Holiday Sales

The Holidays are right around the corner and many of you may be preparing for a holiday sale. Here’s how you can setup things in MasterVision to make that easy:

1. Decide on your holiday discounts. MasterVision will support more than one.
2. Open the Discount screen at File > Open > Point of Sale > Discount Type. It looks like this:
   
3. Create any discounts you want. Give them a name, the percent amount, and make sure you leave Active checked. Close the discount screen to save those changes.
4. Now, when you go to the Point of Sale screen, you’ll see those discount types. Important: Select the Discount first and then add the items to POS. The discount amount will be deducted from the items as you enter them. It’s possible to do different discount amounts for different items – just change the discount type before you add the next item. The screenshot belows shows a $15 backpack with a 15% discount applied.
   

Why Software?

Why do you want software for your martial arts school? That’s a question that stumps a lot of people when I ask it. They know the school down the street has software, so they must need software. Or they think they need software for their school to be “professional”. Or they just have a “feeling” that they should have software.

All of those are really, really bad reasons to buy software. 

There are two reasons – and only two reasons – why you should consider software for your martial arts school: Organization & Efficiency and Business Intelligence. If these two reasons don’t apply to you, then don’t buy martial arts software.

Organization & Efficiency

Are you having any of these problems:

• Feeling disorganized
• Spending more time than you want on the paperwork of running a school
• Not doing things you should be doing because they take too much time
• Hiring people to do the paperwork chores that take too much time

Those are problems of Organization & Efficiency and computers are very, very good at solving those issues.

Sure, for each new student you could put their name & address on a sticky note and throw it in a desk drawer, but software can do better than that. Software keeps all of that information organized, makes it easy for you to find it, and makes it easy to change it all. This is your Organization improvement.

Software is also much faster which makes you more efficient. Sure, you can mentally go through every student in your school and make a list of who’s ready to test. Or you can go to the computer and print out that list in 5 seconds without having to think. Sure, you’ve got great calligraphy skills and can create exam certificates in a couple hours, or you can go to the computer and have it print out beautiful, customized exam certificates in a minute. This is your Efficiency improvement.

If you want to be more organized and more efficient with your time, then you do need software for your school. 

Business Intelligence

Software (well, good software) is very good at crunching numbers so you can know exactly what is going on in your business – what is known as Business Intelligence. It’s Business Intelligence that let’s you know if what you are doing is working or not. Maybe you can run a school by the seat of your pants, but software can tell you exactly what is going on. Things like:

• How many active students you had every month over the last three years and present it all in a nice graph that shows you exactly how your school is doing.
• What your retention rate is – how many active students I had last month (or last quarter or last year) and how many are still enrolled
• Tell you how much tuition you should be collecting this coming month
• Track all of your marketing and tell you how well each marketing source does in costs to get a lead and cost to get an enrollment.

If you want business intelligence insights into how your school is doing so that you can improve, then martial arts software might be right for you.