Our POS software sales team is local and ready to listen
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Gift shop software that helps you stay the course
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Gift shops come and go. Walk down most shopping strips in Australia or New Zealand and you’ll see it. A new shop opens with a fresh fit-out and a lot of hope. Another closes. A third changes hands, sometimes more than once in a few years.
There are plenty of reasons. Rent, staffing, the wrong mix of stock, an owner who is simply worn out. But we see a pattern in the gift shops that last. They’re consistent. They buy well, they know what’s selling, and the owner isn’t buried in admin every night.
That consistency is bankable. It’s what keeps a shop profitable through a slow winter, and it’s what a buyer pays for when the time comes to sell. Good software won’t do the work for you. It can make that consistency a lot easier to achieve.
A gift shop can carry hundreds of different products from dozens of suppliers. Every delivery brings paperwork. Keying it in by hand is slow, and it’s where mistakes creep in.
Tower Systems imports supplier invoices for you, with AI tools that handle most formats. Product data loads when you scan a new item, so the description and category are there without typing. Some of our customers tell us the AI tools save them hours every week.
Hampers and gift packs are another time sink in a lot of shops. Our software treats a hamper as one product made from its parts. Sell it, and the candle, the chocolate and the card all come out of stock at once. You know what you have without counting.
If you sell online, your Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento or BigCommerce store stays in step with the shop. Sell an item at the counter and the website knows. Click and collect orders are managed in the same system. Gift cards, special orders and club or group pricing are covered too.
Saving time is half of it. The other half is making better calls about stock, pricing and space.
Gift retail is seasonal. Tower Systems tracks which products sell in the lead-up to Mother’s Day, Christmas and other key periods, so next year’s order is based on what actually sold rather than a hunch. The embedded AI tools surface insights you’d otherwise find weeks or months later, if at all. Things like a supplier whose range has quietly stopped moving, or a category that deserves more shelf space.
Loyalty works the same way. Instead of a points scheme customers forget about, you can print a voucher on the receipt that brings them back within a set time. You can record special dates and preferences too, so your team can offer the personal service that sets a local gift shop apart.
None of this replaces the owner’s eye for product. It backs it up with facts, and over time that’s what steers a shop toward steady profit.
Staying the course also means having people you can rely on. Our help desk is based in Australia and New Zealand, and it’s open on Saturdays when gift shops are busiest. You talk to a person, not a script. You also choose when to install software updates, so nothing changes at the counter in the middle of December.
The cost should be predictable too. Some software companies take a percentage of every sale. We don’t. You pick your own EFTPOS provider and keep control of what you pay.
If you’re opening a gift shop, buying one or looking to strengthen the one you have, we’d like to show you how Tower Systems could help. Already on other software? Send us your data first and we’ll confirm whether it can be brought across.
You can read more about Tower Systems for gift shops, call 1300 662 957 (0800 444 367 in New Zealand) or email sales@towersystems.com.au.
Contacting a human is easy.
POS software made for local independent pet shops
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Ask a pet owner where they get advice and plenty will name their local pet shop. Not a big-box store. Not a website.
That’s because the local shop knows them. It knows the family down the road has a new puppy that isn’t settling on its food. It knows which customer keeps a bearded dragon and what the enclosure needs. It remembers when the dog is due for worming.
Big pet businesses sell a lot of product. We’d argue local pet shops matter more to local pets. And we think they deserve software built for the way they work, not a generic system they have to work around.
A pet shop is not a simple shop
Think about a normal day. Birdseed sold by the kilo. A collar in a particular size and colour. A live fish. A dog in for a groom. A conversation about changing a cat’s diet.
Most POS software handles the barcode scan at the counter and not much else. The rest ends up on paper, or in the owner’s head.
We built Tower Systems for pet shops to deal with all of it. Bulk food and treats sell by weight, in whole or part quantities. Collars, apparel and bedding are tracked by colour, size and style. You can record the history and care of live animals, and track high-value items by serial number.
The customer side is where a local shop really wins. You can record microchip numbers. You can recall customers when worming, or a similar product, is due. You can print care notes on the receipt, like how to move a puppy onto a new food. And you can market to people based on what they’ve actually bought, so your offers make sense to them.
Promotions work the way a local shop needs them to. Buy-one-get-one deals. Coffee-card style loyalty. Bundles too, such as a tank, filter and starter food at one price. Bundles lift the spend per visit, and they’re harder to price-check item by item online.
If you run a grooming salon or a DIY dog wash, you can track that work in the same system as your retail sales and let owners know when their pet is ready to collect. Repairs and servicing are tracked at no extra cost, whether it’s an aquarium pump or a set of clippers that needs sharpening. Recurring billing is there if you need it.
Then there’s the admin. Supplier invoices import automatically. The built-in AI tools write product descriptions for your online store and help you make sense of your reports. The software connects with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and BigCommerce, plus Xero, Tanda and Deputy. You pick your own EFTPOS provider, and we don’t take a cut of your sales.
The people behind it
Our help desk is in Australia and New Zealand. When you call, you get a person who knows independent retail, not someone reading a script.
