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The Benefits of Moving to a Point-of-Sale (POS) System
Buying a point-of-sale (POS) system may seem like a hassle and an unnecessary expense, but if you look closer, you’ll find clear gains.
There are two main types of systems: for retail stores; and for restaurants and hotels, also known as the hospitality category.
Here are the benefits of point-of-sale systems:
1. Payment Processing – In order for a small business or restaurant to process credit and debit card payments, a payment gateway is required. A point-of-sale system can greatly streamline the process for merchants. It enables businesses to process the transactions as they happen instead of logging into a merchant account virtual terminal and bulk entering credit card transactions at the end of the day.
2. Integration with Accounting Systems – A POS system can integrate with a merchant’s bookkeeping system and manage various types of data, such as sales by employee, inventory, and more.
3. Markdown Management – Another area a POS system can aid in business management is with markdown management. This is especially useful for tracking obsolete inventory that needs to be cleared out to make room for new stock.
4. Communication Simplification – A restaurant POS system can send orders directly to the kitchen, saving steps by servers and cutting the time between a customers ordering and receiving their meals.
5. Pinpointing Shrink – By monitoring inventory at the point of sale, merchants can ensure their “on the books” inventory matches their actual stock, eliminating sudden shrink.
6. Reduce Human Errors – Manual inventory tracking can become a nightmare as mistakes are sure to happen. A POS system tracks each sale as it occurs, eliminating the need for manual inventory management.
7. Consistent Pricing – For businesses with more than one location, owners can set pricing to be consistent throughout the entire company, if desired.
8. Sales Pattern Monitoring – Being prepared for seasonal stock management, sales by employee for commissions and contests, and more can be aided with a point-of-sale system’s ability to monitor sales patterns.
9. Employee Management – Another plus with sales pattern monitoring is the ability to man your store with more employees during peak times and save money by scheduling fewer staff during slower days and times.
10. Improved Customer Relations – The bottom line with implementing any system is to improve customer relations. Word of Mouth is one of the most powerful marketing tools for businesses. Keeping your customers happy by maintaining sufficient staff and stock can be attained through the aid of a point of sale system.
Accuracy: Scanning is more accurate than punching in numbers from a sticker, or expecting the cashier to remember what each item costs.
Analysis: POS systems let you manage inventory, flag items for reorder, and analyze sales patterns.
A point-of-sale system is, at heart, a cash register — but because it’s based on a PC, it opens up a new world of data about your business.
A point-of-sale (POS) terminal can be networked to other terminals, and to a server in the back room or at another location. It can be expanded with handheld devices wirelessly linked to the main system. You can use it to can track a number of operations in useful ways and customize it as your needs change over time.
The main advantage of a computerized POS system over a cash box or a cash register is the sophisticated and detailed sales reports it provides. The software lets you analyse sales in different ways, such as by SKU (item sold), time periods, promotions, by store if you have more than one, or even by sales clerk. It will help your inventory manager buy in the right number of cartons of tissue paper with improved timing, and help your chef calculate how much cheese to order for the coming week, taking into account an upcoming holiday. It can also help reduce employee shrinkage.
But that’s only the start. Once your sales are computerized, you can plug that computer into a network, and the network into a back-office computer system that downloads results from all your registers, consolidating and monitoring the information in a variety of ways. If you bite the bullet and pay the costs, you can integrate all this into your accounting and inventory software systems.
The added and more immediate flow of detailed information about your sales will help you come up with better competitive ideas and then evaluate their effectiveness.