Take Control Of Your Business And Grow Your Profits!

Few purchases can have as dramatic an effect on your retail or hospitality business as a point of sale (POS) system. Let our POS specialists teach 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

A right POS system can lift you up to a new level of control over your operations, increasing profits, efficiency as well as fine-tuning your business model. The wrong choice of system, however, can cause you a great amount of frustration and waste of money.

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

A POS system can save you a great amount of money, increase your profits, and cut down the amount of time you spend on one business plan to the next.

Saving more money, have more control over your business, and being more productive; sounds like a great combination, right? Here are some of the ways a modern point of sale system can help your business.

Eliminate shrinkage

A computerized POS system can drastically cut down on shrinkage, the inventory missing from your store or restaurant due to theft, waste and employee misuse. Because employees will know that you’re carefully tracking inventory, internal shrinkage will diminish.

Improved accuracy

Whether you use barcode scanning or not, POS systems ensure that every item in your store or on your menu is sold for the right price. Your staff will never have to guess prices again, and you can change prices with just one tweak in the computer.

Get better margins

You can get better magins by having a detailed sales report, focusing on higher-margin items would be cinch. By moving items within a retail location, or promoting poor-performing dishes in a restaurant, you can help boost sales of well performing items.

Knowing your stats

You can easily know which of your products have been sold today, yesterday, last week or months ago, with the help of a POS systems. It can even tell how much money is in the cash drawer and how much of that money is profit.

Manage inventory better

Detailed sales reports make it much easier for you to keep the right stock on hand. Track your remaining inventory, spot sales trends, and use historical data to better forecast your needs. A POS software can be set to alert you when when stocks run low so you can reorder for them. Many store owners who think they know exactly what trends affect them find a couple of surprises once they have this data.

Build a customer list

Collecting names and address of your best customers may come in handy in the long run. You may use this list for targeted advertising or for announcing 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

For retail, you can make checkouts faster by using a barcode scanner and other POS features. Restaurants will find their order process greatly streamlined as orders are relayed automatically to the kitchen from the dining room. Either with these two, you’ll be delivereing a faster and more accurate service to your customers.

Keep in mind that realizing these benefits requires you to commit using your POS systems’ capabilities to their fullest. Without proper training and analysis, any sophisticated POS system will just be another regular cash register.

Retail needs vs. Hospitality needs

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

Retail

Of the two above, retails are the ones who uses simpler POS. They process transaction all at once and often use less variation in the items 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. If you run a business that sells items in a variety of styles, a POS system that supports matrixes would satisfy your needs. 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 sub 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. For quick-service restaurants, POS systems are practically a requirement for living up to their name: orders entered on terminals in the front are automatically displayed on monitors of the kitchen, ready to be quickly assembled and delivered to the customer.

For fine dining restaurants, point of sale requires a bit different. They need a POS system that gives them the ability to create and store open checks, as parties order more over time, as well as track which server is handling which table. With better management, comes better gains from improved efficiency. If your restaurant has 20 tables and has an average check of , it can increase turnover by one party per table, that would be an extra 0 on one busy night.

Return of Investment (ROI)

Switching from a traditional cash register to a POS system can be difficult. There are many factors to consider and some pitfalls to avoid. However, the return of investment (ROI) 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.