Our previous newsletter introduced you to the new Revenue Per Round report. Along with today's topic, these are new reports in our POS Express product. You will most likely need to upgrade your software to see these new reports. As long as you are on a current support or rental plan, these upgrades are free. Just call or email our support group to schedule an update. If you are still on our 5.2 product, we would like to show you the new POS Express. Of course we will be at the PGA show in Orlando but we could also show you this product remotely over the internet. If your not sure what version or support plan you are on, call our sales office for that information as well. Call Mike Stanovich at our sales office Today for a quick tour 800-793-1872.

Today's lesson - SKU Variance Report. This will essentially show you how to find leaks in your financial plumbing. This new report is a bit different from all others in that it gives you the ability to Drill Down to the details.

First you need to find and add the report to one of your reporting Tabs. Select a Tab (On Demand in this example), and then click the Report Options button:

Locate the new SKU Variance Report and add it to your Tab. Note: if this report is not in the list, you need to get an update from our Tech Support group. Also if you want you can set this up to auto-email to yourself or anyone you like. See our first Lesson from the Pro: Auto-Email your CPS Reports for instructions on email setup.

Now select this report and enter any filtering criteria you like. I am running the report for the current day using my Food & Beverage template to review activity at my snack bar. After you select the report and filter, Click the Display button. Note: do NOT Print from here if you want to take advantage of the new Drill Down features. Also note that you have some Sort By options that may come in handy once you get the hang of this report.

The result is a high level look at your Sales data by Sale Category. Notice that Beer has a negative -9.91 variance.

To investigate why you are short $9.91, put your cursor anywhere over that line until you see your cursor turn to a magnifying glass and Double Click your left mouse button. For example, Double Click on the word Beer. Note that this will open a new Tab called "Beer" in your report view and will now show you the specific Product Codes sold under beer. In our example below we have 2 different Beer Category Products. Domestic Draft and Corona. Our $9.41 variance is all in the Corona sales.

Let's dig a little deeper and see why we have that -$9.91 variance. Move your cursor over the word Corona and Double Click your left mouse again. Now you will notice a third tab "Corona" opens in your display window. You can click on any of these tabs any time to go back to the other views of the report. We now see 3 sales of Corona product for the day. Note the first sale has a variance of 1 cent. Probably a tax rounding issue for a tax inclusive price. But look at the second sale; it has a variance of -$9.90. On the second line of that sale we give you the information to find out why. The Salesman "Rick" and Sale# "170801030005".

If I go Look Up that Sale from the Sale Screen I find that Rick sold a 6-pack of Corona and gave a 50% discount at 4:38PM. Hmmm.. About the same time Rick and his brother Tom went out for a late afternoon 9-holes.

Stop by our booth at the PGA show to say hello. Better yet, drag some of your friends over to our booth and recommend they use our product! FYI, if you know anyone who has a general retail store (non-golf related), we now have a sister company to provide similar POS solutions, POS Prophet Systems. We will have some literature available for that product line at the show if you know of someone who could benefit from it.

Enjoy :)