You also decide when to install updates. We release them regularly, often with improvements customers asked for, but they go in when it suits you. Not in the middle of a busy Saturday.
If you run an independent pet shop, we’d like to show you how it works. Bring your own situations to a demo: a bulk food sale, a grooming job, a worming reminder. If you’re switching from other software, send us your data first and we’ll confirm whether we can bring it across.
You can read more about Tower Systems for pet shops, call 1300 662 957 (0800 444 367 in New Zealand) or email sales@towersystems.com.au.
Contacting a human is easy.
Retailers: You choose when to update your POS software
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At Tower Systems we give local specialty retailers agency. We think you should decide when to install a software update. We don’t push it onto your counter on our schedule.
We release updates regularly. Many of them include improvements our customers asked for. When an update is ready, it’s up to you when it goes in.
It sounds like a small thing. Independent retailers tell us it isn’t.
Why forced updates hurt independent retailers
Plenty of software companies update on their own schedule. The update arrives whether you are ready or not.
For a small retailer, timing matters. Nobody wants a change to their POS in the week before Christmas, in the middle of a stocktake or on a busy Saturday morning. A new screen layout or a changed workflow can slow the counter at exactly the wrong moment.
You know your business. You know when it’s quiet, when your experienced staff are rostered on and when you have time to learn something new. That knowledge should decide when an update goes in.
What goes into our updates
Our updates are shaped by the people who use the software. Through our Software Ideas platform, customers suggest improvements and every customer can vote on them. Those suggestions guide what we build.
So an update from Tower Systems usually includes something a retailer like you asked for. It might be a faster way to process a supplier invoice. It might be a new report or a tweak to a screen you use a hundred times a day.
We want you to have these improvements. We just think you should choose when they arrive.
Why we do it this way
I’ve run retail businesses and built software for them for more than 40 years. Independent retailers are business owners. They make hundreds of decisions every week about stock, staff, pricing and the shop floor. I think it’s odd for a software company to take one of those decisions away from them.
Giving you control over update timing is a matter of respect. It’s your business and your counter. It should be your call.
Independent retailers tell us they value this. Some update the day a release is available. Others wait for a quiet Monday. Both are fine with us. If you’d like help, our local help desk team can talk you through what’s in an update before you install it.
Ask before you choose
If you’re comparing POS software, ask each company one question: who decides when updates are installed? The answer tells you a lot about how they see their customers.
To talk with us about Tower Systems:
Australia: 1300 662 957
New Zealand: 0800 444 367
Email: sales@towersystems.com.au
Contacting a human is easy.
No script, just a person who knows retail
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Who picks up the phone when you call the POS software help desk?
When you call the Tower Systems help desk, a person answers. They are in Australia or New Zealand. They don’t read from a script.
It could be Mitch, Minh, Roy, James, Tash, Travis, Simon, Paul, Michael or someone else on the team. Real people with real names, not an anonymous avatar or a generic email address. Real people delivering real support. Retail is personal, after all.
W’ve built software for independent retailers since 1981. In that time we’ve watched plenty of software companies move support offshore, add phone trees and hand staff a flowchart. We understand why. It’s cheaper.
It is also worse for the retailer on the other end of the line. So we haven’t done it.
Why scripts let retailers down
A script works when every problem looks the same. Retail problems rarely do.
Think about a Saturday morning. There’s a queue at the counter. A barcode won’t scan, or a supplier invoice has landed with the wrong pricing. You don’t want to be asked whether you’ve restarted your computer. You want someone who listens, works out what’s actually going on and helps you fix it.
Scripted support makes you prove you’ve done steps one to five before anyone will think about step six. That costs you time. Time at the counter costs you sales.
It also costs trust. Most retailers can tell within a minute whether the person on the line understands their business.
What you get from a person who can think
Our help desk team knows our software well. They also know the businesses we serve: newsagents, gift shops, garden centres, jewellers, farm supply businesses and more. They know what a lotto reconciliation looks like or how a layby works, because they talk to retailers about these things every day.
Without a script, they can do the obvious thing. Ask a question that fits your situation. Skip the steps that don’t apply. Notice when a small fault points to a bigger one. Follow up when they said they would.
Being local helps too. Our team works in your time zone and knows Australian and New Zealand trading conditions. Support is available six days a week, with after-hours help for urgent system-down problems.
I think this is the part people don’t see in a software demonstration. Features matter. But the day something goes wrong, the person who answers matters more.
Where AI helps, and where it hands over
We use AI too. Our help desk chatbot has been running for more than three years. Customers tell us it saves them time on quick questions, and that it answers in plain language.
It is there for the simple things, at any hour. It is not a wall between you and a person. When a problem needs judgement, experience or a conversation, you can reach a human on our team.
We chose that balance on purpose. The chatbot takes care of the quick questions, so our team has more time for the calls that need them.
A question to ask any software company
If you are comparing retail software, call each company’s help desk before you sign. See who answers. See whether they listen or read.
Then call ours.
Australia: 1300 662 957
New Zealand: 0800 444 367
Email: sales@towersystems.com.au
Contacting a human is easy.
