This option of MIB was written in 1985 for a Midwest warehouse that has 23 captive stores. It was meant to be a simple inexpensive system and it continues to be that even today. I doubt that they spend $100 per store per year for support and hardware maintenance. Here a captive store means that the warehouse owns the stores. Each of the stores and the warehouse has their own computer. The stores are responsible for invoicing, received on accounts and reconciling the finish day reports with the daily deposits. The warehouse is responsible for daily stock orders, pricing the inventory, tracking interstore transfers, authorizing charge customers and mailing charge statements.
Interstore transfers are an important part of this business for a couple of reasons. First, the trucks delivering the daily stock orders travel the same route making the deliveries and on the return home. This means that a truck can pick up a part at one store and deliver it to another for minimal cost. This allows these stores in rural areas, in most cases, to have a needed part within a few hours rather than over night. Second, slow moving parts are kept in stores rather than in the warehouse. Thus, there is some chance that it can be sold directly from the store but for sure it can be moved from one store to another in at most one day and most of the time within a few hours.
The routine for daily stock orders is a two step process.
Step 1. The warehouse manager connects to the stores one at a time. He first down loads a file with any interstore transfers. He then has the store computer run a stock order. These two steps take a few seconds. He then disconnects from the store and connects to the next store and repeats the same steps.
Step 2. After he has connected to all of the stores, the manager starts connecting to the stores again one at a time. He down loads the store stock order into the warehouse computer and immediately prints an invoice for the stock order. Once the invoice is printed, the system creates a posting file for the store. The posting file and any interstore transfers from Step 1 are posted into the store. This completes the computer part of the daily stock order.
I was amazed that the warehouse manager posts the order to the store before the stock is pulled. However, the manager assured me that it is rare that when the computer says that they have a part, that they don't have it. Even then most of the time the error was because the part was put on the wrong shelf when it was originally delivered from the manufacturer. The error is usually corrected within hours and the part is delivered to the store the following day.
Labels: Auto Parts Warehouse, Captive Stores, Store POS System
Avoiding Computer Viruses On Your Store POS System
It seems as though if somebody uses the internet for finding parts or any other application, sooner or later they are going to get a computer virus. I myself misspelled the name of a web site a few years ago. Immediately, a porno site flashed on the screen and my antivirus program started screaming at me to shut down the internet connection because I was being attacked by a virus. I turned off the power on the computer but had visions of losing all of my information on that computer. I was lucky that time because the antivirus program worked that time. Another instance a few years later and it did not work. A while back I remember reading that somebody hacked into a Microsoft web site in South Korea. It seems to me that if Billy Gates can't protect his own web site, the rest of us are vulnerable. The only way to be safe is to not use your computer on the internet. We at MIB use that notion to take a slightly different path to internet security. We strongly recommend to our customers that their Store POS System's server is never used on the internet. However, each of their MIB work stations can do double duty as an MIB work station and have internet access. Moreover, the MIB work stations communicate with the server via serial connections. This means that a virus that reaches a work station can't infect the server. The worst case is that a work station is infected. In that case you merely reformat the hard drive on the work station and reinstall the operating system. No important information is lost and the only inconvenience is losing use of a work station for roughly an hour.
Labels: Computer Virus, Internet Access, Store POS System
A Case for Hiring Minorities
I remember talking a store owner back in 1981. The store is located in the town where I live which has a majority Hispanic population and a large Native American or Indian population. He mentioned that in the past he had an Indian that worked for him who was now deceased. He said that sometimes you could look at the counter and there would be 4 sales people with no customers and there would be 6 Indian customers lined up to buy from the one Indian sales person. I watched a similar situation occur in a town that has a majority Indian population. There were no Indian sales people but there was an Indian janitor. Every time an Indian walked in they would head straight to the janitor and try to get information from him. The janitor would then have to lead them over to a sales person. Finally, I saw two situations in the South that got my attention. First, there was a small store in a small city with a 90% black population. The owner and one employee worked there and both were white. Second, was a store in a racially mixed community. It seemed to me that many if not most of the customers were black mechanics. The owner treated all customers with respect. His delivery man on the other hand waited until the owner was not around to tell me that he didn't like "niggers". That attitude was sooner or later going to show up when he dealt with customers and you have to get rid of employees like that. Time and again I see situations like these that are obvious opportunities to increase sales by going the extra mile to hire a minority and making sure that your existing employees treat everybody with respect. Yes, you may need to train minority employees but with electronic cataloging available on most Store POS Systems, it is much easier to train people today. Yes, their culture is different and you may have to make allowances for it. Yes, you may not like doing this sort of thing, but business is business. Oh yes, it is also the right thing to do ethically. I remember a friend that lived in an area with a large immigrant Haitian population. He didn't like the Haitian culture but he swallowed his pride and hired one because he knew that would increase his sales to Haitians.
