The Top 10 Reasons You Need a Point of Sale System

10. You have employees.

If you have employees you are open to theft, sweet-hearting and careless mistakes. You need a point of sale system to manage your employees, enforce your policies and insure that your money gets to you.

9. Pricing and Math Errors.

It is still amazing how many restaurants still use a calculator and hand written tickets. According to studies done by various institutions you are open to math and pricing mistakes totaling in excess of 1% of your annual volume. In a restaurant doing as little as $1,300 per day that would add up to $4,700 per year. (Less than the price of our 2-terminal Sweet Deal Package) To eliminate pricing and math errors you need a point of sale system.

8. Time In Attendance.

Employee payroll is one of the most overlooked and most easily managed portions of your profit and loss statement. If you have 12 employees and each of them clocks in 5 minutes early a day, that equates to 1 hour per day of extra payroll. Even with minimum wage plus benefits this could add up to $6 - $8 per day or over $2,900 per year. This figure doesn’t take into account the total man-hours it takes to compute time cards and then report on the hours worked for each employee. This is time that you could be spending elsewhere. If you have a few as 5 employees you need a point of sale system.

7. Reducing Theft.

This is the original reason for the invention of the cash register back in the late 1800’s. Even when most of the businesses were family owned and run there was a need for a cash register to reduce theft. In today’s world of hiring employees to help staff and manage your store there is even greater need for this type of control. For years we have known about the tendencies of people with regard to theft. 10% of the people wouldn’t steal if giving the opportunity. 10 % of the people are going to steal no matter what safeguards are in place. 80% of the people will steal if given the opportunity. Point of sale systems are put in place to guard against the 80% and make it more difficult for them to steal from you.

6. Speed of Service.

There is only 1 thing we can think of that will drive customers away faster than bad food and that is slow service. When a customer places their order their own internal clock is running in overdrive. No matter how long they took to look over the menu and to place their order, once they have given your server or cashier their order their hunger clock is speeding along faster than a fan on high! You need a fast, reliable way to get orders into your system. This should mean a terminal that is fast, easy to understand and quick to respond to the touch of the server, cashier or bar tender. The system should also distribute the order properly to the kitchen prep station or bar. Your point of sale system should also measure your speed of service and report on how you are doing. Reducing the time it takes to get your customer’s their food is critical and can even make up for less quality. For proof I give you some of the major fast food chains. Is their popularity based upon the best tasting, best dressed and best served burger or speed of service? If you want to speed up your customer service you need a point of sale system.

5. Enhanced Reporting.

What is the use of having a computer and not taking advantage of the power? If all you need is to have a total amount of cash in the drawer that sometimes matches to the amount of sales shown you probably don’t need a point of sale system. However, if you want more detail and information to help manage your operation and make it more profitable then you need a point of sale system. It used to be that having a good product was enough to get you by. Now it takes a lot more information in order to compete with all the other restaurants in your market that are all looking for the same customer you have seated in your restaurant. You need to understand the buying habits of your customers. What are they ordering? When are they ordering it? What is your most profitable item? How many of it did you sell? What items on your menu are not selling? If you cannot answer all of these questions with total confidence in your answers then you need a point of sale system. If you hesitate to correctly answer (without guessing) any of these questions you need a point of sale system.

4. Exporting of Data to Other Systems.

Even most small businesses today have some form of electronic accounting in place either in their operation or through an accounting service. In addition, most businesses have an electronic payroll service or software that creates payroll. Point of sale systems capture critical data for you and then export this data in formats that automatically put this information into accounting and payroll packages, eliminating hours of tedious manual input that often leads to mistakes and human error. If you have an electronic accounting or payroll service/software or even if you want to track your sales in Excel, you need a point of sale system.

3. Integrated Credit Cards.

If you are not currently taking credit cards as a form of payment you need to start today. Never mind the fees. The loss of business that you are suffering in today’s plastic minded economy will more than compensate for the fees charged. If you are currently taking credit cards through a stand-alone terminal you could be being charged exorbitant fees for the terminal when you could be processing through your point of sale system. In some cases, the elimination of the terminal rental will pay for the credit card interface in less than a year. With integrated credit card processing you are assured that the amount of the sale will match the amount charged on the credit card, eliminating the need to go back and match individual sales when the credit card batch does not match credit card sales. When high-speed Internet connections are used to process credit cards we receive approvals in less than 2 seconds. No longer is slower speed of service an excuse not to take credit cards. If you want to quickly, accurately and smoothly process credit cards you need a point of sale system.