Software built for the way stockfeed and farm supply businesses work
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A stockfeed, produce or farm supply business manages bulk stock, organise deliveries, prepare feed mixes, look after customer accounts and source products customers cannot find on your shelves. All at once.
Tower Systems brings these jobs together in specialist software. Locally made and supported, it helps connect your counter, stockroom, delivery vehicles and online shop.
Manage deliveries and charge for what you supply
Deliveries are a core part of many farm supply businesses. Your software needs to help manage the work from the initial order through to dispatch.
Tower Systems includes dispatch management for multiple trucks and multiple deliveries per vehicle. Integration with Allotrac provides an option for businesses with more advanced delivery requirements.
When selling from a bulk supply tanker or truck, you need to charge farmers for what you actually provide. Support for weight-based and fractional quantities helps you handle these sales accurately.
Retailer Roam™ also supports selling away from the shop, including from a truck. It can operate without an internet connection, helping you serve customers beyond reliable mobile coverage.
Buy in bulk and make your own mixes
Your own feed mixes can give customers a reason to choose your business.
Tower Systems supports buying raw materials and managing their mixing or packaging into finished products. This helps you connect the ingredients you purchase with the products you prepare and sell.
Buy in bulk, mix to your recipe and charge accurately for the finished product. Whether customers buy a standard bag or a specific quantity, your software should support the way you trade.
Keep customer accounts, quotes and invoices under control
Strong general debtors facilities are important when account customers represent a substantial part of your business.
Tower Systems combines customer account management with quote and invoice management tools. You can prepare quotes, manage invoices and keep track of what customers owe within the same system you use to run the shop.
That matters when a customer’s purchase involves more than a quick counter transaction. A quoted order, a scheduled delivery and an account sale are connected parts of the same customer relationship.
Loyalty options provide another way to recognise repeat business. Choose an approach that farmers value and that makes commercial sense for your store.
Say yes to special orders
You cannot carry every product every customer might need. You can, however, make special orders part of your service.
Tower Systems supports bringing in and managing special orders for customers. This helps you look beyond the stock on your shelves when responding to a request.
For an independent farm supply business, that is an opportunity to compete through service. You can help customers source what they need while keeping the order organised within your retail software.
Spend less time entering supplier invoices
Supplier paperwork can consume time that would be better spent serving customers or managing the business.
Tower Systems includes AI tools for importing just about any supplier invoice. These tools help reduce manual data entry and the work involved in bringing supplier invoice information into your system.
An integrated barcode lookup tool provides access to 1.6 billion barcodes, helping you find product information without starting every product record from scratch.
Together, these tools target everyday administration that can otherwise slow your team down.
Connect your shop with Shopify
Online selling should be part of your business, not a separate stock-management task.
Tower Systems integrates with Shopify, synchronising product descriptions, pricing and images. Online sales flow back into the software to help keep inventory accurate.
This gives customers another way to buy while connecting online activity with your existing retail operation.
See business performance without preparing another report
You should not have to find spare time to assemble reports before you can understand how your business is performing.
The Tower Systems Insights Dashboard provides business performance insights around the clock, without you having to prepare them manually.
It gives you a way to check performance when it suits you, rather than adding another reporting job to your day.
Choose local support and a voice in future development
Software is a long-term business relationship. The people behind it matter.
Tower Systems is locally made and supported, with a help desk team based in Australia and New Zealand. Human-delivered support is available six days a week, with after-hours assistance for urgent system-down issues. Training and ongoing software updates are included in its monthly rental model.
Local produce and farm supply businesses also have an opportunity to influence the software’s future direction. Tower Systems draws on feedback from its community of store owners to guide development.
As retail evolves, that connection matters. Your practical experience can help inform the tools you will use next.
Put your real business needs into a demonstration
Ask Tower Systems to demonstrate the work you do every week: importing a supplier invoice, preparing a quote, managing a customer account, organising a special order and dispatching a delivery.
Include a bulk sale from a truck, a product made to your own recipe and a Shopify order. Then look at how the Insights Dashboard helps you monitor performance.
To arrange a demonstration, call Tower Systems on 1300 662 957.
Running your shop when you’re not in it
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Most independent retailers want to be on the shop floor. Life doesn’t always allow it. A holiday, a sick day, a trip to see family, a second job. There are plenty of reasons you can be away from the shop.
Here’s something we hear often from customers. Time away is when they see the business most clearly. Standing behind the counter, you see the next customer and the next delivery. Step back, and you see the patterns.
Remote management is normal in small business retail
Managing remotely is common in our part of retail. Some owners hold down a job elsewhere while the shop builds. Others own two, three or more shops and can only be in one place at a time.
How you manage remotely is your call. So is whether you group several shops together for a single view of the numbers. Some owners want everything combined. Others prefer to keep each shop separate.
We’ve built Tower Systems to be as flexible as possible here. The setup you start with can change as your needs change. Add a shop, step back from the counter, or bring in a manager, and the software adapts with you.
Our software also runs in-store or in the cloud. You choose what suits the way you work.
