If the core of your business is to sell products, then you should invest in a POS system today. But before that, let’s dive into understanding what is a ‘Point of sales’ system anyway. This article will help you to learn about the following aspects:
- A key component of a POS system
- Key features to look for in a POS system
Key components of a POS system
Hardware and software form two major parts of a POS system that work in tandem to conduct sales transactions:
Hardware
A POS system consists of a physical setup like a cash register connected to a PC or server, or even a portable device such as a tablet or smartphone connected to a cloud-hosted system.
It may carry add-ons such as a barcode scanner, receipt printer, label printer, cash drawer, scale for weighted items, and a card machine to process payments via debit or credit card.
Software
Point of sales software keeps the information and preserves it within a database. Feature full Point of Sale solution provides a huge range of capabilities such as billing and order processing, sales monitoring, and reporting, inventory tracking, returns, analytics, mobile connectivity, customer data management, employee management, and loyalty programs.
Many Point of sales solutions can be integrated to 3rd party software such as accounting software for bookkeeping, email marketing solutions, and e-commerce platforms for selling online.
Key features to look for in a POS system
Now that you know what a POS system is, here are 7 key features that you should look at while purchasing it:
Billing and order processing
The Point of sales system must have the basic functionality of billing and order processing. It should be capable of bill orders by scanning items and capturing different payment models.
It can generate order invoices, reprint, and email to end customers along with adding the discount, customer details, additional remarks, and salesman’s name to an order.
Sales monitoring and reporting
The POS system must be able to generate a robust report on sales results. It should be able to report hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly takings and outgoings so that the merchants can easily understand the overall success of their business.
Sales trends such as seasonal demand in products, forecasts based on sales trends, insights on unnecessary product overspending, and information relating to stock management are some of the features of an advanced POS reporting module.
Inventory and stock management
A POS system’s inventory management module must provide complete visibility and accountability at the store level at all times.
The system should provide a view of lot-wise inventory, SKU transaction history about ‘in’, ‘out’, and ‘within’ movements of any SKU, and inbound & outbound inventory.
It should be able to make stock adjustments i.e. increase/decrease stock while viewing inventory and capturing the reason for stock adjustments.
Cross-channel returns management
Accepting cross-channel returns and facilitating refunds and replacements from any store location are some of the functionalities of a POS returns management module.
The system should facilitate the creation of multiple returns for one sales order at different time intervals. It should capture details like the reason for the return, the salesperson’s name, and remarks.
Customer relationship and experience
A Point of sales system can help you retain your customers by storing customer data and purchase history. This can be used to provide a personalized experience to your customer.
Customer data is highly useful for advertising as this data can provide insights on which customers would be interested in your sale. For example, sending a sale flyer for “30% off on oversized shirts” to a customer who wears a medium-sized shirt would be a waste of time.
Employee management
It is surprising for many when we say that a POS system like BusinessWala can be used to manage employees. But, an employee management module of a POS system can help you manage your staffing levels, employee hours, and sales performance which helps you to track employee productivity.
You can track your employee activity by linking it with each transaction. This will help to bifurcate the good and weak performers so that you can take appropriate actions to improve their productivity.
Loyalty programs and gift cards
Instead of using traditional punch cards, you can now track your customer loyalty incentives using the POS system.
As the sales of gift cards are increasing every year, your POS system must have the capability to manage those as well.
Today’s POS system goes beyond processing sales. As you have learned in the previous sections, a feature-rich POS can help increase efficiency and provide insights to help you improve your productivity. These are the reasons for you to switch to a POS system today. See how Vinculum can help you achieve that with a cloud-based Point of Sale system .
For more details and helpful knowledge about Businesswala POS or for a free demo get in touch with us.