Putting The Cart Before The Horse…
Whenever you are in the implementation phase of a new Point of Sale program there is a generally accepted procedure for doing the implementation. Typically, this involves in summary:
1. Making sure that you staff has adequate enough training to to be able to understand and use the software.
2. Setting-up and/or changing your Control Configuration to reflect both your needs and usage.
3. Setting-up Background data that would normally be needed , such as Categories, Sup-Categories and special codes.
4. Setting-up specific Template Items, Template Customers and Template Vendors based on how you will be using the software. – This would be critical whether you are entering things manually or importing the data from external files. This includes making sure that the information is both complete and accurate.
5. Being clear about what kinds of Margins, Prices and Special Discounts that may apply to your customer base as a whole and for selective customers. This should be decided upfront before item labels are printed.
However, if you deviate from the above, literally putting the Cart before the Horse, some or most of the following things may occur:
- Staff may incorrectly set-up new Customers and items – Some Examples: Wrong Customer Type, Wrong Tax Code; Wrong Item Type, Wrong (or no) Last Cost, wrong Tax Status, and/or no Item Tax Code specified. This results in improper taxes being calculated for customers and items and incorrect Tax History being generated.
- Staff doing inventory adjustments for items that have or cost on file. This results in issues when try to price item based on margin, and creates more work later on when trying to do Purchasing and Receivings transactions. This also creates a situation where the quantity may be correct but both the Average Cost and Last Cost may be incorrect, resulting understated inventory valuations. This affects your margins and causes problems at tax time because your inventory costs and valuation will be understated.
- Users changing prices on items that another user just finished printing item labels for. This means that someone will have to reprint the labels again, doubling the amount of work required to complete product labeling tasks.
- When a scanned barcode is not found, a user may be too quick to add the item as a new item, without having attempted to look-up the item first. This may result in duplicate items being on file, and skewed costs and skewed sales history.
If you need and assistance with your implementation plan or changes to your existing system, please contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department