Retail Point of Sale Systems

Point of sale systems are very important commodities to have to successfully run a business in which sales are your specialty. This is especially true for businesses that specialize in retail. The success of this type of business relies heavily on making sure you have an accurate count of your inventory, recording which products are the ones that see the most within your business, and which ones do not sell. Being able to make credit card transactions is also an important part of being able to stay in business as a retail store.

Inventory

Knowing which products in retail stores sells and the products which do not sell is an important knowledge to have when running this type of business. This is important because a business owner will not want to order more of the items that his customers are not buying. At the same time, the items that are really popular with your customers need to be identified so that you will be able to carry more of them in your store.

The point of sale system will help you do this by keeping track of your inventory and recording every sale you make. It will then tell you which products you will need to order and which ones are just taking up shelf space in your store. The key to running a successful business is efficiency. You will be able to accomplish this by implementing a point of sale system.

Credit Card Transactions

Being able to accept credit cards as a way of payment in a retail store is another important part of being able to stay in business. Studies have shown that businesses that do not accept credit cards have about 60 percent less business than those that have the capability of processing credit card transactions. For new and small business owners you cannot afford to lose customers due to your inability to accept credit cards. With a point of sale system you will be able to process those types of transactions, and in the process gain more customers.

Point Of Sale Systems provides detailed information on Point Of Sale Systems, Restaurant Point Of Sale Systems, Affordable Point Of Sale Systems, Retail Point Of Sale Systems and more. Point Of Sale Systems is affiliated with Point Of Sale Hardware

Forgotten Point of Sale System Features - Grand Totals

Restaurant point of sale systems have loads of features that POS salespeople love to talk about. Some are glamorous, others are flashy and some are unique to their product. When showing off these new and fancy features too often these salespeople forget about the basics and why cash registers were invented in the first place.

Preventing theft. That is the purpose of a cash register. Ringing up items and safely storing cash if the fundamental philosophy that created a now multi-billion dollar industry known as the Point of Sale Industry.

Why then are so many point of sale companies, software manufacturers and POS salespeople forgetting about the fundamental principles that are still valid in today’s business environment? The answer eludes and frustrates me because valuable profits are being lost by not utilizing these basic and important features.

Reporting Grand Totals

Would you buy a car without an odometer? Then why would you buy a point of sale system without a grand total? The principles are the same. They track how far you go and subtracting yesterdays total from today’s total tells you how far you went today.

Point of sale systems today have gotten away from this extremely important feature that securely reports on the total sales of your business. Cash registers still have this feature as a standard feature. But even with this feature too many people do not know the importance of the feature and how valuable it can be in stopping theft and letting management know when there is something wrong with your business.

Not too many years ago I was helping a fast food franchisee open a new location. We were going over the system, mostly reminding him of the features of the system, which he already had installed in several other locations. I mentioned the grand total and he questioned me on what that was.

I explained that this number was just like a car odometer and tracked every dollar sold and kept incrementing after every sale. Take today’s number and subtract it from yesterday’s number and you knew exactly how many dollars in sales you had.

To add to this number, the point of sale system he had also had a reset counter that showed how many times the system had been closed since first installed. Each day’s report should be incremented by 1, thus they should always be sequentially numbered.

With this knowledge in hand we returned to his office and began a quick audit of one of his problem stores. We quickly found that the daily close count showed missing reports. We also checked the grand totals and found missing sales.

What was happening was the closing store manager was running the end-of-day report between 10:00 pm and 11:00 pm and then running another close at midnight, the time when the store was supposed to close. The closing manager was pocketing the sales rung between the first and last closing reports and turning in the first closing report as the daily sales report.

Had it not been for the grand totals we would never have caught this thief. The closing manager even went as far as to change the time on the register to keep the elusion complete. It was those little used grand totals that eventually caught up with him.

The sad thing is, most point of sale systems have gotten away from the grand totals. Not only are they not even offered, if you ask about them you will probably hear excuses why they aren’t important.

Grand totals are important. Without them the scenario just explained above could be repeated every night on a point of sale system without these totals and you would never know it. When I say never, I mean never. You would eventually go out of business because your closing managers would be taking all the profits and leaving you with all the expenses.

Don’t settle for less than you deserve. Demand the security that your point of sale system should provide. You wouldn’t buy a car without an odometer. Don’t buy a point of sale system without grand totals.

Jerry D. Wilson has over 25 years of point of sale experience helping business owners stop employee theft and increase profits. Please visit DirecTouch POS and DirectRetail POS for more information on other features that are important to your point of sale needs.

Point Of Sale Marketing

Point of Sale marketing is the economic process by which goods and services are exchanged between the producer and the consumer and their values determined in terms of money prices. Much of marketing is concerned with the problem of profitably disposing of what is produced.

Marketing originates with the recognition of a need on the part of a consumer. Marketing terminates with the satisfaction of that need by the delivery of a usable product at the right time, at the right place, and at an acceptable price. There are five distinct concepts related to Point of Sale marketing. First is the exchange concept, which, as the very name indicates, holds that the exchange of a product between the seller and the buyer is the central idea of marketing.

While exchange does form a significant part of marketing, to view marketing as a mere exchange process would amount to a gross undermining of the essence of marketing. Exchange, at best, covers the distribution aspect and the price mechanism involved in marketing.

Second is the production concept. In organizations that practice this concept, production and technology dominate the thinking process of the key people. The concept holds that consumers would, as a rule, support those products that are produced in great volume at a low unit cost. Thirdly, there is product concept, which seeks to achieve the same result via product excellence – improved products, new products and ideally designed and engineered products. It also places the emphasis on quality assurance.

