Less purchases can have as dramatic an effect on your retail or hospitality business as a point of sale (POS) system. Let our experts show you how you can take control of your business, be more efficient and increase your profits without having to suffer from costly mistakes.
Taking Control of Your Business
The right POS system will give you a new level of control over your operations, increasing profits, efficiency as well as fine-tuning your business model. The wrong system, however, can waste both your time and money, and even bring you a lot of frustrations.
In a sense, your POS system is a glorified cash register! The basic POS system you’ll see in any quick service restaurants, which consists of a computer, cash drawer, receipt printer, and an input device like a keyboard or scanner. However, in addition to being more efficient than cash registers, POS systems are able to create detailed reports which can help you in making decisions.
POS systems can save you a great amount of money, increase your profits, and lesses the amount of time you spend from one business plan to the next.
Save more money, getting more control over your business, and being more productive; sounds like a pretty good combination, right? Here are some of the ways a modern point of sale system can help your business.
Getting rid of shrinkage
A computerized point of sale system can drastically cut down on shrinkage, the inventory that’s missing from your store or restaurant due to theft, waste and employee misuse. And since your employees will know that inventory is carefully tracked, internal shrinkage will diminish.
Accuracy
When it comes to pricing, you have to make sure that you’ve place the correct price on every item you sold, a POS system can help ensure this. Your staff will never have to guess prices again, and prices can easily be change with a single tweak in the computer.
Getting margins
Detailed sales reports can help you focus on higher-margin items. By moving items within a retail location, or promoting poor-performing foods in a restaurant, you can help boost sales of well performing items.
Know where you stand
With the help of a POS system, you can instantly know how much money you have in your cash drawer, how much of that money is profit, as well as how many of a particular product you have sold today, yesterday, last week or even last month.
Better inventory management
Detailed sales reports make it much easier for you to keep the right stock on hand. You can easily track your inventory, see what’s on stock, spot sales trends, and use historical data to better forecast your needs. Your POS software can be set to alert you when you’re running low on stocks so you can reorder for them. Because many store owners thinks that they know exactly what trends affects their business, they are mostly caught by a big surprise when they find out these data.
Build a customer list
List the names and address of your best customers, you might never know when they’ll come in handy! You can use it for targeted advertising or incentive programs.
Reduce paperwork
POS systems can dramatically reduce the time you have to spend doing inventory, sales figures, and other repetitive but important paperwork. The savings here: time and peace of mind.
More efficient transactions
In retail settings, checkouts can be made quicker if you use a barcode scanner and other POS features to aid you. Restaurants will find their order process greatly streamlined as orders are relayed automatically to the kitchen from the dining room. In both cases, your customers get faster, more accurate service.
Keep in mind that realizing these benefits requires a commitment to utilizing the POS system capabilities to their fullest. Without proper training and analysis, any sophisticated POS system will be just another cash register with no special functionality.
Retail vs. Hospitality Needs
Since there are two segments in the POS market, they require different needs: retail operations and hospitality businesses like restaurants, bars, and hotels.
Retail
Of the two groups, retailers have simpler POS needs. Retails complete their transactions all at once and uses less variation for the items that they sell. Some POS features retailers may specifically want include the ability to support kits (e.g. 3 for deals), support for digital scales and returns/exchanges. But if your business sells items in a variety of styles like clothes, then you will need a POS system that supports matrixes. As an example, matrixes gives you the ability to create one inventory and price entry for a particular sweater, but can still track sales according to size and color of the sweater.
Hospitality
Depending on the type of establishment, restaurants and other hospitality businesses have different requirements from POS systems.
Efficiency is the key focus for casual restaurants. For retail-style restaurants like sandwich shops, POS systems that relay inputted orders cut down on time-per-transaction and reduce the errors that can happen when hastily-scrawled orders are passed back to the kitchen. For quick-service restaurants, a POS system would be required to meet success: orders entered on terminals in the front are automatically displayed on monitors in the kitchen, ready to be quickly assembled and delivered to the customer.
For fine dining restaurants, point of sale requires a bit different. Their needs includes the ability to create and store open checks, as parties order more over time, and to determine which staff is handling which table. The efficiency gains from better management can be impressive. If a restaurant with 20 tables and an average check of can increase turnover by one party per table, that is an extra 0 on a busy night.
Return on Investment Worth the Trouble
Switching from your old system to a computerized POS system can be difficult. There are several factors you need to consider and pitfalls to avoid. However, the return of investment (ROI) can really make it worth all the effort you put into it.
Need more information or an online resource?
Go to POS-For-Restaurants.com
The author of this article is the Vice-President of Customer Relations at POS-For-Restaurants with over 20 years of experience serving restaurants of all types throughout the U.S.