Labels: Hispanics, Indians, Minority Employees, Store POS System
Hard to Reconcile
I had a conversation a while back with a representative of a large automotive program group. He was clearly a company man through and through. After our conversation was over, it was hard for me to reconcile some things that he said. I know of a few stores that had sold their stores to this program group over the years. The people that sold to this corporation told us that these corporate stores added more inventory and installed the latest and greatest store pos systems from the corporation. Also, it turned out that in each case the sales at these stores had dropped dramatically. I asked the representative if this was typical. He assured me that this was typical. He went on to say that the corporation would prefer to have another individual buy and run the store. He then said that what with the parts business like it is, there was little chance that somebody would want to buy a parts store. From what he said, it seems that a mega-corporation with unlimited cash, vast managerial skills and superb marketing skills can't find, train and retain managers that can run a parts store nearly as well as an owner. In other words these corporations don't know how to run individual stores well. However, these same corporations continue to try to convince the owners of affiliated stores to run their stores the same way that the corporations run their stores. Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." Either this corporation does not care if their affiliated store succeed or their management fits the definition of insanity. It seems to me that if the corporation wanted their affiliated stores to succeed, they would make it as easy as possible for the owners of the affiliated stores to run their stores however they want.
Labels: insanity, Program group, Store POS System
Employee Theft
In most cases employee theft is more an irritant than a make or break issue. One charge customer with a large credit balance going bankrupt causes you more financial loss than a life time of petty theft from an employee. However, in most businesses employee theft causes more financial loss than customer theft. Be aware that there are actions that encourage employee theft.
* A simple rule is that a good owner does not steal from his employees nor anybody else. If employees are part of a profit sharing program and they see the boss stealing from the company, that even gives an honest employee an incentive to steal. A boss that steals from anybody creates an atmosphere of dishonesty.
* The boss should make it clear that managers and employees are trusted equally. If you as a boss make it clear that you trust a manager more than employees, then your employees are hesitant to turn in a manager who is stealing. Moreover, a manager is usually in a better position to steal more than any other employee. I remember a situation when an employee went to the owner concerning a manager that was stealing. The first thing out of the owner's mouth was to fire the employee. However, the owner changed his mind when it was clear that the employee was correct.
There are two different ways for you to fight employee theft using your Store POS System. For the first way you lock your system so that nobody except you can change any data inside your system. If you lock your system, then you have to make any corrections to your system that occur from sales clerks making simple mistakes during normal operations. My preference is second way which is to play dumb and open the system so that anybody can make changes to the computer data but at the same time all changes to data are tracked. However, this way requires that you monitor changes in data regularly to look for patterns that would indicate theft.
Labels: employee theft, Store POS System, tracking changes in Store POS System data
Getting The Attention of a Sales Tax Auditor
It varies from state to state and probably from auditor to auditor but there are certain things that are bound to get the attention of sales tax auditors. A tax exempt charge account that has a large volume of cash sales is one of those things that gets the attention of sales tax auditors. The reason is simple. Suppose a friend of one of your sales clerks comes into your store looking for a good deal. The sales clerk figures that he can run a cash sale through a tax exempt account and give his friend a lower price with no harm done. If it happens just a few times, then probably nothing will come of it. However, things like that don't just happen a few times. If there is a continuing pattern of cash nontaxable sales to a charge account, this begs to be investigated if you get a sales tax audit. If you are audited and found to have not paid some sales tax, then you will have to pay the sales tax plus interest and penalties. The interest and penalties can be more than the tax. A tax audit can come from multiple directions. I will mention a couple that I have heard of in the past. For example, suppose Joe's Repair Shop buys about $1000 a month in charge sales and your sales clerks are running another $1000 a month in cash nontaxable sales through Joe's account. If Joe is audited and they look at his part sales, then they are going to know something is wrong when his sales are about half of what they would expect from his purchases. Also, an audit is likely to come from a former employee looking for a whistle blower's fee. I remember a customer of ours telling me about one of his employees that had formerly worked for a mass retailer. The employee knew that the mass retailer was cheating big time on their taxes. Our customer and his employee went to the IRS and reported the tax cheat. The two of them split a very large whistle blower's fee.
