The POS Software Blog

The POS Software Blog

News from Tower Systems about locally made POS software for specialty local retailers.

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Who our POS software is for, and who it is not for

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We say no to prospective customers more often than you might expect from a software company.

If your business is a franchise, a big chain, or a cafe or restaurant that happens to sell some retail on the side, we are not the right fit and we will tell you so. A bad match costs everyone, us included.

We’re not rude about this, just practical. We know what we are good at, and what we are not made for.

Our software is made for independent, owner-operated specialty retailers in Australia and New Zealand whose trading is more complicated than a generic till can handle. Maybe you run a workshop and need to track repair jobs. Maybe you sell items with serial numbers, or by weight or length, or you carry age-restricted lines, or you want to remember a customer’s anniversary so you can invite them back at the right moment.

A generic POS system scans a barcode and takes a payment. If that is all your shop needs, cheaper options exist and one of them will probably do. It is when the barcode scan is the easy part of the sale that our software makes sense.

We serve 20 specialty retail channels. Jewellers, bike shops, garden centres, newsagents, pet stores, toy shops, fishing and outdoors businesses, produce and farm supply, firearms dealers and more. Each version is built with retailers in that trade, which is where the useful detail comes from. A haberdashery can sell lace by the centimetre. A garden centre prints watering advice on the receipt, which matters in a business where a paper price tag fails the moment it rains. A jeweller tracks a repair from booking to pickup and gets a reminder out ahead of a customer’s anniversary.

Size of business matters less than people assume.

A first-year micro business starts on our Startup tier and an established multistore operator runs unlimited terminals on a higher tier. The common thread among the businesses we serve best is an owner who makes the buying decision and cares personally how the shop runs.

A few things about how we do business, since they come up in almost every sales conversation. We do not take a cut of your sales, on any tier. You choose your own EFTPOS provider. Monthly rental can be cancelled at any time. Our pricing is on our website for anyone to see, and you do not have to hand over an email address or phone number to see it. We find retailers appreciate that more than any feature.

Every call to our help desk is answered by our own people in Australia and New Zealand, and new customers get one-on-one training tailored to their shop. The features in our three major software updates a year come through our software ideas platform, where customers suggest and vote. Nobody buys their way to the top of our roadmap.

We have also been building AI into the software in-house since 2022, before anyone else in Australian specialty retail POS. Retailers use it most for importing supplier invoices from almost any PDF. It also writes product descriptions for web stores and gives plain-English answers about what the sales data is saying. These tools are on our Advanced and Ultimate tiers.

If this sounds like your business, book a demo, online or in your shop, and bring your hard questions. If we are not right for you, we will say so.

Pricing: towersystems.com.au/pricing.html. Book a demo: towersystems.com.au/pos-software-free-demo.html. Or call 1300 662 957 (AU), 0800 444 367 (NZ).

In retail, when the boss steals, staff learn to steal

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Years ago we helped a retailer investigate an employee theft problem. Using encrypted transaction data from their POS software, we isolated the days and times where discrepancies were appearing, matched them against the roster, and identified the most likely person. When confronted, the employee admitted to taking around $20 a day.

The reason they gave was not what the owner expected.

The boss took cash from the till for lunch. So they did the same.

The idea of stealing hadn’t occurred to them independently. They watched the owner take money from the register without ringing it through and drew a straightforward conclusion: this is normal here.

The owner hadn’t thought of it as theft. A few dollars for lunch — their business, their money. But watched by a staff member, it looked exactly like what it was: taking cash without processing it.

That’s one of the harder things to sit with in small business retail. The standards your team follows aren’t the ones written down anywhere. They’re the ones you demonstrate every day, on the floor, in front of people who are paying more attention than you think.

Handle cash loosely and some staff will handle it loosely. Take shortcuts on process and some staff will take the same shortcuts. Not everyone, and not immediately — but you’ve shown them it’s acceptable, and that’s enough.

The practical response isn’t complicated. Run every transaction through the system, your own lunch included. Pay yourself properly rather than dipping into the till. Use your POS the way you expect your staff to use it. And when something looks off in your data, investigate it — not assuming the worst, but not ignoring it either.

The encrypted transaction data in this case did its job. It gave the conversation a factual basis rather than an accusation, which matters both for resolving the situation and for treating the employee fairly.

But the real problem wasn’t the employee. It was what the owner had been quietly teaching them for months without knowing it.

In our POS software we have tools available for early detection of employee theft, tools many retailers have used to catch theft earlier than they otherwise might.

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The right POS system or website for any retail business depends on the specific needs of the business. Tower offers POS software and websites made specifically for local small business retailers in a selection of retail channels. To see if we might help you…, request a free, no-obligation demo today.  

Call 1300 662 957 in Australia or 0800 444 367 in New Zealand. Or, email sales@towersystems.com.au. 

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