News From Extreme Point of Sale, Inc.

Buy 99 Get 100 Five Percent Off

The headline is obviously an exaggeration, a special that no store would ever truly run, but it is also a sale that ThunderPOS could handle automatically with the very flexible Promotions feature.

The holiday shopping season is rapidly approaching, and eye-catching specials are a part of the deal. To set up Promotions, you'll need to go to the Store menu, then Promotions.

You can have any number of promotions in the system, but any one item on a transaction can only benefit from one promotion. The system will attempt to give the customer the most favorable of the promotions an item is eligible for, though it is an estimation.

There are a lot of options with promotions, but don't panic - it's mostly a matter of knowing what you want to do. Start at the top and work your way down. First, give it a descriptive name. This will appear on the register screen for your employees to know why it's getting a promotion, and optionally can appear on the receipt.

Next, you pick whether everyone gets the promotion, or only people who you pick or who have a specific discount card get the promotion. For something like a Black Friday special, you're likely to want to give it to all customers.

Pick out the times that a promotion is available. This can be always, on certain days of the week, or for a specific date range. A Black Friday one might only be on November 29th, for instance, or from the 29th to December 1st, where a store wanting more traffic in the middle of the week might have a promotion that runs every week on Tuesday and Wednesday.

You'll select what the promotion does next. There are five types here:

Buy X get Y. This can be buy one get one free, buy two get one half off, or whatever you might want. This will give the less expensive item in a group the discount - if you have it buy one get one free for items that are $10 and $5, the $5 one will be discounted.
Dollar Discount. This will take a flat dollar amount off items on the promotion, but will not reduce the price below zero.
Percent Discount. This will take a percentage off all items on the promotion.
Specific Price. This will sell all items on the promotion for the price that you set here, which can be useful for things like 'All Used Rock CDs $8'.
Bonus on Trades. This will get a percent boost to trades of items on the promotion, and can be allowed for cash trades, store credit trades, or all trades.

Finally, you'll need to select what items the promotion applies to. Is it for New, Used, or Both? What departments and categories, or specific item IDs, does it apply to? If using departments and categories, are there any items it shouldn't apply to?

While there's a lot there, a promotion can be set up in under a minute, and it can make running your discounts worlds easier.

Version 5.4.4.0 Available

Version 5.4.4.0 is available, and includes a number of minor fixes and features. It is vital that all stations get updated to this version once any of them are, as you will not be able to use prior versions of the software off a database running 5.4.4.0. For this reason, we recommend contacting us for the update via phone if you are multi-station or if you are a user of ExtremePOS Store Server.

Included in this version is the driver's license scanning functionality discussed last month, allowing you to scan licenses at the register to add a customer or lookup an existing one.

Additionally, there is new auditing functionality, tracking changes to prices and costs made through inventory. This will not require reason entry, but will track the responsible employee and the date and time. The log for this can be viewed through reports, though it will only have data going forward from when 5.4.4.0 is applied.

We've also by request added the option to allow for price changes to make items be negative price at the register, which was blocked in version 5.0. We highly recommend against turning this feature on unless you are certain you want it on, as it can cause confusing issues, particularly with returns or trade ins.

The current version of the software, available for supported users, is 5.4.4. To get back on support, or to upgrade to phone support from email support, contact sales at (919) 387-7597 x100. If you are not on phone support, and you call, a response will be sent to the email address on file. You may also buy a support incident from our website.

We are shifting our support hours back to the previous time of 9 am to 5 pm Eastern effective today.

As a reminder to users of Windows 7, Microsoft's support of this version of Windows is ending in January 2020. We highly recommend getting onto Windows 8.1 or 10 by this time. Versions of ExtremePOS, Musicware, Praiz, and ThunderPOS 4.0 and above should all be compatible with Windows 10; versions before 4.0 are themselves being sunset for support as of the end of this calendar year.