2. Competitive Marketing.

a. Frequent Diner Modules. Who are your customers? What do they buy? How often do they visit? Of your frequent visitors, who hasn’t been in to see you during the past month? Of your frequent visitors, who has a special day coming up this month? These are questions that you should have the answer to. All the major chains and all of your competitors are after the people who come to your restaurant. They want to take them for themselves. How are you going to compete with the billions of dollars being spent to draw your customer away? By marketing your operation and your menu. Your point of sale system should be able to manage your customer base, keep up with their buying habits, how often they visit, when was their last visit and what special occasions they have coming up. Your point of sale system then should be able to sort these into groups that should be sent mailers, coupons, invitations to special events or simply told that they are appreciated and asked to visit you again. If you have competition you need a point of sale system.

b. Gift cards have become the norm for so many businesses today. An entire industry has been formed around the old concept of giving a paper gift certificate. Today, you will find gift cards at most major checkout lines. A point of sale system should be able to sell, redeem and control balances for your own gift card program. No longer do you need a book of certificates that are kept in the safe. Today, all you need is a stack of blank plastic cards with your colorful logo on them. These cards carry no balance and have no cash value until sold and a balance placed on account. As an owner you should keep a few of these cards with you. Each of these cards might have a small balance on them for you to hand out to pull customers to your restaurant or to give in case of a poor experience to help bring someone back. Think of these cards as your personal marketing tool. When the customer looks in their purse or wallet and sees your logo they will be reminded to come visit you. If you use gift certificates or gift cards you need a point of sale system.

1. You Don’t Need Any More ‘Partners’.

Sure you need gift cards. Yes you need to better understand your customer’s buying habits. You absolutely need to have credit cards integrated with your point of sale system. You need enhanced reporting and export of these reports to electronic accounting and payroll services. You need to eliminate errors, reduce mistakes and keep track of your payroll. But more than any of these you don’t need any more partners. Especially the ones that take their portion of the profits before you get yours. We are talking about the servers, waitresses, bartenders and cashiers who:

a. Undercharge customers in order to enhance their own tips. Show a $5 tab and a $50 tip. (Yes, I have seen this!)

b. Deliberately void or delete an item after it has been paid for.

c. Stuff coupons into the cash drawer in exchange for cash.

d. Don’t charge customers for soft beverages to enhance their tips.

e. Ring up a lower priced item (well brand) and serve a higher priced item (premium brand)

f. Give discounts to their friends.

g. In a buffet line, ring up a buffet and a tea. Reprint this ticket 10 times and sell and collect for themselves these reprinted receipts instead of ringing up new customers.

If you want to stay in business, you need a point of sale system.

Jerry D. Wilson is Director of Internet Sales for DirecTouch Restaurant Point of Sale. With over 25 years of hospitality point of sale experience, he has written several articles explaining the benefits of touch screen and retail point of sale software. Please visit http://www.directouchpos.com or http://www.directretailpos.com for more information.

Handheld Point of Sales Changing Restaurants

A few years ago in Europe a small restaurant chain made history. The future had arrived when they took their first order and sent it electronically to the kitchen. That simple act forever changed the future of high volume restaurants. Their little experiment was expand to over a dozen restaurants and netted them a 20% increase in revenue within months. The system paid for itself and created profits by decreasing table turn time by delivering orders to the kitchen in the blink of an eye and increasing the amount of time the wait staff could spend with their patrons.

Such a simple and wonderful idea has been slow to catch on. Many restaurants fear the initial cost investments and the technical nightmare of installing software on handheld devices. Several of major restaurant software manufacturers have released handheld versions of their software. Most of these lack the ease of use and installation needed to make them viable. There have even been a few attempting at making software that can recognize handwriting. Although the concept seems sound in practice it is far from easy to master.

Some time ago I was challenged to write a customer Point of Sale Software System for a customer. I spent a long time thinking about hand held PCs and how best to incorporate them into the package. Easy installation and the ability to run on almost any platform became my primary concerns. I soon hit upon a realization that I could create the application with an HTML front end. I had already created three versions of a Point of Sale system we used in house. I had created our Point of Sale System as an Internet application because we perform a lot of on-site service. Being able to access a customer?s bill and update it from right there at their location was a power we desperately needed. It also allowed for easy integration into our supplier network and allowed the owners to access company data from anywhere and since they?re always halfway across the country it solved a lot of problems.