The numbers come to you
You don’t need to be in the shop to know how the day went. Business intelligence reports and management functions are available wherever you log in.
Some of it happens without you lifting a finger. When a staff member closes the register and runs the end-of-shift procedure, the day’s sales and key figures are emailed to you straight away.
If the cash or EFTPOS balance is out, you know that evening. Not at the end of the month, when it’s harder to track down.
Alerts when something doesn’t look right
The software also watches for unusual activity in-store. If a staff member discounts a big-ticket item too heavily, or cancels more sales than usual, you get to find out without having to jump through hoops.
You can log in, look at the transaction and deal with it quickly. Small problems are much easier to fix before they become habits.
Admin on your own time
Remote access also means you can fit software work around your day.
If you’re on the counter most of the week, or short a staff member, stock maintenance and other admin can wait until you’re off the floor. Electronic invoices that suppliers send overnight can be processed over breakfast at home.
That leaves shop time for the work that grows sales: displays, customers and your team.
One approach for every kind of specialist shop
We see owners of bookshops, gift shops, garden centres, bike shops, jewellers and rural supply stores manage this way. The approach is the same across all of them. You can step away from the floor and still know what’s happening.
Built for every kind of specialist retailer
Bookshop, gift shop, farm supply business, bike shop, garden centre or jewellery store, the approach is the same. You can step away from the floor and still know exactly what is happening while you are not there.
Talk to us
If you’d like to see how remote management would work for your shop, or across several shops, talk to us. We’ll show you the options and help you choose the setup that suits you now, knowing it can change later.
AU 1300 662 957 | NZ 0800 444 367 | sales@towersystems.com.au
Contacting a human is easy.
70 days to Christmas: a practical checklist for indie retailers
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It’s Friday 16 October. Christmas is 70 days away. Ten weeks sounds like plenty, but it goes quickly once the rush starts.
This list won’t ask you to spend more or add to an already full week. Most of it is about checking the basics and getting more out of the stock and people you already have.
1. Give slow sellers another go
This can be an easy win. Â Walk the shop, your back room and anywhere you have stock before you order anything else. Check the drawers, the bottom shelves and the stockroom. You will almost certainly find stock you have already paid for that would make a good gift.
A product that struggled in one spot can sell well in another. Move it, pair it with something, or put a gift suggestion beside it. Try that before the discount stickers come out. Display it the way you would want a present to look.
2. Bundle things that belong together
Shoppers are short on time in December. A bit of work from you now makes their decision easier.
A journal and a pen. A puzzle and some treats. Gardening gloves and a trowel. Pick pairings that suit your shop and the people who shop there.
Package the bundle neatly and give it one clear price. It doesn’t need a discount. Saving the customer the thinking is the offer.
3. Look at last Christmas first
Before you place another order, pull up last year’s sales by department and by product. Note what sold early, what ran out and what was still on the shelf in January.
Then weigh that against what is happening in the shop this year. Last year’s numbers are a guide. Some of last year’s buying decisions are best left in last year.
4. Count the stock you’re relying on
Pick your key Christmas lines and count them by hand, on the shelf and in the stockroom. Compare the counts with your POS.
Include cards, wrap and bags. They are easy to forget until you run out.
If the numbers don’t match, find out why now. Ordering off wrong figures in November is an expensive mistake.
5. Make gift shopping easy
Walk through the shop as if you had no idea what to buy. Where would you start?
A few clearly signed gift displays help that customer a lot:
- Gifts under $20
- Gifts under $50
- Thank-you gifts
- Teacher gifts
- For someone who has everything
- Easy to post
Keep each display small and focused. Make sure every price is easy to see.
6. Plan your display changes
Write down which areas will change over the next ten weeks, when, and who will do the work. Leave room for the slow sellers from step 1.
Then give one person the job of checking the Christmas displays every day. Tidy, priced and full is the standard.
7. Check supplier deadlines early
Ask your main suppliers about order cut-offs, lead times and availability. Get the answers in writing if you can.
Review the reorder settings on your expected best sellers. Keep watching actual sales as the weeks go by.
You don’t need to replace everything that sells. Think about what you would like left on the shelf when Christmas trading ends.
8. Get the team across the gift range
Each week, pick a few products and talk them through with the team. Who would like it? What does it cost? What goes with it? Where is it?
Show them the bundles and explain why you put them together.
New staff need time to practise the everyday jobs too. Make sure they know where to find your procedures for gift vouchers, lay-bys, returns and online order collection.
9. Sort out the counter
Put together a short counter checklist:
- Receipt rolls and printer supplies
- Shopping bags
- Gift wrap, ribbon and sticky tape
- Gift voucher stock
- Spare price labels
- A tidy spot for customer orders awaiting collection
- Answers to common questions, written down
If a scanner or receipt printer has been playing up, fix it now. December is the worst time for it to fail.
10. Give people a reason to come in
Build your Christmas marketing around specific products. Show a handful of them with prices and a line on who they would suit. Your own shop photos usually work better than supplier images.
Include the slow sellers you have redisplayed and your new bundles.
