Tips & Tricks: July 2006 Archives

As you know, the FloristWare Flower Shop POS System makes it very easy to market with e-mail and postcards. FloristWare will walk you through the process of building a list and then automatically create a customized e-mail or postcard for each person on it.

Writing the content for that e-mail or postcard is up to you! The message that you send to your customer will play a huge role in determining the effectiveness of your campaign. It is very important that you get it right.

This excellent article by Janine Popick contains some great information on how to create an effective message. You should give it a read before your next batch of e-mails or postcards.

Thank you.

As you know, when making sales the payment method is sometimes recorded incorrectly. A sale charged to a Mastercard may accidentally be recorded as being charged to a Visa or Debit card, etc. This means that the payment figures in your daily sales report will not match the actual payments collected.

Because this is such a common problem the FloristWare includes a powerful feature that can help you balance the payments recorded in your Daily Sales Reports. You can correct errors of this type before you print your daily sales report and try to balance it.

To get started go to the 'Payments' section of your Daily Sales Report. You will see a small orange button near the bottom of the screen. Clicking this button shows you all of the payments made during the day specified at the top right-hand corner of your screen.

The information in the report is organized into columns and rows. Each row contains the information for one payment. You can now change the method of each payment using the pull-down menu in it's row. It's that simple!

There are three things that you should keep in mind when balancing payments in this way:

1. Never Change the Payment Method From 'Account'!
If you originally recorded a payment as being charged to an account and then change it to something else it will not be removed from the customer's balance owing. FloristWare will not let you change payments to 'Account' for similar reasons - the amount would not be added to a customer's balance owing.

2. Be Very Careful!
Make only changes you are sure about - things can become very messy if you get careless.

3. Keep Track of the Changes
We also suggest that you keep track of any changes you make (using pen and paper) until you get the report balanced. While you can always change sales back, FloristWare does not keep track of the changes you are making so you cannot just 'Undo' them.

There are a couple of things to report this week.

The first is that FloristWare will be exhibiting at the Texas State Florists Association Convention in San Antonio Texas from July 21-23. We hope that any florists in the area who are interested in taking a look at the FloristWare POS System for florists will visit.

The other news is that testing of FloristWare Version 2.0 is going very well. We managed to sneak in a few more new features at the last minute and it will be available for download on Monday July 10.

Thank you.

We just started a new month. And, as you probably know, most FloristWare users need to enter new unlock codes at the end of each month. This always leads to the question "why?"

There is no doubt that the process of entering the unlock codes is a bit of a nuisance but it is, unfortunately, unavoidable. It's a case of taking the good with the bad. The unlock code system is the only way we can offer the FloristWare POS system the way we do - for a low monthly subscription with no contract or commitment.

There are couple of things that you can do to make this monthly ritual less stressful. The first is to make sure that you contact us as soon as you start seeing warnings that your FloristWare is about to expire. Leaving it to the last minute only makes things worse! There is no worse scenario than waiting until the first of the month and then not being able to start FloristWare in the morning.

The other thing that you can do is to pay in advance. If for example you pay for three months in advance your next set of unlock FloristWare for three months - you won't have to worry about unlock codes for another 90 days! Other users choose to pay for a year at a time.

We really are sorry that you have to go through the trouble of entering the codes at all, and hope that you find FloristWare worth the effort.

Thank you!

Some of our Canadian users have had difficulty in sourcing enclosure cards for use with FloristWare. It was not practical for them to deal with the John Henry Company and their own local printers weren't really prepared for this type of work.

We are please to tell you that we have found a new supplier that is ready and eager to work with Canadian FloristWare users. For more information please contact:

Suzanne Christie
1-800-603-3862
http://www.srcprint.com

Earlier in the week I was speaking to a florist who has been using FloristWare for some time. I was surprised (and disappointed) to learn that she was still using her cash register.

She explained that she used FloristWare for taking orders and the register for "cash & carry" type sales. She didn't really have a reason other than that was the way she had started out, and that she found the cash register a little quicker at handling these simple sales.

The whole point of having a POS system is to collect valuable marketing information on your customers. Doing that takes a little longer than just ringing in a sale on a cash register, but it will pay off in the long run.

Since this information is so valuable you want to collect as much of it as possible. That means that you try and collect whatever information you can from every customer even if they are just buying a single rose!

If for some reason (you or the customer are in a hurry, it's very busy, etc) and you don't have time to enter that information you can always skip those sections. If you do, FloristWare is just as fast as using a cash register.

So please - if you haven't already gotten rid of your cash register please thing about doing so!

We're thinking about a new reporting feature and we'd like to get some feedback from our users.

As you know, FloristWare tries to create a Daily Sales Report each night when you close down. This report does a great job of showing you what happened in your store during the day.

We are thinking about adding a new feature that would allow FloristWare to automatically e-mail the Daily Sales Report (in pdf) format as soon as it is generated.

It could be sent to as many people as you like. The idea is that your Daily Sales Report could be sent to the owner, manager, and possibly the accountant or bookkeeper to help them keep on top of things. It would be especially helpful if you are on vacation and want to receive updates of what is happening in your store each day.

Please let us know what you think!

The Hot Spots feature is one that most users are not taking full advantage of. It is very powerful and it can save you a lot of time if you use it properly.

A "Hot Spot" is any place that you deliver to frequently - places like large business, hospitals, funeral homes, etc. FloristWare lets you store the address information for these places so that whenever you are sending an order to one of them you can complete all of the address information for the order with just one click.

The reason many florists don't make full use of the feature is that it's "front loaded". It takes a few minutes to set up. Even though it will save you time the set-up tends to get put off.

Once you do take the time to set it up the Hot-Spots feature will be saving you time for years to come. It really is a great feature so please take the time to get it set up soon.

There is a new feature in Version 2.0 of the FloristWare order-taking/POS system for florists (available this week) that makes entering enclosure card messages faster and easier than ever.

FloristWare now keeps track of up to twelve "short forms" or abbreviations to help you enter card messages more quickly. FloristWare will then expand these abbreviations into their full phrases.

For example, you could specify that FloristWare expand "hb" into "Happy Birthday". Then, each time you want to enter "Happy Birthday" on an enclosure card, you need only enter "hb" and FloristWare will replace it with "Happy Birthday".

To take advantage of this feature you need to make sure that you have upgraded to Version 2.0. You can then specify your short forms in your Settings and use them whenever you are entering a card message.