Taking the tools I had already created and using them to construct a Restaurant Point of Sale was fairly easy and straightforward. There were tons of changes and modifications made and features added, but the core functions of selling a product and recording it are the same no matter what you sell. The end result was a Point of Sale Software Application that can be accessed and used on almost any platform system with no special software to install. The benefits to using this kind of model for software development are far too numerous for me to type. I think you can get an idea of the advantages to businesses of any size. Think of just a few of the advantages to a medium or large sized company. For a large chain of restaurants to be able to increase profits by more than 20% is a staggering figure and well worth the paltry hardware and software costs. With an Internet Based Application they can also increase profits by decreasing the time needed to install and manage software across all locations. Imagine being able to update the software for 400 locations instantly. Imagine how much would be saved by not needing to install software for the vast majority of the machines used for Point of Sales. The amount of money a large company could make just by streaming their technology and taking advantage of it is just staggering.

In all of this I forgot to mention the best part. Think about how cool it is to sit down and have a waitress take your order on a handheld. That?s just too cool and I love it. The same great software can also be used as a Kiosk where patrons enter their own order. I can see the day when you sit down in a fast food restaurant and a computer-generated face takes your order and a small robot brings it to the table or it gets dropped from a chute. Not all restaurants would benefit from all technology, but the advantages of hand held ordering are at the bottom line and a lot of restaurants are going to reap in the profits.

Please consider this article for publication in your newsletter or on your website. Permission is granted to reprint for free with author box and byline intact. Please send me a copy of your publication if you choose to include my article. TITLE: AUTHOR: Ed Duval URL: www.AndTechComputers.com

MAILTO: support@andtech2020.com

Author Box - ? Ed Duval (2006) Ed Duval is contract writer and software developer for www.AndTechComputers.com and Creator of the HotPotato Restaurant Point of Sale Software System. With over a decade of experience in software development he shares his unique insight on today's point of sale software systems.

Checkout the Benefits of Retail Management/POS Software

What is Retail Management/POS?

POS software originally referred to software applications designed to speed up sales till/checkout processes. Since its origins, however, POS software has evolved to include so many more features that it is now more commonly referred to as Retail Management Systems (RMS).

These days, a good RMS can be expected to offer the following functions:

- POS
- Inventory control
- Automatic purchase order creation
- Automatic price updates
- Barcode scanning
- Accounts receivable + payable
- General ledger
- Payroll
- Customer tracking & follow-up
- E-commerce + website shopping cart integration
- Shop management
- EDI (electronic ordering)
 

To help you understand what a good RMS can do for your business, here’s TRG’s guide to the main benefits.

1. Increased profits

Obviously, there’s little point investing in dedicated retail software if you’re not going to see a return on your investment, and good RMS software has numerous profit-boosting capabilities.

• Fewer pricing errors
Leaving your staff to price items can lead to pricing errors which cost you money. RMS allows you to set and control the price of every item in your store, minimising such errors. It will also calculate the REAL cost of any discounts you choose to make, e.g. how many more items you need to sell if you reduce the price by 5%.

• Control price points
Every item has a “magic” price point which maximises profits, but finding out what that price point is can take hours of research. RMS can analyse your sales records and tell you the ideal price for each item, i.e. the highest you can go while still selling as much as you can. Why sell at $2.49 when you can sell just as many at $2.99?

• Reduce dead inventory and maximise turnover
Do you really know what sells and what doesn’t? You might have a vague idea but RMS can tell you exactly which items are flying off the shelves and which are piling up in your stockroom, enabling you to phase out unpopular lines and focus on those which sell quickly, thus improving your cashflow.

• Reduce employee theft
Individual log-ons combined with daily profit margin, inventory control and voided/cancelled/deleted sales reports mean any thefts canbe spotted immediately. And by letting your employees know about the full capabilities of your POS software, they’ll be less likely to try and steal from you.

• Critical information
If a line suddenly stops selling (or suddenly starts!) it might take you a while to notice. But your RMS software will tell you immediately so you can adjust pricing to maximise profit or minimise loss.

• Electronic cheque verification
Bad cheques are still a big problem for retailers. But linking your POS system to an online electronic cheque verification service can help you minimise the damage done by bad cheques. Cheque verification services have been shown to enable retailers increase their collection rate on bad cheques to as much as 80%!