Check you have the stock before you promote it. Then tell the team what is being promoted.
11. Keep an eye on cash
Before the next order, check what you already owe and when it is due. Look at how much money is sitting in slow stock.
Often it makes more sense to sell through what you have before adding another range. Keep some money aside for the lines that take off closer to Christmas.
Fit your shop into their Christmas
You don’t need to turn your business into a Christmas shop. Think about where what you sell fits in your customers’ plans. It might be a gift. It might be something for a family lunch, the summer holidays, or a job they want done before the break.
Then make that link obvious, on the shop floor and in your marketing.
Start with three jobs
There is no need to tackle the whole list before close today. Pick three jobs, give each one an owner and a date, and get started. We would begin with whatever makes your shop easier to buy from.
Tower Systems is not your average software company.
AI tools embedded in POS software help retailers thrive
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Retail advice: more visits, bigger baskets, better margins
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A shop local pitch needs more than words to cut through and succeed
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What’s the total cost of ownership of your POS software?
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If you have dead stock in your shop you have to ask: what am I doing wrong?
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A retail self-audit can help local indie retailers reset, and thrive
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Transparent POS pricing from Tower Systems
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What Don’t You Know About Your Shop? A question for indie retailers
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Software made and supported in Australia, for local Aussie jewellers
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A local jeweller is a different business to a chain jewellery store, and everyone in town knows it. You made the engagement ring for a couple who now bring their daughter in for her 18th. You have served some families across three generations. Being local is a superpower, and we think POS software should help a jeweller lean into it rather than flatten it into something generic.
Our jewellery software is made in Australia and supported from Australia and New Zealand.
We compete with software made overseas, that’s often supported overseas.
Being Australian made is a point of difference for our Tower Systems jeweller software.
We have served local jewellers for decades, and that shows up in practical ways.
Call our help desk and you speak with our own people, in your time zone, who know Australian retail. Second-hand goods record keeping is handled. Xero is connected. You choose your own EFTPOS provider. The software was built around how jewellery shops here trade, which is a different thing to software written for shopping malls in another hemisphere and adapted later.
Occasion marketing is where localness pays most directly. You already know your customers personally. The software records the anniversary, the birthday, the wedding date, and prompts you to reach out at the right moment. Customers notice when a jeweller remembers. They tell people about it too, which is marketing money cannot buy.
If you run a workshop, repairs are tracked from intake to collection, with notes, status updates and customer contact along the way. Repairs deserve more respect than they sometimes get. People hand over pieces that matter to them, and a repair handled well often earns more loyalty than the original sale did.
The inventory side is built for jewellery. Stone details, metal types and certifications sit against each piece. High-value items are tracked by serial number. Rings and designer collections are managed by colour, size and style, and special orders let you sell a piece before it arrives. There is also club pricing, so you can give a local sporting club or community group their own pricing. Small thing, strong tie.
When the town show or a local market comes around, the Retailer Roam app takes sales away from the counter with stock kept in sync. The Shopify integration keeps the web store and the shop on the same data, which matters when a piece is one of a kind. Selling it twice is not a mistake you get to make quietly.
The AI tools handle the tedious parts. Supplier invoices import automatically from almost any PDF, product descriptions for the web store are generated from your stock data, and reports explain themselves in plain English, so understanding your own business does not require an evening with a spreadsheet.
We also do business the way local businesses tend to prefer. Monthly rental, cancel any time, and we take no fee from your transactions.
If you are local independent jeweller keen to leverage your localness, consider our locally made and supported software for jewellers.
Book a demo and we will show you the software with your shop in mind: towersystems.com.au/pos-software-free-demo.html, or 1300 662 957 (AU), 0800 444 367 (NZ).
Advice for retailers: How to work out which part of your shop floor makes the most money
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Retail space usually costs between 11% and 15% of revenue, depending on the type of shop. For most retailers that makes it the biggest cost after stock and labour, yet plenty of shops have not looked hard at how that space earns its keep in years.
This is not advice you will get from your accountant, and you will not find it in your profit and loss. It is a practical exercise, done with paper and pen, that gives you a fresh view of your own business. Retailers who do it are almost always surprised by something.
We share this advice today to help local small business retailers look at the space use in their shop from a profit contribution perspective. Retailers we have done this with have made changes that have led to them making more money. It’s all about profitable space usage.
Here is the method we recommend.
- Take a blank sheet of paper, ideally A3, and roughly sketch the layout of your shop. Mark in display units, wall shelving, the counter, everywhere you have products.
- Include your back room if you hold stock there. That space costs you rent too.
- Colour-shade the layout by department.
- List the departments down the side of the floor plan.
- Estimate the percentage of total space each department uses and write it next to each department on your list. Rough is fine. This does not need to be accurate to two decimal places.
- Using your POS software, report on the gross profit dollars earned by each department over the last year. If your system cannot do this directly, calculate it from sales figures using the average gross profit percentage for each department. In our software, this is a standard report.
- Work out each department’s percentage of total gross profit and write it next to the space percentage on your floor plan.
