The folks at the Herald and Weekly Times (the Vic. arm of News Ltd) approached me months ago looking for help to address the 180 or so Victorian newsagents using the old, out of date and non-compliant POS Solutions DOS software. This group of 180 is holding back H&WT business development plans.
News Ltd, to their credit, has said enough is enough. They want newsagents to switch to compliant industry standard software.
We agreed to help and put together an offer which helps newsagents and helps News Ltd. It is based around the same software News Ltd has purchased from Tower Systems for their own use and the same software already chosen by 1,400 other newsagents.
Newsagents use the Tower software for home deliveries, point of sale, magazine management, marketing and business management. Tower Newsagents are the most IT compliant in the industry – as measured by magazine distributors and newspaper publishers.
Victorian newsagents switching from POS Solutions DOS software to the Tower Windows software can access a one year $10,000 interest free loan from H&WT. If your hardware is up to scratch it won’t cost anywhere near that. The starting price is $5,495 (incl GST) which includes software (matching the licences you have of the POS software), on site training and two years of support.
Close to 200 newsagents have switched from POS Solutions to Tower Systems over the last two years. Plenty more have signed to make the switch over the next eight weeks.
My estimate is that POS Solutions has about 700 newsagent users nationally. This figure comes from material prepared POS Solutions which claims 1,100 users with around 400 of these being non-newsagents.
Disclosure: I own Tower Systems.