Now we just want to take a couple of minutes and talk with you about barcode
printing, and I have Ashley Hawkins here, he's our technical services director
over at POS Nation. Ashley, thanks for coming.
Basically we just want to kind of give each customer a rundown on the barcode
express printing module. So what we want to discuss are things like, if we want to
print a barcodes for everything or if we would just want to print for a couple. So
if you just want to kind of walk us through, that would be really great. Sure,
well, the easiest way to access the barcode printing module, barcode express
in the software is simply logging into the software to the cashier's front
screen here to begin with. And so when we get in, we're gonna go right underneath
the pay button. We have the options button here and that brings us to the
backend management console where all the functionality is. And we're gonna go to
the setup screen and then barcode express should be right here. If you have
it activated, it will show up. If you don't have it activated, we can get that
unlocked for you. And when we first come into the software you'll have a few
options up on the screen. The first one here is that we do have a label select
and that allows us a little bit of functionality, selecting different label
formats that are preset in the software. Now, I'm not gonna set that, it's
already preset where we want it, and at this point we're going to be able to go
into the software and there's a button up here, under the options button, we have
a mark all. And so if we're starting out with an initial inventory and we just
want to print out a couple labels for every item in the system, we can select
that button. It's gonna prompt us for how many items we want to preset for each
item in the system, how many barcodes we want to preset. I'm gonna preset two
labels for every item in our whole system. Now what's gonna happen is over
here on the right-hand column, you'll see a heading called number of lab, that's
short for a number of labels, and you'll see that it has the number two under
each line item here. That means that we've already set this program up to
print two labels for every item in our system. Now after every barcode printing
session, you're usually going to want to go back up here to the options button and
unmark all just so that you start with a clean slate. Now if we would just want to
go print a single item or a group of items that we've received
in for inventory, then the easiest way to go do that is, once we bring up our code
express, we're gonna go to the item button right down here and that's going
to ask us to scan a barcode on one of the items that we're looking at. I've
done that with my cola here, and it's gonna pull up that line item. And I'm
just gonna go over here and select the number of lab, number of labels, and I'm
gonna type in two for that. Now, if we had multiple items that were printing
barcodes off for at the same time, then we could just hit return after
we select the number, we can go up to another item, I'm just gonna select one
of the other items on the list here, and I'm gonna type 3 for that one and hit
return, and that sets those two items up. Now, I'm gonna have a total of five
labels print out for this particular run and at that point, after we've made
sure we've selected the right label format and we've got those selected,
we're gonna just hit the print button and it's going to print off our labels
nice and neat for us. And now here's our list of labels that we had and so on.
These are pretty standard format labels and I'm going to take that label
off right there and I can just go ahead and slap it on my product if I want to.
Obviously the cokes already labeled, we would be typically using this in a
situation where we have unlabeled items. Okay well the other thing that you
just brought up was standard labels. Okay now let's talk about some
of the limitations that this might have and what other options, if you need
something, that's really a non-standard label. Let's talk about that for a second.
Sure, well you know first, non-standard labels, that's usually, most of the time,
if somebody has an existing system with UPC codes like on the back of this cola
here, that'll be something that's just really easy to set up in the system.
We see the most complications that people have is when they go off making
their own barcodes for the first time and they really don't understand some of
the basic safety rules and things to make that go smooth for them, you know
one of the basic safety rules of building a barcode initially for an item
that's not in the system is keeping it to about 12 to 14 digits. If we go over
that, you can see that there is a finite space on this label and people
don't really think about the space that they have but
really just to be safe, 12 to 14 digits will about fill this up,
especially if you use alphabet characters and it tends to make it go
further across the label. The biggest things that we want to do in the
formatting though, when we're creating those labels, we want to realize this is
not a number for us to look at in reference, this is a number for the
computer system to keep track of. And so that's a big key that we don't want to
put a long description for the item number, it needs to be a number of some
sort. So you would come up with some system that allows you to create each
item with a serial procedure, and when you do that, you want to keep your item
numbers, those barcode numbers, to being just numbers and just alphabetic
characters. And you might possibly have a slash or a dash but I wouldn't go off
doing periods and some of the other dollar signs and things like that. That
can actually cause confusion in the database system that would, you know,
render the system having some troubles. So we keep it to that 12 to 14 digits.
And the other the biggest rule of thumb because sometimes if we're using a
non-standard label this is our standard label size, two inches wide by one inch,
but we also have various other labels that the system can print. Butterfly
labels, things that go around the piece of fine jewelry, and some other shapes
and sizes. You really don't have an idea of spatially, for how much space you have
there until you print out a few, so it's always best to build two or three items
and then actually go print out some labels and see what it looks like before
you continue inputting your entire database. That will give you time to make
some adjustments before you have, you know, a thousand items in your system, you
have to go back and change the formatting. Okay well, the other thing I'd
like to take just a second as well and talk about is user error mitigation. Okay,
now the whole reason for point of sale is to actually mitigate
user error, so just explain to us for just a second the differences between
using something like the TTS lookup feature and actually printing barcodes
or utilizing an item that actually has existing barcodes and how that's going
to tie into potential user error. Okay sure, well you know we do have
different options in different levels of user error that we want to mitigate
against. I usually tell people if they just have five or ten items or so in
their system that are not barcoded, the TS lookups a really great tool to
save the money of a barcode printer and barcode printing modules and that sort
of thing. As you can see once we open up the TS look up here, we have
18 items that will show up on one screen. Now you could select a particular
department and those front 18 items will be there and we can scroll through, but that
becomes troublesome to have to scroll through a department and try and dig up an
item. So it's always best if we have five or ten items, we might want to create a
special department there that would be for non bar-coded items and like this
miscellaneous items department you can see that there's only a handful of items
maybe twelve or so in here, and that makes it pretty easy for us to quickly
identify and see a particular item without getting overwhelmed with the
selection of items in our system. Once you get over eighteen or twenty items
you start getting into 100 items or so that are not barcoded and that you
don't have another way to look up in the system, it's really best to
start barcoding those for sure because the the barcode system allows you a much
more failsafe method to locate your item quickly. There's no error
you know, once your barcode scanner scans that barcode, it's going to call it the
right item, there's no chance for you to possibly be in a hurry and push the
wrong button here on the touchscreen lookup and you know, start messing up
your pricing that you're selling the item for or your inventory levels. Well
Ashley, I definitely appreciate you coming by, it's really informative. And
one other thing I'd actually just like to discuss is, and to give you a little
indication on, is that barcode express that, you know, we were talking about
non-standard labels and non-standard barcodes, it actually has a little bit of
limitation to it. Usually there, you can see in there, there's only a few
different selections that you can have for a style of barcode or style of label
and we have bartender which is an alternative to that, that really takes
you to another stratosphere of being able to to produce your own barcodes. So
you definitely can consider that after you've maybe looked at barcode express
or demoed it for a second and it can really help you make the right choice. So
we appreciate you. and Ashley, appreciate you coming by, and hopefully
that was informative enough. That was barcode printing.