- Circle the best performers in green and the worst in red. A strong department earns a significantly higher share of gross profit than the share of space it occupies. A weak one occupies more space than its profit contribution justifies.
Now stand back and look at the marked-up plan. Space and profit side by side, department by department. This is your shop as a landlord would see it if every department paid its own rent.
What you do next depends on what the page shows you. The work usually leads to one or more of these actions: moving a department to a better or worse position in the shop, giving a strong department more space, shrinking a weak one, improving a department’s margin through better buying, or working to lift sales in a department whose gross profit dollars are below its potential.
Be careful before shrinking a department solely on these numbers. Some low-margin departments drive traffic that shops the rest of the store. Newsagents know this well. The exercise is not a set of orders, it is information you did not have before, and it is up to you to weigh it against what you know about why customers walk in.
Once you have done the shop, you can go deeper: pick one department and run the same analysis by category within it. That is often where the most actionable findings sit.
Do this once a year, or ahead of any refit. Shops evolve, and space allocation tends to reflect the business you used to run rather than the one you run now. This exercise is one way to keep the floor working for today’s shop.
The gross profit reporting this relies on is standard in our POS software, by department and by category. If you would like to see it with your own shop in mind, book a demo at towersystems.com.au/pos-software-free-demo.html or call 1300 662 957 (AU), 0800 444 367 (NZ).
Cash flow advice for small business retailers, from people who see the numbers every day
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In our work serving small business retailers in Australia and New Zealand we get to talk more than software. Often we talk business. Cashflow is a regular topic: how to improve it, how to strengthen the financial basis of the business.
This post today is about cashflow in local small retail businesses. It draws on our many years of experience seeing data from a range of businesses.
Retail businesses rarely close because they were unprofitable on paper. They close because they ran out of cash. Profit is an opinion until the money is in the bank, and cash flow is where good retail habits show up or fall apart.
Here is our best practice advice, drawn from decades of watching what works.
Treat stock as cash, because it is. Every dollar on your shelves is a dollar you cannot use anywhere else. The single biggest cash flow lever in most shops is buying. Buy to sell-through, using your own sales data, rather than buying to the rep’s suggested order or to what you bought last year. Our POS software shows what is selling, at what rate, by supplier and category, so reorders reflect your shop and not someone else’s optimism.
Quit dead stock quickly. Stock that has not sold in six months is cash going stale. Discount it, bundle it, clear it, and put the money into lines that turn. The reports make dead stock easy to find. Acting on it takes discipline, and the retailers with the healthiest cash positions do it routinely rather than annually.
Know your cash rhythm weekly. Once a week, look at what came in, what went out, and what is due in the next fortnight. Fifteen minutes. The retailers who do this are never ambushed by a BAS payment or a big supplier invoice, because they saw it coming. Xero integration in our software keeps the accounting side current without rekeying.
Put GST and tax money aside as you go. It was never yours. A separate account you sweep weekly saves the quarterly scramble that damages so many small retailers.
Watch the seasonal calendar in both directions. Christmas stock is paid for months before it sells, so plan the cash dip as deliberately as you plan the range. Coming out of a season, mark down fast while shoppers are still in the mood. February is a terrible time to be holding December stock.
Chase the money you are owed. If you run customer accounts, invoice promptly and follow up without embarrassment. Our software manages debtors, statements and credit limits, and retailers who moved to systematic follow-up tell us they freed up thousands they had simply stopped noticing.
Build recurring revenue where your business allows it. Storage, locker rental, service plans and memberships smooth the lumps in retail cash flow. Recurring billing is built into our software and it is underused.
Mind the leaks. Transaction fees clipped from every sale, software add-ons, terminal charges: individually small, together meaningful. We do not take a percentage of your sales or charge per transaction, on any tier, and you choose your own EFTPOS provider. Check what your current setup costs across a full year, since the sticker price is rarely the whole story.
Be frugal in your capital spending. Is the planned investment in a shopfit necessary? Does the car upgrade have to be done this year? Is that piece of equipment really going to pay for itself?
Be frugal with the day to day? Are you paying someone to clean the shop? Are you paying for a bookkeeping service that, with AI, you could cover yourself today? Is you advertising spend bringing new shoppers in?
Be the asset. It’s easy to roster someone to work so you can have an easier day. That rostered hour costs real money and while you working the shop floor has a cost, it’s a different cost to paid labour.
None of this requires an accounting degree. It requires accurate data, a weekly habit, and software that shows you the truth about your shop quickly. If your current system makes any of this hard, that is a cost too.
What all this really comes down to is being frugal. Now that can sound negative. It’s not. It’s about leaving more cash in your bank, it’s about making you richer in and from your business.
We are glad to talk cash flow and show you the reports live. Book a demo at towersystems.com.au/pos-software-free-demo.html or call 1300 662 957 (AU), 0800 444 367 (NZ).
The most important advice we give small business retailers
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At a retail forum the other day we were asked what is the most important advice we give small business retailers. Our answer surprised a few people because it was not about marketing or ranging or margin.
The answer is often considered boring. It turns retailers off.
If only they understood the thousands of dollars to be made by listening to our answer.
