Can POS Systems Boost Your Business?
Brian Wallace, Founder & President, NowSourcing
Point-of-sale (POS) systems aren't new.
As a retail business owner, it is important for you to have an efficient POS system in place.
In the year 2020, the market size of POS software touched 9.3 billion.
If you want to give your customer a seamless experience, then a POS system is a must for your retail business.
A quality POS system comes with a customizable toolkit that can help increase productivity and track essential business data hundred times better.
In this post, you'll learn about what POS systems can do and how they play a crucial part in boosting your business.
Benefits of POS systems
POS systems have been in the market for a long time, and many businesses have benefited from this.Choosing the right kind of POS system can help you grow your business and enhance the level of customer experience.
Without any further ado, let’s dive right into the benefits:
1. Ensure faster payments and checkout
Did you know about 65 percent of customers complain about longer checkout times as their biggest frustration?
With an advanced and efficient POS, this is never a problem.
Check out why.
- It offers various payment methods so that customers do not need to dig into their wallets while standing at the checkout lines
- It enables customers to save their preferred payment methods so they do not need to take our their wallets during their subsequent purchases
With the easy synchronization between devices integrated and POS systems like card swiper, barcode scanner, printer, and so on, the time taken for each transaction can be significantly reduced thereby making the process faster and more efficient.
2. Simplify accounting and invoicing processes
POS systems are used to keep track of every financial activity.
Retail frauds are high, but with efficient POS systems, these can be minimized, and losses can become a thing of the past.
Every invoice is stored in the central system and also automatically processes the underlying accounting operations.
This saves businesses from spending too much time behind maintaining accounts and invoices. Moreover, the invoices can be grouped to have a better look at the business activity.
3. Tracks inventory in real-time
POS Systems are tightly integrated with inventory details.
When an invoice is generated, the invoice items can be deducted from inventory, and a transparent stock can be managed for the business.
With proper inventory management from POS systems, you can keep an eye on products selling out fast and create a safe limit to place orders when the quantity automatically reaches a certain point.
POS systems can help you eliminate out-of-stock states. They can also enable you to serve more customers and unlock immense growth opportunities.
As per the Intuit market research, a business ranking at $300,000 in revenue can decrease its operational cost by 10% and save an average of $30,000 annually.
4. Features advanced reporting capabilities
Today, POS systems are as advanced as you can imagine. If you have been looking for an efficient cloud-based LMS, check out this POS system by Lightspeed.
They are equipped with all modern technologies for reporting and analytics. Using these technologies, you can briefly look at the business performance and make crucial decisions.
POS systems can crunch all the accounting and invoicing data and provide insightful, tailor-made business reports.
Many POS systems create reports that require little to no modifications, and you can directly present them to stakeholders.
With advanced reporting features, you do not have to spend much time preparing and generating reports. Moreover, choosing the correct data to include in reports requires deep expertise.
5. Get access to customer data
POS systems are designed to store large amounts of data efficiently. This data is made available whenever required, making them ideal for businesses.
Once you've identified patterns in the data that contribute to your business growth, you can indeed focus on them specifically.
Moreover, having more customer data can help you contact customers regarding offers, special occasions, events, and more to attract them towards your business.
Today, POS systems can save their data in on-premise servers or in the cloud. Many businesses prefer storing POS data in the cloud because the costs are lower.
Further with relevant credentials and access permissions, anyone can access the POS data stored in the cloud from any place. This makes cloud data storage the best option for POS systems for multinational businesses.
Having lifetime data access is a boon for businesses because you can access any metric at any time, and there will be almost no delays. Moreover, with more historical data of your business, you can predict the future better.
6. Boosts your brand image
An efficient POS can greatly help with enhancing your brand image.
For example, if you own a restaurant, there are several ways in which POS technology can impact your brand value. Take a look:
- Customer loyalty programs — Loyalty programs are a great way to build your brand value and reputation. An efficient POS can make creating and implementing a digital loyalty program a simple affair.
- Connecting with diners through technology — While building a great brand image for your restaurant, it is essential to display that you can handle all types of payment methods. A reliable POS can facilitate contactless payments.
- Maintaining consistency across multiple locations — Look at any reputed hotel or restaurant chain and one thing that you will notice is the consistency of their brand across locations. By using an efficient POS, you can ensure that all critical functions including but not limited to inventory management, staff monitoring, and payments are consistent across all locations.
- Managing employees better — Did you 83 percent people trust the suggestions of their friends and families in choosing a restaurant over advertisement activities? And a POS system can aid in better management of employees. Managers can use a POS to efficiently track the work schedules of employees and also supervise their sales performance.
7. Enhance security
There are several ways in which a POS system can enhance the security of the business.
- It boosts the prevention of loss
- It combats fraudulent activities by significantly reducing security risks for both the customers and businesses
- It ensures safer access to customer data
An efficient POS is secured with the latest encryption techniques and comes with user and role management features. With such features, you can restrict access by roles and prevent tampering with data by others.
For example, any data stored in the Lightspeed POS system is secure because of the security features that come along with the software suite. Even if someone manages to get past the security, the system's log files will record it and send alerts for suspicious activities.
8. Simplified order management
POS systems have policies that can be set to place purchase orders when inventory stock goes below one point.
Such features help you automate the ordering of products and invoicing them. Moreover, this makes managing orders easier as everything is right there in the POS system only.
Once the purchase order is fulfilled, the payment receipt is generated, and the stock quantity is updated too.
All these tasks are prone to mistakes and are time-consuming. Hence, with the help of Lightspeed POS systems, you can enable growth by managing all orders under one roof in an efficient manner.
9. Get access to dedicated support professionals
Before you select a POS system for your business, check with the team whether they have a dedicated and centralized support team who can handle every kind of issue.
The best POS provider will provide you the required assurance that your ticket is not passed from one desk to another only to find in the end they can’t help. You need to have access to dedicated professionals who are there whenever you need them.
10. Improves store performance
A real-time POS system can help improve the store performance by providing visibility into customer management, inventory management, sales performance, and purchase order management.
In fact it provides the required data to retailers when they need it the most. In fact the data helps the retailers to tweak the performance of their stores and boost the sales figures.
Being able to track data real time and from anywhere enables retailers to keep tabs on their inventory and business without wasting time traveling between different locations. Instead they get up-to-date information as and when they need it on their mobile phones.
Conclusion
In this century when technology is power, it will be a smart move to choose a POS that can integrate with other modules to create an omnichannel experience for the shoppers.
When weighing the advantages of an efficient POS, you will find there are more pros than the number of cons. If you continue to operate your business without one, you run the risk of putting your brand in danger.
Having said that, with the above information, we believe you will be able to find the POS that suits the needs of your business in the best possible way.
About the Author: Brian Wallace is the Founder and President of NowSourcing, an industry leading infographic design agency in Louisville, KY and Cincinnati, OH which works with companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500s. Brian runs #LinkedInLocal events, hosts the Next Action Podcast, and has been named a Google Small Business Adviser for 2016-present. Follow Brian Wallace on Linked