I've got cash registers that work just fine. Why should I buy a computerized POS system?

You can be losing money in a number of different ways, but if you're using older technology, you are losing it.

You can be giving away your product without being aware of it.

For golf and country clubs, your primary product is access to the course, of course. If you're like most clubs, you have different terms and conditions for access to the course - you have weekday, weekend, twilight, non-member and member fees. If you have customers who get charged the wrong amount, or not charged at all when they should have been, you're losing money, and the sums can be very substantial.

As an example, we had one golf and country club implement our system a couple of months after the start of the season. Before the system was implemented, memberships were purchased at the accounting office, and theoretically were to be presented to the pro shop staff whenever the golfer arrived to tee off. When the system went live, they were amazed at the number of people who were claiming membership status when they either didn't have active member status or weren't in the database at all. Because the system won't allow a member round to be issued unless the member is identified at the POS, the pro shop staff couldn't simply take the golfer's word for his status, the office had to verify and correct the golfer's status in the database. The net result? The office found that over 80 people were claiming membership status who actually didn't have it, and the membership revenue increased by over $70,000 in the first month the system was live.

Staff people have friends for whom they're tempted to do "favors".
It's a fact of life that a lot of people bend the rules when it comes to friends and sometimes even acquaintances. If you have a system in place that controls the administration of the rules, they are a lot harder to bend. In AISA Club Manager, the POS system can be set up so that the buttons for twilight green fees aren't even enabled prior to, say, 3pm, the buttons for member green fees aren't enabled when a five-day member is selected and it's a Saturday or Sunday, and the member green fees buttons aren't ever enabled until a member in good standing is selected from the database. If your system makes it difficult or impossible to bend the rules, they get enforced, and you see the additional revenue.

You can have staff people who succumb more directly to temptation.
While a lot of managers believe that their staff people are completely honest, there is always a temptation to steal when relatively large amounts of cash are handled, and some people will succumb to temptation.

Employee theft is a problem that can afflict smaller courses even more than larger ones, and the losses can be much more painful. At a small course, you can have a single employee on duty in non-prime time periods, and that employee can be handling significant amounts of cash. With cash registers, there isn't much that forces an employee to ring in non-stock items like green fees.

In AISA Club Manager, you can optionally have the system print green fee tags each time that a golfer goes out on the course. These tags are color-coded for each day and are attached to the golfer's bag and are highly visible. Both members and non-members are issued tags, so the rule becomes that everyone on the course must have a green fee tag with today's color displayed. Of course, the only place that the golfer can get a green fee tag is from AISA, so the clerk is forced to record the sale to get a tag.

You get three immediate benefits:

• Clerks are strongly encouraged to stay honest.
• Course utilization figures are completely accurate, even more accurate than the utilization figures from some tee sheet programs where member check-in can potentially be ignored and no-show reservations may not be cancelled correctly.
• The fact that every golfer must display a green fee tag also means that any problem with walk-on golfers is identified and steps can be taken to eliminate the problem.

You can be losing customers to your competition.
If you're not providing the best possible customer service there's a good chance you are losing customers without ever realizing it. The best pro shops can check in golfers, set up cart rentals, process credit card transactions and get the golfers on their way in a matter of seconds. Golfers, like everyone else, expect not to wait at all any more, and if you don't have a modern POS system, you're making a significant percentage of your golfers wait, guaranteed.

Undoubtedly you've had a situation where the customer you're serving has selected one or more items for purchase, you've rung the items in and then the customer pauses, perhaps to look at another item, to chat to a friend, to search for a missing wallet. In any event, if you've got a cash register, that uncompleted purchase effectively locks up the system for you, and for everyone else working that day. With AISA Club Manager, you can suspend an open transaction and start a new transaction in substantially less than one second by touching the monitor twice. Returning to the suspended transaction and picking up where you left off is also done by touching the monitor twice. It couldn't be simpler, it couldn't be faster, and it couldn't provide better customer service.

2. You're working harder than you need to.

Computers really are great labor-saving devices, especially when they are used effectively. However, the effective use of computers is almost completely dependent on the software running on the computer.

The larger your operation, the more time a modern POS system will save.

This doesn't mean that small to medium size operations don't benefit from the labour-saving characteristic of POS/accounting systems. In fact, proportionally, the smaller operator gets more labour savings than the larger operator because the smaller operator has fewer people to share the workload, so more work tends to flow up the organization chart to the club manager. The more the manager can automate the day-to-day tasks facing him or her, the more time there is for the higher value tasks of the effective manager.

This does mean that if your POS/accounting system automatically handles posting sales from the pro shop, lounge, restaurant and any other areas you have in your operation to your back office accounting system, that's good. If it can also generate things like contact lists, member cards and specialty reports, that's better. If it can help you market the club, run promotions, maintain and extend contact with your customers - members and non-members alike, that's great.

The more complex the business processes involved in running the business, the more time it will save.

If you have a cash-only public course, that's one thing. If you have a semi-private club where you have a mix of members and cash customers, that adds to the complexity of your operation. If your members have charge privileges at your bar and restaurant, the complexity grows further. If you have all that and you also implement green fee passbooks, cart rental discount cards, driving range discount programs and multiple member classes with different terms and conditions the information you have to manage becomes really enormous. The only effective way to manage this information is with a computer and a modern POS/accounting system.

The more integrated the system, the more time it will save.

A cash register lives in isolation. All the information generated from a cash register doesn't go anywhere until someone physically takes that information (in the form of a sales tape and/or individual sales receipts) to the back office system where it has to be manually entered.

Stand-alone POS systems are better - at least you get better information from them - but they still don't move the information from your pro shop or restaurant until someone initiates some sort of transfer.

Integrated systems which have the POS system as a front-end to a complete back office accounting system are better yet. If there's no transfer process, no one can forget to do it. If there's no manual entry of sales figures, there's no error.

Integrated systems that also have communications capabilities to allow you to get information from anywhere and send it to anywhere are the state of the art. For multi-site operations, these kinds of capabilities are now considered essential.

Okay, but why should I buy AISA Club Manager?

There's really only one answer to this question. AISA Club Manager represents by far the best value for the money.

We've worked with dozens of club managers to create a system with the functionality needed by clubs and we've succeeded. Our system is easy to learn, easy to use, powerful, flexible and an all-round excellent value. Even more surprising, it's quite affordable.

We're not the most inexpensive POS/accounting system out there. There are retail POS systems that are cheaper, and there are even a few restaurant systems that are cheaper, but in the club management market you need a retail POS and a restaurant POS and a back office accounting system and a Customer Relationship Management system all rolled into one. That's what we give you.

Of course, we're not alone in the club management market. There are a number of very good club management systems that provide similar functionality to AISA Club Manager but AISA costs five to twenty times less than they do. If you're operating a Golf and Country Club, Yacht Club or Ski Club, you can't do better than AISA Club Manager.

Society Manager and AISA Affordable, Powerful Solutions for Small Business Please contact us at Asseance: sales@asseance.com