The most important advice we think local small business retailers need is to focus on data accuracy. Dry, we know. But it is the factor local retailers most often overlook, and when it slips the damage spreads further than almost anything else in the business.
Here is the pattern we see. A retailer puts real hours into ordering stock and getting the shop looking right, and meanwhile half the sales go through the counter keyed into a department instead of scanned. Or the web store is full of products described as “candle lge” that no customer searching for a soy candle in a glass jar will ever find. Nobody set out to be sloppy. It builds up one shortcut at a time.
The costs rarely look like data problems, which is why they go unnoticed. Your reports can only tell you about what was entered, so vague or wrong entries produce reports that mislead with complete confidence. Decisions made on those reports feel informed. They are not.
Theft is the cost people least expect. Loose inventory records mean you cannot see shrinkage. Stock walks out the door and the numbers are too muddy to show where or how much or since when. Retailers who tighten up their data are often shocked at what it reveals within a few months.
There is a newer cost too. The AI tools in good retail software are only as smart as the data underneath them. With clean data they will flag margin shifts and buying opportunities you would have missed. With rubbish data they will confidently summarise rubbish.
The fix is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Decide that every item gets properly described, every sale gets scanned, and stock records get maintained rather than guessed. Train everyone who touches the counter. Then check, because habits drift.
Retailers who do this tell us the same thing: they wish they had done it years earlier. The reports finally mean something, and for the first time they can see their own business clearly.
What local small business retailers have been telling us lately
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Anyone can write nice things about their own software. We do it in our marketing. So, from time to time we like to hand the microphone to the retailers using it, because their words carry more weight than ours.
This feedback arrived in June from Tara and Cody, who run a rural supplies store in Queensland and recently started using the AI invoice import:
“The time savings, 8 hours a week, for our small business have been incredible! While it doesn’t process every single invoice, it handles the majority of them and has made a huge difference to our day-to-day operations.”
Eight hours a week is a full working day back. And they are right that it does not catch every invoice. We would rather people know that going in than be surprised later.
Switching POS software worries plenty of retailers, understandably. Mel at McLaren Vale Garden Centre made the move in May and told us the transition “has been smooth with plenty of training and support when needed”. The Bookshop Pahiatua in New Zealand went further:
“This is the easiest POS system I have ever used, anything I asked of it it can do! Their online help is amazing and so are the team if you can’t resolve the issue thru the chat.”
Then there are the customers who have grown old with us, in the best sense. Kerrilyn Page bought a traditional newsagency in Mount Morgan back in 2006. Her shop, Wattle Bee Next, looks nothing like it did then:
“With the help of the team at Tower Systems we have diversified to a modern non-traditional store. Tower Systems have been integral in this process.”
We see this a lot. A shop starts in one category and, over years, becomes something else entirely. Software should keep up with that. Too often it is the thing holding a shop back.
Reading back through years of this feedback, the help desk comes up more than anything else. Sheryl Muscat wrote that our team “never make us feel like we have wasted their time and they always seem to come up with a solution”. Jeremy Maitland, director of We Know Pets, put it in commercial terms:
“A piece of software is only as good as the backup that is provided and Tower are first rate in this area. Since installing the Retailer software we have exceeded our growth targets.”
For the record, everyone answering our help desk is based in Australia or New Zealand.
Some of our favourite feedback is the shortest. “We love this system” (John, West Side Newsagency, Port Augusta). “Who knew POS software could be this easy” (Rod, Goolwa Time and Jewellery). “The reports are fantastic” (Leanne, Shepherd Avenue Deli, Port Lincoln).
If you are weighing up POS software, feedback like this is useful but it is not the whole picture. Come and ask us your hard questions at a demo. Call 1300 662 957 (AU) or 0800 444 367 (NZ), or email sales@towersystems.com.au.
Are you using your POS software as a glorified cash register?
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Your POS software can most likely do so much more than track sales
Too many small business retailers use their POS software to less than half its potential. We see smart software treated as a glorified cash register, tracking sales and not much else.
This is a waste of money.
What frustrates us is that the easiest financial wins in retail are usually sitting inside software the retailer has already paid for.
Dead stock is the obvious one. Stock that is not selling is money parked on shelves. Your software knows where it is hiding. Quit it, reinvest in what sells.
Employee theft is harder to talk about, but the data does not care about awkwardness. Good POS software shows patterns you would never spot on the shop floor. Retailers are regularly surprised by what it reveals. Not in a good way.
Some suppliers make you money. Some cost you money. Supplier performance reports settle that question with facts rather than a rep’s charm.
Every hour spent typing invoices into a computer is an hour wasted. Electronic invoicing gets rid of that work entirely.
Stockouts might be the most expensive problem of the lot. You cannot sell what is not on the shelf. Your software can flag the gaps before customers walk out, and it can agentically create the orders to fill them.
Comparing trading periods, year on year and season on season, shows what is really changing in your business. You decide from evidence rather than gut feel.
Any one of these is worth real money. Do several and you can turbocharge the financial performance of the business.
