What is the worst technological problem you've encountered and how did you handle it?
By Staff -- Gifts and Dec, 12/1/2008 12:00:00 AM
Stephanie Fleishman, 2910 on the Square, Canton, MD
the Sunday before Christmas was my only day off last December. Our POS system crashed. I had told my employees not to surf the Net while the POS system was open, but they did. They tried to reboot it, and it didn't work. I had to come to work and beg, borrow and plead with my computer guy, whom I hadn't seen in two years, telling him that I understood his rates had gone from $65 to $95 an hour and I would pay it, but I needed him in person and not virtually. I called my accountant and said 'this is the busiest time of the year; we cannot do pen-and-paper and calculator,' and I got my accountant's blessing to buy a brand new computer for the front of the store. The system we'd had was seven years old. I went to the Apple store and there was a really long line. The thing that ran our receipt printer and cash drawer didn't work with the new computer so we had to find the part and have it FedExed to us. Our POS system had become corrupted: we had to FTP it down to Round Rock, TX, so the developer could fix it. The developer FTPed the software back and we started going live Wednesday night or Thursday, but then we had to key in all the sales we wrote up by hand in the meantime, because that runs our inventory. It was a major inconvenience. The new system has been awesome. Upgrade your computer sooner rather than later.
Sue Sacks, Options Gallery, Healdsburg, CA
The biggest issue is finding the time. I am at my gallery 50–60 hours a week. When I go home, the last thing I want to do is get on the computer. Recently I was changing two email programs and bringing an Excel spreadsheet of all my addresses into one program so that I could send out emails. I finally just hired a young woman who had worked for me to do it. I also had to bring in my computer guy, who had to take my computer away for the weekend. My whole business is on that computer! I run all of my accounting on it and I am trying to do more from a sales perspective. Not online sales: I have a gallery and things are changing all the time. It's not like I reorder the same merchandise. But what I want to do is build an email list so I can do specials just to the email list. Probably about 300 are in the list so far. People change their emails and what you get back is just that it didn't go through. You don't get back what the new email is. Using online template services like Vistaprint is hugely decreasing my costs. Something that would normally have cost $300–$500, I just produced for $30. Usually I hire a graphic designer. Admittedly she's way better than I am, but some things don't need that art expertise.
Christi Tullis, Ambiance Interiors and Gifts, Suwanee, GA
Last year on Black Friday our point-of-sale software went out. In a six year period, we'd been through three IT companies and none of them had our POS backed up on our server. We lost all our data. Our IT professional said “I'm going to take your hard drive and freeze it to retrieve the data.” I said “I'll give you 24 hours because this is our busiest season and then I'm not paying for this month, and I'll be asking for a refund for part of the year, too.” We did eventually get the data back, but we had to send the hard drive off for weeks, so in the meantime we were handwriting receipts, completely old school. At the time we didn't know if people's credit cards were good. Fortunately we didn't have too many that weren't. IT professionals are often not very familiar with POS software. It ended up being our accountant who checks it when he is doing our book work. That saves us almost $10,000 a year we had been paying for IT. We now have an onsite backup, a Quickbooks online backup and a third party online backup, so if anything were to happen we would only lose a day's worth of information, whereas at the time we would have lost six months. And we have so much inventory that would have messed us up for years to come.
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