Eftposhirenz

04/09/2026

How electronic and card payments are changing the way we buy:
As a business owner are you keeping up to date?

Electronic and card payments used to be a fairly simple story: cash was declining, cards were rising, and online banking was gradually becoming normal.

That story is now much more complicated.

The payments landscape is being reshaped by digital wallets, contactless cards, account-to-account transfers, open banking, real-time settlement and stronger security expectations. Cards are still central to everyday commerce, but they are no longer the only symbol of convenience.

The biggest change is that payments are becoming invisible.

Consumers increasingly expect to tap, click, scan or approve a payment without thinking about the infrastructure behind it.

Businesses, meanwhile, have to manage more payment choices, more technology partners and more fraud risk while trying to keep checkout simple. The result is a market where speed, trust and flexibility matter as much as price.

Read the full article at https://EftposHire.co.nz

28/08/2026

AI’s Hidden Weakness – GIGO

AI is the techno darling of the day. It’s predicted to either bring a new world of wonder or the end of civilisation as we know it.

Take your pick.

There’s no doubt, however, that if deployed intelligently it can make huge productivity gains.

Amongst all the AI hype and enthusiasm however, everyone seems to have forgotten what is possibly the oldest computer formula in the book.

GIGO.

Garbage in. Garbage out.

Automating a badly designed system will merely result in getting rubbish output at much higher speeds.

Read more on my website https://EftposHire.co.nz

05/08/2026

What's the received wisdom about the state of the New Zealand economy?

It's on its beam ends, right?

Then how come, according to Xero, in the June quarter small business had its best quarter in nearly four years with sales rising 8.6% year on year?

Unsurprisingly agriculture was the standout, with sales up 16.3%, helping drive the national result.

Construction rose 11.0% and manufacturing increased 8.6%. Retail trade grew 6.4%. Even hospitality, supposedly in a death spiral, was up. 2.9%.

All this suggests that the New Zealand economy has at last turned the corner.

The data suggests a “two-speed” recovery. Rural and agriculture-linked regions performed especially well, with Canterbury up 12.3%, Manawatū-Whanganui up 11.9%, Waikato up 10.0%, and Southland up 9.6%.

Auckland and Wellington also improved, but at slower rates of 7.2% and 7.1% respectively.

Despite the stronger sales, the recovery has not yet flowed through into jobs or wages. Small business jobs rose just 0.7% year on year, while wages were up only 1.5%, the weakest increase in the Xero series dating back to 2017.

Hospitality, retail, and other services recorded fewer jobs than a year earlier.

Xero country manager Bridget Snelling described the figures as a reason for cautious optimism, but said more confidence was needed before stronger sales translated into hiring and pay growth.

24/07/2026

I once had a businessman say to me, "Nobody ever went broke making a profit."

It's just not true!

Profit is theory. Cash is reality.

If your business is largely invoice-based, you can be making good profits but if people are not paying the invoices, you're going to go broke.

One of the absolute rules in business is "Cash is king".

If an invoice gets more than a week overdue, you should be sending a polite email requesting payment.

An accounting program like Xero will automatically do that for you. It will send out three reminders. If they don't result in payment, you need to be more aggressive.

At that point I send out a polite but firm email asking if there is a problem and suggesting that if there isn't then could we get payment by the end of the week.

If that doesn't work, you have to get on the telephone and have a chat. I know, it's one of the least enjoyable parts of running a business but if you don't do it, you're working for nothing.

There are scumbags in this world who know perfectly well that for small debts collection options are limited. Usually it's not worth putting them in the hands of a debt collector. Collection companies' fees often exceed the money collected.

And those ratbag debtors know it.

The owner of a failed restaurant called Morocana owed us $7,800. We eventually got an award from the Disputes Tribunal but didn't get any money. When I suggested to my solicitor that we institute bankruptcy proceedings, she looked into the case and came back and told me it's not worth the time, trouble, or money. He has a string of debts a mile long and others are seeking bankruptcy proceedings.

Unfortunately with slow payers your only option is to get on their case and stay on it until they pay up.

08/07/2026

Why do businesses fail?

New business survival statistics are grim. One in ten businesses will not survive its first year, and after five years fewer than a third of start-ups will still be trading. Some of those that do survive are limping along rather than thriving. So why does so much effort, hope and money end in heartbreak?

Read more on the latest blog post on our website https://eftposhire.co.nz/blog/

07/07/2026

Westpac have terminated the arrangement by which we were permitted to hire Eftpos machines out on our merchant numbers.

I suspect that they were spooked by BNZ being fined $6.7 million for breaches of the anti-money laundering laws.

Their reason for terminating our arrangement is because they have no oversight on who is using the merchant facility and therefore they are potentially in breach of AML requirements.

We still have a limited number of terminal IDs. They are credit card and contactless enabled.

They will, however, book out very very early so if you want a machine, you need to book well in advance.

In order to give all our customers fair access to this facility, there is a limit of two weeks per booking. If you want a machine for longer than that, you will have to get your own merchant number.

28/09/2021

If you are thinking of starting your own business or if you are in business and it’s struggling to stay afloat you need to read this book.

If you would like a copy flick me an email at [email protected] and I'll email it to you.

Many small to medium enterprises are hanging on by their financial fingernails, their owners desperately hoping to hold on long enough to make it through to the sunlit uplands of a post-pandemic commercial world.

More than good few simply won’t make it.

Pity, because many of them could be salvaged if only their owners new how.

That's why I have written an eBook called "How To Avoid Going Bust In Business". It looks at ways to avoid getting into financial strife, and ways to get out of it if things are already looking grim.

In this book I will give you a secret on how to beat bankruptcy. It isn’t my own idea. It was given to me by a man who sent many companies to the wall. He also saved a lot of businesses and with it a lot of other people’s money.

You can use it, and the other tools in this book, to keep a weather eye on your finances and avoid a business failure that can destroy more than just your financial position. Families have broken up, homes lost, reputations shattered. Even lives ended.

The tragedy is that business owners often don’t see disaster coming. It’s not until there’s a knock on the door- from a debt collector, a bailiff, or an angry creditor – that the awful truth dawns on them. At that point it is often all over, red rover.

As I said, If you would like a copy flick me an email at [email protected] and I'll email it to you.

23/09/2021

Spring has sprung, as heralded by the first flush of cherry blossoms.

Let's hope it's a harbinger of better times to come once we are let loose from lockdown level 3/2.

20/09/2021

Auckland goes to level 3 tomorrow night. (About time!)

But, if you are running a retail or hospo business, non-contact delivery at the door poses its own problems. Like, your hard-wired eftpos terminal won't reach.

That's where a mobile unit will work for you.

Go to our website https://EftposHire.co.nz to see how we can help with that.

Cheapest short or long term eftpos terminal hire rates in New Zealand backed by customer-focussed service and using modern equipment.