Increase Your Profits Using Efficient POS Systems!
Less 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 you can take control of your business, be more efficient and increase your profits without having to spend a great amount of money on POS systems.
Taking Control of Your Business
The right POS system will give you a new level of control over your operations, increasing efficiency, boosting profits, and helping you fine-tune your business model. A wrong system can be a waste of money and a source of ongoing frustration.
In a sense, your POS system is a glorified cash register! The basic POS system you see in any establishment in the food industry, that consists of a computer, cash drawer, receipt printer, keyboard and/or a scanner. In addition to being more efficient than a regular cash register, POS systems are able to create detailed reports which can help you in making decisions.
A POS system saves money, provide productivity gains, and can lessens the amount of time you spend away from the primary focus of your business.
Saving more money, getting more control over your business, and being more productive; sounds like an excellent combination for your business, right? Well here are some of the best ways a modern point of sale (POS) system can help you out.
Eliminate shrinkage
A computerized POS system can drastically cut down on shrinkage, due to theft, waste and misuse of your staff. And since your employees will know that inventory is being tracked, internal shrinkage will diminish.
Improves accuracy
When it comes to pricing, you have to make sure that you’ve place the right price on every item you sold, a POS system can help ensure this. Your staff will no longer have to guess the price of an item, and prices can easily be change with a single tweak in the computer.
Get better margins
Detailed sales reports can help you focus on higher-margin items. By moving items within a retail location, or promoting poor-performing meals 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. The software can alert you to reorder when stocks run 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 regular customers as part of standard transactions. Then use this list 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.
Efficiency in transactions
For retail, 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, 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, even the most sophisticated POS system will be nothing more than a regular cash register.
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 these two segments, retails are the ones who uses simpler POS. They process transaction all at once and use less variation in the items they sell. Some POS features retailers may specifically want include the ability to support kits (3 for deals), support for digital scales and returns/exchanges. Your POS system will have to support matrixes if you sell items that come in a variety of styles, like clothing or shoes. 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
Restaurants and other hospitality businesses differ in requirements.
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. And for quick-service style restaurants, a POS system would be required in order to live up to their name: a customers’ order is entered on the terminal at the front which sends the order and displays them on a monitor at the food preparation area where the order is assembled and delivered to the appropriate 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 , it can increase turnover by one party per table, that is an extra 0 on a busy night.
Return of Investment (ROI)
Switching from your old system to a POS system can be difficult. There are several factors that needs to be considered and pitfalls 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.
Tags: Point of Sale, Point of Service, POS, restaurant automation, restaurant computer, restaurant hardware, restaurant point of sale, Restaurant pos, restaurant pos equipment, restaurant pos quote, restaurant pos solution, restaurant software