The bottom line is watch cash nontaxable sales to a charge account on your Store POS System to be sure that these sales are actually for the account in question.
Labels: cash nontaxable sales, Sales tax audit, Store POS System
Using Knowledge to Sell Bearing and Seals
There is a retired gentleman in our town that was locally famous for being able to find and sell parts that nobody else could find. His strength was in bearings and seals. The bearings and seals came off of no telling what and nobody was going to find the application in any catalog. He used a micrometer to measure the old bearings or seals and then looked up the bearing or seal by size in old paper catalogs. These are his instructions. We start with ball bearings. You will need to measure the inside diameter, the outside diameter and the width. The inside and outside diameter measurements need to be accurate to within .001". In most cases the width can vary some but not always. The seal is measured the same way. With seals if you are measuring an old seal you must allow for wear. On the inside the old seal may measure less than the new one. On the outside diameter the old seal may measure as much as .005" smaller than the new seal. That is because there is a press of .005". In other words, the new seal is .005" bigger than the hole it is going in. For taper bearings you must also measure the radius, that is, the taper of the inside of the bearing.
Labels: Auto Part Store Software, Bearings, Parts store, seals, Store POS System, successful automotive jobber
Hold Off Ordering Slow Moving Items
Let us suppose that you have an item in stock that has not sold in the last couple of years. Suppose also that you sell that item today. Experience shows that often in this situation, the customer that bought this item made a mistake and the item will be returned. Most store pos systems will order up a stocking item as soon as it is time to reorder. Now if the item is returned, you may have two of the slow moving item in stock because it is hard to return stocking items. MIB has a solution for this problem. You can have MIB hold off ordering slow moving items for several days. After some specified number of days, MIB will order the item if it has not been returned. If an item has not sold in the last couple of years, the chances of selling two of them in several days is slim. In this way you can spend your inventory dollars on items more likely to sell.
Labels: inventory control, slow moving inventory, Store POS System
Making a living While Selling Parts to Repair Shops
A short while ago I was taking with a small jobber store in the Midwest. He said that he didn't want to sell to repair shops. He said that they want you to deliver and then beat you up to get the lowest price, are slow to pay and when all is said and done they go bankrupt and leave you poorer by several thousand dollars. One jobber from the past seemed to have at least part of that under control. He billed his repair shop customers every week. If they didn't pay by the time billing was run on the following week, they were cash only. In today's economy everybody should be doing business that way.
Labels: Auto Part Store Software, Parts store, Store POS System
Quick Price Updates at No Cost
It seems as though the majority of price files available today are in Microsoft Excel format. We at MIB wanted to make it easy to read price files from Excel. To do so we wrote a program to convert TAB delimited output from Excel into a file that MIB can read in a flash. This is especially helpful for updating prices that a supplier provides in the same form time and again. You need only create a small table telling what columns of data in Excel go into what data in MIB. From that time on you can convert that type price file in seconds. Since these price files are normally available for free from your suppliers, you can update your inventory prices at no cost and with no more than a minute's labor. Visit our www.storepossystem.com web site and you will see that this is just another way that MIB delivers a quality point of sale inventory control system at minimal cost.
Labels: price updates, Store POS System
Computer Hardware
You don’t have to buy your computer or other hardware from MIB. MIB uses off the shelf computer hardware that is sold and serviced in just about any location. This makes the start up cost of an MIB system very low. There are no hardware maintenance contracts with your MIB system.
When you call MIB for support you get someone that you can clearly understand. MIB will help any way they can to solve your problem or answer your question. Service is the key to our customer satisfactionLabels: Store POS System
What is MIB?
MIB sells and supports a point of sale computer program for Windows based PCs. The company has been in business since 1977. Provides a wide variety of reports about your inventory, customers, cash flow, employee performance and sales. Allows instant display and reprint of invoices and ROA’s run previously. You can get up to the minute accounts receivable information and prints charges statements.Labels: Store POS System
MIB can Reduce Your Invoice Costs
One user has noted that using a laser printer to print 2-part invoices reduces his cost to about half the cost of 2-part NCR invoices.
Learn more about why to buy our
Store POS System now.
Labels: Store POS System
