Carls Tip - Installing a USB Epson TM-T88V thermal printer

Download the driver for the TM-T88V from http://www.refpoint.co.uk/TMT88m5.exe

Plug the printer in to the computer and turn it on. Click on the Start Menu and Devices and Printers. Windows will detect the printer and under Unspecified put ‘TM-T88V’.

Run the driver. Select Next. Select I accept the terms of the license agreement, select Next. Leave the option for Standard. Select Next. Select Add.

 

Select EPSON TM-T88V Receipt under the drop down for Select Driver. Under Printer name, enter tmt88, Port Type select Create a USB port. Leave the Set as Default Printer un-ticked. Select Next.

Select Next. This will install the printer driver. This will take a few minutes. The computer will require a restart.

Once the computer has restarted, the tmt88 printer will show within Devices and  Printers.

Carls Tip - Creating Overdue Rental Letters

Once a rental account becomes overdue, it will generate a letter OverdueR1. If the account isn’t paid by the next month, it will roll over to OverdueR2, third month of not paying it will generate OverdueR3 and then after the fourth and final OverdueR4. The account will not advance from OverdueR4, and if a payment is made, then this will reset the account back to OverdueR1.
  To create the Overdues list, and the letter, select Rentals/HP, ChargeUp and Overdues, Create Overdues File. Select Create new overdues list. Set the Account Types RCMI to R just to pick up the Rentals (Having RCMI will include all Rentals, Credits(HPs), Maintenance and In-store agreements). Select Run Report.

  To review the letter list (there might be some accounts you might not want to send a letter to), Rentals/HP, ChargeUP and Overdues, Edit Overdues File. Select Search. Select as any accounts you want to remove, and select DELETE. These will not affect the accounts, just the letter list, so running the above create letters, will recreate these entries.

  To print the letters, select Rentals/HP. ChargeUp and Overdues, Letters/List. Select Overdue letters. If the system has to generate a lot of letters, than there is an option for running the Letters in a customer range.  Leave the Enter U to update accounts with this letter/date blank, and this will not update the account, which is useful for checking that the letters are all ok, then once the letters have been checked, re-run this process and put a U in this option and the system will mark the account with ‘last letter / date sent’, and will know the next time they are overdue to roll over to the next letter type.

Select Run Report, then View PDF. This will produce the letters.

Any Questions on this, or if you have any other suggestions for a 'Carl Tip' that other people would find useful, drop me a line on support.

Gaz's Tips: Backoffice screens crash fix.

Chrome and Firefox Flash player can crash sometimes, which is annoying. It usually does this when it runs out of memory. We've found that you can reduce, or even get rid of, the problem by adjusting the storage settings. Go into the POS tab and click the "About" link in the top right, then click on "Flash Settings"

This will load the Flash Player settings in a new tab/window. Click on the second tab from the left and slide the slider up to "Unlimited".

Carls Tip - Create a Bundle

Create a new product (by copying the first product you want to appear in the Bundle).
 In selling prices, set the selling price of the package. Under Attributes set in a description of the Bundle, set the Stock to N-Non Stock, Serials to N – No Tracking, Flag to K – Bundles and the TV Lic to Not Set.

Save and Close.

Use the MyList function to drag and drop the new bundle model to the top of the list, and all parts that belong to that bundle. (They will appear in point of sale, in the same order that the models are put into the MyList). Change the QTY of products within the bundle if you require more than one within the bundle (For Example, two sets of 3D Glasses etc).

Select Create Bundle in the drop down box and select Apply. Are you Sure you want to Create Bundles? Select Yes. Bundle created.

Sell the Bundle product in point of sale, and it will populate the breakdown of the bundle onto the sale.

 

 

Any Questions on this, or if you have any other suggestions for a 'Carl Tip' that other people would find useful, drop me a line on support.

News: We're on Twitter!

I've just reactivated our company Twitter account, we're @ref_point, please follow us and we'll follow back. We'll post updates, software changes etc. etc. here and you can also tweet us with support problems and suggestions for the software. Awesome!

Carls Tip: Clearing Firefox's cache.

Firefox can store parts of RPii program, so that it can load it faster. When using RPii, sometimes it helps to clear you cache so that the browser will get the latest version of the program.

 Close all sessions of Firefox, then open a fresh session. Click on the orange Firefox tab at the top left corner (unless you have the menu bar, then just go to tools and options), select History and then select Clear Recent History.

Set the time range to Everything, select the details box to expand for more options, make sure everything is ticked and select Clear Now.

To get Firefox to clear the cache automatically when it closes.

Close all sessions of Firefox, then open a fresh session. Click on the orange Firefox tab at the top left corner (unless you have the menu bar, then just go to tools and options), select Options, and then Options again.

Select the Privacy tab at the top centre of the pop-up. Under the ‘Firefox will’ select Use Custom Settings for history. Tick the box for ‘Clear history when Firefox closes’ and select the Settings box.

