2. Improved Inventory Management

If you’re still counting inventory manually, it’s time to upgrade to a point of sale system. When you scan an item’s barcode at checkout, it’s automatically taken out of your inventory. With all your inventory data being logged digitally, you’re able to:

• Pull real-time reports to make informed decisions
• See what stock you’re low on
• Set minimum quantity alerts so you know when to reorder
• Identify your best sellers and most profitable products
• Find the products that aren’t selling well

With this information, you’re empowered to order top sellers in bulk to save money and better control your margins to maximize profit.

3. Faster Wait Times

With a cash register, every customer needs to come to your checkout counter to complete their purchase, limiting your flexibility and creating long lines that strain employees and hurt customer satisfaction.

But if you have a POS that enables mobile payments, you gain the freedom to ring up purchases wherever your customers are. If there are a lot of shoppers at checkout, you can send additional employees to check customers out, dramatically reducing wait time and engaging your guests on a more personal level.

4. Greater Mobility

Your POS system enables you to take payment processing outside your brick-and-mortar, too. As long as you have a portable, connected device with you, you can make sales wherever you need to, no matter how far from your brick-and-mortar location. This is a great option for festival booths, pop-up locations, food truck services, and, a bit closer to home, curbside pickup. Bring customers’ items to their cars and run credit cards right in the parking lot. This is a great way to make your store more accessible and convenient for all your customers.

5. Simpler Returns

Is your return process easy for both customers and staff members? Return rates are high, and a POS makes it fast and simple to complete these types of transactions. Search for customer purchase histories—even if they don’t have a receipt—return items to your inventory automatically, and designate final sale products as non-refundable in your system.

6. Better Order Tracking

It can be challenging to keep track of all your orders, especially if you’re working across multiple channels (in-store, online, pickup, delivery).

Whether you run a store, a restaurant, or a service business, a POS can give you complete visibility into status and location for every order, plus help you plan ahead with preset information, including delivery zones, associated fees, and pickup and delivery windows.

7. Easy Appointment Scheduling

For service-based businesses that depend on appointments, including salons and automotive shops, a POS enables you to input, track, confirm, and change appointments with ease. Set shifts and employee schedules, double book a staff member when needed, rebook appointments from a customer’s history, email follow-up and appointment reminders, and more—all within your POS’s appointment system.

8. Offline Payment Processing

What would you do if the internet goes down when you have a long line of customers waiting to pay? Without an internet connection, you can’t process credit card payments. Do you turn away patrons who don’t have cash on hand? Do you close your store and lose sales until the internet is restored?

A POS with offline processing makes it possible to continue accepting card payments, even if you lose connection to the internet. Simply enable the offline feature and continue scanning as usual. Your POS will store purchase data and process payments when it comes back online. Plus, you can limit transaction amounts if you’re worried about delayed processing.

9. Better Customer Service

POS systems offer elevated levels of service with improved accuracy, speed, and personalization. Input orders quickly—including any required modifiers the POS system prompts for—while customers can verify their information on a customer facing display. With a POS system’s customer management features, team members pull up a patron’s information and purchase history with a few taps of the screen using only a phone number—facilitating a more tailored, personal approach to service that encourages repeat business.

10. Better Staff Management

With a modern POS system, you can make staff management easier:

• Optimize staff scheduling for the week (or month) ahead
• Access data to focus scheduling around historically busy times
• Get performance tracking info for individual employees
• Automatically track working hours with built-in time clock
• Schedule employee reports to expedite payroll processing
• Automatically send working hours and tip information to your payroll partner

Cut out the extra steps involved in typical operations upkeep. Use your POS to get to know your team better, provide support where needed, and spend more time taking care of your primary retail responsibilities. Plus, your employees will appreciate working with a standardized, predictable system.

11. Effortless Loyalty Programs

With a POS, it’s simple to implement a loyalty program. All it takes is a few pieces of information like a customer’s name, email, and phone number. You’ll get to set up point value and redemption parameters before customers can then earn points on every purchase—no on-hand loyalty card required. Simply locate the customer in your system, see how many points they have, and apply points to their purchase with just a few taps of the POS screen.

12. Better Marketing

A major benefit of a POS system is the built-in customer database. Build your customer list using loyalty program incentives, then use it to market to your existing base and increase sales. You’ll be able to send customers promotional emails for products they’ll love based on their purchase histories or even select certain patrons for special offers (double loyalty points, for example). Having an incentive to buy from your business helps drive traffic through your doors and provides an excellent customer experience—all enabled by your point of sales system.

13. Easier Sale Management

Do you run multiple sales simultaneously? It’s often difficult to keep track of what’s discounted and when. A POS can help. Select which items you want to discount in the system and input how long you want the sale to last. You can even designate different types of promotions like buy one, get one (BOGO) or mix-and-match specials. This eliminates the hassle of price confusion at checkout—everything’s in the system and rings up automatically ensuring the line moves swiftly. Plus, you won’t have to manually set up sales using a pricing gun anymore, giving you more time to focus on your larger business goals.

14. Centralized Business Orders

It’s easy to keep track of vendors, billing and invoicing, and purchase orders (POs) with a POS. Create POs within the system, and when the items are received, simply scan the barcode, type in the quantity received and the total paid—and your inventory is updated instantly! You also have visibility into how much you’ve paid vendors for the same items over time to monitor costs. Additionally, a POS integrates with your accounting software, making it quick to create and send professional invoices and monitor payments received.

15. Better Operations Insight

A POS has robust reporting capabilities giving you maximum visibility into all aspects of your business. For example:

• Identify what your average ticket size
• Run tax and payroll reports to ensure compliance
• Have daily snapshot reports of your sales automatically emailed to track revenue
• Get service rating reports
• Check inventory counts
• Access delivery reports

Data like this can give you the insight you need to make profit-boosting decisions that grow your business.