Are you a budding Entrepreneur? Do you own a small scale business and want to expand your wings and fly high and reach new heights?? There will always be a question floating in your mind on how to bring a change that will help flourish your business in the long term and also keep it sustainable? Here is the answer to all such questions –part from the old ways of pen and paper and simple spreadsheet. Switch to a proper point of sale system that is POS-A system that help you scale and grow
To know what exactly it means, if you ask any shop keeper or business man what is a POS they would answer you as simply as the backbone of their business – A hub where everything merges. In simple words it can be said as a perfect blend of software and hardware that allows merchants to take transactions and key day to day business transactions.
The Point of sale system in the core is a cash register but, as it is based on PC it opens a new world of data about your business. A point-of-sale (POS) terminal can be networked to other terminals, and to a server in the back room or at base location. It can be expanded with handheld devices wirelessly linked to the main system. You can use it to can track a number of operations in useful ways and customize and optimise it to your needs that change over time. So that you can branch out all your tasks for more speed and efficiency yet you have the control and all the logistics of sales with you for the reliability and security.
POS has an upper hand over normal cash register because of the flexibility that it provides. It allows you to analyse the sales in many possible angles and perspectives thus helping you to utilize the resources properly and helps to reduce employee shrinkage. POS is a great investment to any business. Though you are doing a pretty good job in managing all the sales of your business manually, but with POS you can simply be best at it.
There are hundreds of reasons why businesses must use POS. Few of them are listed below.
- Digitalization eliminates all the possibilities of human errors
Once your business gets established with very high turnover, even a small error of as little as 1% could make you loose thousands buck. Though POS costs you a basic amount of money, but it is very meager amount when you look at the returns you gain from it just like the seeds that you sow to reap huge harvest later.
- Safeguards against internal theft and misusage of money and resources
As POS has the capability to put a check on each stage in a products life cycle. Hence avoiding the cope for any malpractice or any flaws. It also holds a mirror to all the loopholes present in our product hence it also helps us in tackling all the loopholes that could have caused serious losses to the company.
- Increases performance and efficiency
With all the plot holes and loop holes plugged, there is no need for redoing the process again to verify; hence losses incurred will be less. Just like the icing on the cake, now your customers don’t have to wait in long queues and you will be able to handle more customers in a day. Also it enables you to record the client data so that you can have their shopping history and record their loyalty purchases and award incentives to help you market better to them.
- Accuracy and Consistency
Whenever there is a price change you only need to do it in only one place and it will automatically be updated across multiple locations and within your management software. With your whole business updated, anyone who markets your item will have the correct knowledge of the accurate and the updated price or deal. This means your prices are always consistent, so your customers will never feel cheated and hence increasing your trust value. The added and more immediate flow of detailed information about your sales will help you come up with better competitive ideas and then evaluate their effectiveness.
If you integrate your POS system with all your ventures, like your online store, and branches over various places, you can provide real time interfacing between all of them so that they remain synchronized and updated all at the same time.
- Return on investment (What do you get out of it?)
POS helps you to determine your best selling product, your most successful outlet and also perhaps the reason for it. All these will be automatically reported to you in POS system. Hence it throws light upon the products with best profit margin, your best assets in terms of both human resource and other material resources. Also it helps you to chart out your best and worst helping you build a better marketing strategy. And once your business expands its reach and is well established, POS will not be just meant for improved efficiencies but it will be critical to just know what is going on, where and how to handle it.
Three I’s are necessary for the best implementation of POS -“Integration, integration and integration”. Point of Sale Software is as good as its level of integration with the many popular software & services. Examples of such software would be accounting programs, where all of the daily activities and transactions would automatically imported into accounting without any labor on the user’s end i.e. they get automatically updated without expecting any effort from the user end. So as to provide the customers with real time data so that the accurate and the best is delivered to them always.
With the booming popularity of online shopping, many businesses are choosing to operate both on and off-line. Due to the lucrative market and the worldwide exposure without opening up a physical store, many are even selling exclusively online. For these businesses that operate in both environments, it is imperative that they both are in synchronization. For example a person in tier-two city can have access to the product launched in western country with the same price as a person in that country would pay thus providing more accurate data about pricing.
Implementing new technology can be scary and overwhelming. As the POS is the central nervous systems of a business, it might be intimidating to think about replacing it. That’s why so many retailers have not made the switch yet so it is the high time for each one of you out there trying to expand your businesses to new horizons to make this switch before everybody else does, to make the best use of it before anybody else.
Modern POS systems do more than just offer flexibility when processing daily transactions. They improve a merchant’s chances of success by providing them with tools to streamline business processes. Many of these vital processes would be overly tedious and resource exhaustive to complete without the support of a modern POS system. So switch to POS system and establish your business more effectively.
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