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 to take control of your business and increase your profits.

Taking Control of Your Business

Having the right POS system will provide a new level of control over your operations, increasing efficiency, boosting profits, and helping you fine-tune your business model. A wrong system is like wasting valuable time and money for your business, it can even be a source of ongoing frustration.

In a sense, a POS system is a glorified cash register. The most basic POS system consisting of a computer, a cash drawer, receipt printer, and an input device such as a keyboard or scanner. In addition to being more efficient than the traditional cash registers, POS systems creates detailed reports which gives you all the information you will need to learn your weaknesses and make future plans for your business’ success.

A POS system saves money, provide productivity gains, and can cut down the amount of time you spend away from the primary focus of your business.

Saving money, have more control over your business, and be more productive; sounds like an easy and achievable plan, right? Here are some of the ways a modern point of sale system can help your business.

Eliminating shrinkage

A computerized POS system can drastically cut down on shrinkage, can be from a missing inventory to theft, waste and misuse of your staff. And since your employees will know that inventory is being tracked, internal shrinkage will diminish.

Accuracy

Whether you use barcode scanning or not, a POS system will ensure that every item in your store or on your menu is sold for the correct price. Your staff will no longer have to guess the price of an item, and you can change prices with just one tweak in the computer.

Get better margins

Having a detailed sales report, you can focus more on the higher-margin items. By moving items within a retail location, or promoting under-performing dishes in a restaurant, you can help boost sales of well performing items.

Know where you stand

At any point of the day, a POS system can instantly tell you how many of a particular product have you sold today (or last week, or last month), how much money is in your cash drawer, and how much of that money is profit.

Manage inventory better

Knowing what stocks you need to keep on hand can easily be tracked using a detailed sales report. 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 alert you to reorder when stocks run low. 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

Collect the names and addresses of your best customers as part of standard transactions. Then use the list for targeted advertising or incentive programs.

Reducing 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, you can make checkouts quicker by using a barcode scanner and other POS features. And since POS systems streamlines your business, all orders from the dining room is quick and accurately delivered to the kitchen. Either with these two, you’ll be delivereing a faster and more accurate service to your customers.

You have to keep in mind that these benefits requires you to commit using your POS systems’ capabilities to their fullest. Without appropriate training and ongoing analysis, even the most sophisticated POS system will be no more useful than a basic cash register.

Retail vs. Hospitality Needs

Since there are two segments when it comes to the POS market, they require different needs: restaurants, bars, and hotels and other retail operations and hospitality businesses.

Retail

Of the two groups, retailers have simpler POS needs. Their transactions are completed all at once, and there is often less variation in the types of products they sell. Because there are some POS features retailers that specifically want to include the ability to support kits (3 for $2 deals), support for digital scales and returns/exchanges. A POS system that supports matrixes would best suit businesses that sells items of variety styles, such as shoes and clothes. 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

Restaurants and other hospitality businesses differ in requirements.

Efficiency is the main focus for casual restaurants. For sandwich shops and other retail-style restaurants, 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. And for quick-service style restaurants, a POS system would be required to meet success: orders entered on terminals in the front are automatically displayed on monitors of the food preparation area, ready to be quickly assembled and delivered to the customer.

For table-service restaurants and fine dining, POS requirements are somewhat different. They need to know which staff is responsible for which table, and being able to create and store open checks. With better management, comes better gains from improved efficiency. If your restaurant has 20 tables and has an average check of $45, it can increase turnover by one party per table, that would be an extra $900 on one busy night.

Return of Investment (ROI)

Migrating from your old system to a computers POS system is not as simple as it looks. There are several factors that needs to be considered and unexpected problems to avoid. However the return on investment and benefits to your business can really make it worth your time and effort.

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.