POS System or Point of Sale
A POS system, or point of sale, is a combination of hardware and software built to centralize business operations. It manages the transactions for your business, including credit card processing, and the post-transaction operations that lead to customer fulfillment, whether in a retail or restaurant setting.
Features
Inventory tracking
This is useful if you have storage facilities or multiple branches since a POS system inform you if you have enough stocks in your store or other branches, and if more stocks are needed.
Sales reporting and analytics
This feature allows you to capture and analyze vital data on product sales as well as revenue rates and ROI. You can determine which products need more marketing efforts, or craft better sales boosting strategies.
Customer management
POS systems store and maintain customer’s full purchase history that you can access on your dashboard. You can access customer information anytime and gauge who among them are your most valuable customers.
Employee management
This allows you to efficiently manage your employees’ time and optimize productivity by keeping track of when and what your employees are working on.
Mobile access
Cloud platforms allow you to access your sales data anytime from any location using web-connected mobile devices, giving you and your business much flexibility.
Integration capability
The POS system must be capable of smoothly integrate with other business systems and apps you use such as accounting software or e-commerce solutions so that you can manage other tasks and processes from within your system. It should also integrate with your existing hardware components.
Benefits
Accurate Operation
The business of selling involves numbers, multiple clients and products at the same time. Handling them all manually easily opens you to errors and mistakes. You do away with double-checking each customer’s order and other information since POS software can record transactions, manage inventory, and analyse sales patterns in an accurate manner.
Analysis
Data is just a bunch of disparate figures and serves no purpose without a powerful analytics and reporting system that can extract relevant information to reveal trends, strengths, weaknesses and solutions. Analytic features of POS software can provide you with useful insights to guide business decisions.
Networking With Other Terminals
You can manage sales from a single platform with the networking capabilities of POS software that allows the system to connect and communicate with other terminals and handheld devices for tracking operations from any location.
Shrinkage Security
This is a distinctive benefit of POS software compared to other sales software since it offers powerful SKU reporting and follow time periods, promotions and orders, and can focus on the performance of each employee.
Affordability
Even with all the powerful features tucked into POS software, it is relatively cheaper than other sales apps and business productivity software. With many cloud-based platforms, POS software features can also be scaled to match the requirements of your business.