For retailers and restaurateurs, efficiency and accuracy are essential to the successful and profitable running of a business, but if your shop or restaurant is still using a traditional cash register, you and your staff are probably wasting time managing your inventory and analysing the effectiveness of promotions and sales. Point-of-Sales systems or POS systems are computerised systems that allow businesses to keep an accurate record of sales, inventory, cash flow and more. Here’s what POS systems can do for you.

Keeping Track of Sales and Inventory
Getting sales figures and inventory to match up is a time-wasting chore for most businesses that rely on cash registers. POS systems record all sales and keep track of inventory numbers for you, so staff members don’t have to waste time making the numbers match up at the end of the day. Products that are bought together are also recorded, allowing you to enhance your marketing by presenting products together in the shop or in advertisements.

Sales and Promotions
Sales and promotions are a great way of getting customers in the door, but without POS systems, it can be a real challenge to judge the success of promotions. POS systems allow you to easily identify which promotions were effective and which were not, based on the sales figures. The ease with which such data can be produced and analysed when you have POS systems in place will come as a breath of fresh air to those used to trying to keep track manually.

Price Consistency
If you have a number of shops or restaurants, POS systems can ensure that pricing is consistent in all of them as well as helping you determine how best to stock the different outlets based on what are the most and least popular items in each shop or restaurant.

Less Wasted Time
With a good POS system in place, staff in your shop or restaurant will waste less time double-checking inventory and making numbers match up and spend their time doing what matters – looking after your customers. Plus, when there are sales or other promotions, staff won’t have to go around stamping everything with a price gun as POS systems allow for easy price adjustments that automatically register at the till.

Point-of-sale systems can be pricey, but they pay dividends in the long run as less time will be spent on unproductive tasks, it will be far easier to judge the effectiveness of promotions and to alter future promotions accordingly and you can be sure of consistency and accuracy. A nice change from the chaos and stress of dealing with old-fashioned cash registers.

This article was written by restaurateur Jack Brown who uses POS systems in his restaurants.