• Better rates from suppliers
By tracking any disparity between sales volume and profit margin, RMS can help identify which supplier deals you should be renegotiating! Showing a supplier how much of his product you’re selling is an essential tool in helping you get better deals.

2. Improve your marketing

It is cheaper to get business from existing customers than to go out and look for new ones, but are you doing all you can to get your customers to come back to your store again and again? Good RMS software can help you with this.

• Sales letters to customers
Following up a sale with a thank-you letter, information about related products or special offers/personal discounts is a great way to get repeat businesses. Detailed purchase records combined with professional, stylish letter generation can help you keep in touch with your customers and have them coming back for more.

• Automated mailings
Regular mailings (by post or e-mail) enable you to conduct drip/nurture marketing, a proven technique in retail. Using customer segmentation you can make sure you target the right customers with the right products and offers.

• Reports
Monitoring different types of marketing campaign and resulting sales can tell you what’s working and what isn’t, enabling you to establish what types of campaign work for which products.

• CRM compatibility
If you already have a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, your RMS software can interface with it and enable you to store detailed sales information for every customer. CRM + POS = essential market information more effective marketing.

3. Manage your inventory

Quick stock turnover = better cashflow, and RMS software can help you identify what’s moving, and what isn’t.

• Top sellers + dead inventory
Knowing what’s selling is essential to any retail business, and RMS can tell you what your top sellers are. Not only does this help you stay on top of pricing, but it also ensures you never run out of popular lines by automatically sending purchase orders to your suppliers when stocks start running low.

Equally, having lots of dead stock can tie up your cash and take up valuable stockroom space. RMS identifies slow or non-selling lines, helping you to take remedial action.

• Seasonal sellers
Some products sell especially well at particular times of year. RMS can provide you with detailed monthly or weekly sales breakdowns, identifying patterns and enabling you to time product orders and promotions.

4. Reduce accounting work

Bookkeeping is a time-consuming process and takes up valuable time you could be devoting to selling. RMS software cuts down the amount of accounting work you have to do by automating most of your processes.

• Process automation
RMS can automate tasks such as calculating monthly sales tax, printing monthly statements, entering sales transactions into Accounts receivable, posting receipts to journals, and posting transactions into general ledger software.

• Track debtors and creditors
By keeping close tabs on who owes you money and who you owe money to (and when it’s due), RMS helps you improve your cash flow management and ensures that your customers pay you on time, and that you keep your suppliers happy by meeting their deadlines.

• Maintain a clear audit trail
Everyone dreads end of year accounting and reconciliation, but RMS can take away this particular headache by keeping a clear audit trail throughout the financial year.

5. Make your customers happy

Happy customers mean more sales, and RMS software can help create a POS experience that will make your customer service special and memorable.

• Speed up the checkout process
A good RMS system will offer bar code checking, touch screens and instant credit card authorisation, meaning your customers have minimal waiting time at your checkouts and you get to sell more goods.

• Individual credit/discounts
With full customer data available at the touch of a button, personal discounts or credit can be applied immediately, meaning fewer misunderstandings or problems at the checkout.

• Fast order delivery
Some larger items need to be delivered to the customer’s home. Electronic POS can send details of the order to your warehouse before the customer has even left the store, enabling rapid delivery and a happy customer!

• Paper-free refunds
Mishandling a complaint or request for a refund is the easiest way to lose a customer, but how many refunds do you refuse simply because the customer has lost their receipt? As your RMS software stores a record of all purchases, you can call up electronic receipts and make sure that anyone who is entitled to a refund gets one, receipt or no receipt.

• Professional paperwork
RMS software produces crisp, clean, readable receipts, invoices and delivery notices that make you look professional and avoid any misunderstandings with your customers.

TRG International is proud to offer RetailPro, the global leader in Retail Management Systems. Used by over 55,000 retailers in more than 70 countries, it offers full retail/POS functionality, and combined with our experienced installation and technical support teams, it’s the perfect choice for Vietnamese retailers.

Tim Russell is Marketing Director at TRG International, one of Vietnam's leading providers of IT business solutions and services. Originally from the UK, he has been in Vietnam since 2003. Prior to coming to Vietnam he spent over a decade in the tourism industry in both operations and marketing, before moving into IT where he helped set up a company providing reservations software for tour operators and travel agents. He lives in Ho Chi Minh City with wife Nhung and daughter Emilie.