Tick all the options, and select OK. Then Select OK again. Close your session; this should then clear your cache automatically whenever you close Firefox.

  Any Questions on this, or if you have any other suggestions for a c ‘Carl Tip’ that other people would find useful, drop me a line on support.

Rainey's Running for Charity

In non-computer news, I will be running a half-marathon on Sunday in aid of our local branch of the National Association of Blood Bikes. These guys do a fantastic job and deserve everyone's support.

Please help me in my quest to raise £500 by texting RAIN74 £2/£5/£10 (amount of your choice) to 70070. Or visit my justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/raineyjayne

Many thanks.
Rainey.

Keep Calm and Call Ref Point

Tim and I had a successful visit to Harry Garlick in Earby on Thursday, we went to install a wireless scanner and printer to allow them to book stock into the system quickly.

They had been writing all serial numbers down on a piece of paper and then typing them in. The scanner does away with all of that.

Now, they scan the EAN of the product, then scan the serial barcode and a label prints out straight away that they can stick on to the box. They then review all of the serials in a back office screen, match them to the purchase orders and book them straight into stock.

Dave Scothern seemed genuinely excited about it, it will save them a ton of time and get rid of keying errors.

HBH Woolacotts in Cornwall have been using this system for quite a few years and couldn't live without it.

Anyway, while we were at Garlicks, I noticed this pinned to the wall:

Good Advice!

RP2 Issue sending mail to Google

Google have tightened up their SPAM filtering so some emails from RP2 have been getting bounced as they were not fully RFC2822 compliant. I've fixed this now, I had to make sure the From field in the header was a valid email address (I've set it to RP2@refpoint.co.uk) and that there was and RFC Date field there too. This fix will go out in the next update but, in the meantime, if it's affecting you, let us know and I'll manually apply the fix to your server.

Carls Tip: Creating Add-ons

Add-ons are a great way to prompt the sales staff to offer accessories and other products in the middle of a sale, that might otherwise been missed.

Select the Stock tab, Setup, Products, Addons. Select New Entry.

• Enter in the Model number or if you want an entire product group enter in PRODGRP and the product group code. 
• Enter the stage this add-on will appear in the list. 
• Enter the Model number of the Add-on.
• Enter in the QTY of the add-on.
• Leave the Price/Reduction and F/R blank and it’ll use the selling price of the add-on product or you can set up an overriding Fixed price or reduction from selling price.
• Other options can be used for date range, Location and if you need to report on these you can give them a promotional name.

In the sales screen, add a model that an add-on applies to. On the Right hand side below your warranties will now appear the list of add-ons.

Select a + to put an add-on onto the sale.

Clear the current SOA via MyList

Sales Out Allowances (soa's) (Save our a?!*es)

Clear the current SOA via MyList

Another layer of complexity added by the manufacturer but RP2 does cater for them. See below. All the retros and allowances and settlement are shown to give you an exact NetNetNet price - very useful for calculating a selling price. 

When the item is sold the SOA is stored against the sale and can be reported on later. It will also produce a debit note awaiting the credit note from the supplier.

I have had a few discussion recently about SOAs and always have to stress that you are not just setting an SOA but a complete price entry that is valid for the dates entered. REMEMBER that the price will revert back when the date expires.

This has meant that some experienced users will not enter a closing date so that the price remains active. The problem being that the SOA has finished. To deal with this we have put an option int MyLists to clear the SOA on selected products. This will leave the price untouched but set the SOA to zero. 

Clear (as mud)

The RP2 Blog in RP2!

I've added the Atom feed for this blog into the RP2 point of sale menu so everyone can see what we post. I'm hoping this will help in keeping you all updated on what we're doing.

Back to work

After a few days off with my son, I'm back in the office. I have a large list of support issues to go through but then I'm going to start work on an integration with Pixmania. As far as I can see, this works in a similar way to Amazon Marketplace and could be a good source of sales.

We also have interfaces with various other 3rd parties, already active with a couple of our customers. Give us a shout if you interested in any of this

Carls Tip: PDFs have changed, how do I change it back?

Since the latest update to Mozilla’s Firefox, users will notice when they produce a PDF, the PDF now displays different to before. This is because it is no longer using the Adobe Reader plugin, but is now using Firefox’s built in PDF preview (like Chrome does).

You can set this back to using Adobe Reader plugin, by clicking on the Firefox tab in the top left, select Options, and then Options again.

Select the Applications tab at the top. Under the column labelled ‘Content Type’ select Portable Document Format (PDF), to the right, select the Use Adobe Acrobat (in Firefox) option, and select OK.

Now when you produce a PDF (Invoices, Manifests, Reports etc), they will display in Adobe Reader like they did before the update.

 Any Questions on this, or if you have any other suggestions for a 'Carl Tip' that other people would find useful, drop me a line on support.