So why the glorified cash register? We do wonder. Tiredness is part of it. A big part, actually. Running a shop is exhausting, and learning more about software can feel like one job too many. We also think plenty of retailers simply do not believe these benefits are achievable in a shop like theirs. They are. We see it every week.
At Tower Systems we help retailers gain these wins through locally delivered software support that starts with a conversation about your business. You have already paid for the software. Let us help you get paid back.
As the retailer you have to decide how you use the assets in your business. It’s likely that your POS software, regardless of the software you use, can do far more than you currently achieve with it. Challenge yourself to make more money from it.
Innovation for firearms dealers in Australia
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We are grateful to work with Gun Traders Australia to offer an integration between our firearms dealers software and their marketplace platform to help Aussie firearms dealers reach more customers online.
We recorded a podcast episode yesterday with Gun News Australia in which we talk about the link between our firearms dealer software and Gun Traders Australia.
POS software for firearms dealers: compliance first, then everything else
Running a gun shop is not like running any other retail business. Every firearm you buy, sell or take on consignment has a serial number that has to be recorded properly, and the regulator expects your records to be right every time. Get that wrong and nothing else in the business matters much.
That is where we started when we built our firearms dealer software, and it is still the first thing dealers ask us about in demos.
Serial numbers, tracked properly
Our software tracks every serialised item from the day it arrives to the day it leaves, including second-hand stock. When you need to report, the records are there and they are accurate. The age-check prompt at the counter is mandatory for age-restricted items, so the check happens on every sale rather than relying on whoever is serving that day.
The rest of the shop
Most gun shops sell far more than firearms. Ammunition and bulk supplies can be sold by weight or measure, in whole numbers or fractions. Apparel is handled by colour, size and style. It is one system across the whole shop, which matters when you are trying to see what is actually making you money.
Gunsmith and workshop work
If you do repairs or custom work, the workshop tools are included at no extra cost. A job is tracked from check-in to collection, you can schedule technician time, and customers can be kept up to date without anyone chasing paperwork.
Recurring billing is built in too. Plenty of dealers charge for locker space or storage, and the software handles those charges automatically each cycle. It is a small thing that adds up to reliable revenue and less admin.
AI in the software
The software connects directly to ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Anthropic. The most popular use by far is invoice import: a supplier invoice that used to take an hour to key in arrives as stock records in minutes. Dealers also use the AI tools to write product descriptions for their website and to interrogate their own sales data in plain language.
Club pricing
The best gun shops we know are close to their local clubs. Club pricing profiles let you set pricing by customer type, so members get their pricing automatically at the counter. Bundle packs, like a starter kit sold at one package price, lift the average sale and are harder for customers to price-compare item by item online.
Selling beyond the counter
The Retailer Roam app runs sales at trade shows and club events with stock kept in sync with the shop. Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce connections keep a web store on the same data as the counter. Xero covers the accounting link, and Tanda and Deputy cover rosters.
The Gun Traders Australia link makes it easy for your products to be found online.
On payments: you choose your own EFTPOS provider. We do not clip your sales and we do not charge per transaction. We think that is how it should work.
Have a look
The best way to judge POS software is to see it answering your questions, in your context. Book a demo and we will show you the software live, no obligation.
Call 1300 662 957 (AU) or 0800 444 367 (NZ), or email sales@towersystems.com.au.
POS software pricing should not be a secret
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If you have shopped around for POS software lately, you know the drill. You find a website, you like what you see, you go looking for the price and there isn’t one. There is a form instead. They want your contact details before they will tell you what their software costs. Then the calls start.
We don’t do that here at Tower Systems. Our prices are on our website, in full, at towersystems.com.au/pricing.html.
No fuss. We don’t need to know who you are. The pricing is there for anyone to see.
Our Startup plan is $145 a month including GST. Our Ultimate plan is $298 a month including GST, billed annually. The other plans sit between. The page also shows the things a headline price can hide. We charge 0% transaction fees on EFTPOS. We don’t charge based on your turnover. Optional extras like cloud hosting and our Roam cloud POS have their costs listed too. Anyone can look, any time. No salesperson required.
Why hidden pricing is a problem
When a software company hides its pricing, it has decided the sales process matters more than your time. It wants to qualify you as a lead before you have information. In some cases it wants room to quote different prices to different businesses for the same product.
Think about a retailer doing research after close on a Tuesday night, which is when this research usually happens. Hidden pricing turns a ten minute job into a week of phone tag.
It should feel odd to any retailer. Every product on your shop floor carries a price ticket. Customers can see it, compare it and decide whether to buy. The companies selling software to retailers should extend the same courtesy.
Sunshine is good for everyone
Publishing our prices keeps us honest. They have to stand up to public comparison every day of the year. Every customer knows they paid the same as the next. And when retailers call us, they already know what we charge, so we can spend the call talking about their business.
We would like to see every POS software company serving local small business retailers do the same. If your pricing is fair, showing it costs you nothing. If it is not, retailers deserve to know that before they hand over a phone number.
Our prices are on our website today. We think that is where they belong.
Yes, there is software made for specialty toy and game shops
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