Increase Your Profits Using Efficient POS Systems!

Few purchases can have as dramatic an effect on your retail or hospitality business as a point of sale (POS) system. Let our Point Of Sale experts teach you how to take control of your business and increase your profits.

Having A Control Over Your Business

Using the right POS system can boost your business into 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 the cause of frustration.

In a sense, your POS system is a glorified cash register! The most basic POS system consisting 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 the traditional cash registers, POS systems are able to create detailed reports which can help you plan for better solutions for your business.

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

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

Eliminating 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. Because employees will know inventory is being carefully tracked, internal shrinkage will dwindle.

Improved accuracy

Whether you use barcode scanning or not, using a POS system can 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

With a detailed sales report, you can focus more on the higher-margin items. By moving items within a retail location, or promoting poor-performing foods in a restaurant, you can help boost sales of high-profit items.

Know where you stand

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 as well as how much of that money is profit.

Better inventory management

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. Your POS software can be used to alert you when it’s time to reorder for stocks that are running low. Many store owners who think they know exactly what trends affect them find a couple of surprises once they have this data.

Building a customer list

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

Reduce paperwork

Reducing the time you spend on doing inventory, sales figures, and other repetitive but important paperworks can be lessen if you use a POS system to help you out. It doesn’t only reduce the time but save more for you as well as give you a peace of mind.

Efficiency in transactions

In retail settings, barcode scanners and other POS features make checkout much, much faster. Restaurants will find their order process greatly streamlined as orders are relayed automatically to the kitchen from the dining room. With either of the two, your customers get faster, more accurate service.

You have to keep in mind that these benefits requires you to commit using your POS systems’ 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 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 groups, retailers have simpler POS needs. Because they use less variation in the types of products they sell and process transactions all at once. Because there are some POS features retailers that specifically want to include the ability to support kits (e.g. 3 for deals), returns and exchanges, and support for digital scales. If you run a business that sells items in a variety of styles, a POS system that supports matrixes would best suit your needs. For example, matrixes let you create one inventory and price entry for a particular sweater, but still track sales according to size and color.

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 sub shops, a POS system can greatly increase accuracy and cut down on time-per-transaction unlike with hastily-scrawled order tabs sent to the kitchen. And for quick-service style restaurants, a POS system would be required to meet success: orders taken 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. Their needs includes the ability to create and store open checks, as parties order more over time, and to determine which server is handling which table. The efficiency gains from better management can be impressive. If your restaurant has 20 tables and has an average check of , it can increase turnover by one party per table, that is an extra 0 on a busy night.

Return of Investment (ROI)

Switching from a traditional cash register to a POS system can be difficult. There are several factors you need to consider and unexpected problems to avoid. However, the return of investment (ROI) can really make it worth the 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.