At this stage, it would be appropriate to explain the phenomenon of ‘marketing myopia’. Excessive attention to product or selling aspects at the cost of the customer and his actual needs creates this myopia. As more and more markets became buyers markets and the entrepreneurial problem became one of solving the shortage of customers rather than that of goods, the sales concept became the dominant idea guiding Point of Sale marketing.

Point Of Sale provides detailed information about point of sale, point of sale displays, point of sale hardware, point of sale marketing and more. Point Of Sale is the sister site of Fulfillment And Distribution

Building a Restaurant Point of Sales Software Application

Five years ago I began searching for an easy way to track my customers, my accounts receivable, and all the other aspects of my business. I wanted to be able to share this information and access it from anywhere on a wide variety of systems. The end result was the HotPotato Restaurant Point of Sale.

My search ended with me designing and developing my own modular Point of Sale. I spent a great deal of time considering the coding technology I would use. In the end I was swayed to develop my application in visual basic with an HTML front end. Using HTML to design the user interface gave me a very simple way to use the application on a wide variety of platforms. The server may need to be Windows based system, but client machines can be any platform. Pocket PC development became a snap and Linux becomes a viable operating system for any client machines.

At first I thought this development angle might pose problems. But after using the system I can say nothing but positives about it. A web server based application defeats all the problems associated with client installation, multi-location support and ability to access from anywhere.

HotPotato can be installed either locally or on a web server, this gives it the advantage of being on a closed network or accessed off-site. Multi-location support and reporting abilities were some of the features I added first.

Over the last five years I've seen HotPotato go through a wonderful evolution that has produced it's most current version. It is easy to install and so simple to deploy that I?m embarrassed to brag about it. Truths when I say the features developed into the application are cutting edge and developed with the latest software methodologies. A great amount of time went into considering the platform for its development. There was a lot of worry that the business community wasn?t ready for a distributed web server based application. However current trends from larger software companies confirm this is not only a viable option but also how future software applications will be developed.

Being able to easily deploy, support and update thousands of systems with one install and being able to back, manage and analyze their data is the kind of power people once dreamed of. Those powers and abilities are now here in viable applications.

Restaurants are one business that can truly take advantage of using hand held PCs for order placement. The cost savings and profit increase are too obvious to ignore. Developing a system that was easy to install, deploy and maintain I looked to lead of large companies and have been more than satisfied with the results. A true multi-platform application that speeds the order process and refines the work flow to allow for better staffing, a better customer experience and a high profit.

Managing inventory was simplified by associating menu items with one or multiple inventory items supplied by specific vendors. This creates a recipe for the menu item and an accurate accounting of the inventory. By setting minimum stock number and restocking levels a restaurant can maximize their revenue by creating accurate orders that reflect the sales patterns the software reveals.

Customer management tools, delivery management, waiting lists and a wide range of catering features were all developed to round off the software. Centralizing the most common tasks and providing information on time management and sales records gives the restaurant the ability to make strategic decisions regarding their business. No piece of software is perfect and they all require good user feedback to refine them. Developing several Point of Sale Software applications has taught me just how special each business is and just how much power their software can give them.

Integrating Point of Sales and Inventory

Keeping track of your sales and the cash flowing in is one of the most important features of your point of sale software system. However it is only half of the story, a good point of sale system doubles as an inventory management system. Tracking an item from the moment you order it to the moment it is sold makes point of sale software the single most important tool for retail business today.

Integrating inventory into your point of sale system can be a huge time consuming task. Many companies have thousands of potential inventory items; larger companies can have hundreds of thousands. The most important aspect is keeping track of the product from it?s creation to beyond the sale. Knowing who manufactured an item and their specifications for its use allows you to provide a service aspect to your customers. If today?s point of sale systems for larger companies didn?t track this then recalls would be almost impossible to issue and manage.

Employee theft is one of the biggest hits companies can take. Hundreds of thousands of dollars could escape large retailers through the sticky fingers of dishonest associates. New technologies being incorporated into the sales aspect are slowing moving over to inventory management and theft prevention. RFID tags imbedded in the products packing from the manufacturer can allow an entire truckload of incoming products to be counted and added to the inventory at record time. Sensors placed strategically can prevent products from walking out the wrong door unpaid and pay for the cost of system quickly with the savings from fewer thefts.

Any technology has its issues and inventory management can run into lots of bumps. In many cases inventory items can be purchased from multiple vendors and supply chains can change. Your point of sale software system needs to take these changes into account. Prices can also change sometimes on a daily basis. You not only have to keep track of the cost of the item and the price it was sold at, but you have to do this every time the item is brought into inventory. For large companies this can create huge amounts of data and the more data your system holds the slower it can become. So we tread this fine line between capturing the information and keeping ourselves from retaining too much data. Experienced data base programmers have tricks and methods to keep the actual amount of data retained to a minimum while still supplying the functions required in a point of sale system.

To any company that sells retail products inventory management is just as important as sales management. When shopping for a new point of sale software system I suggest you pay particular attention to the inventory and product management features. Having a system that performs a quick sale and manages the cash to the penny is great, but if it can?t help you track your inventory in a method that makes you feel secure then I suggest you keep looking. Finding the right software for your business can be a time consuming process but believe me when I tell you it is the single most important decision you can make.

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.

How Good Is Open Source POS Software?

Before I go into explaining to you how good an open source POS software is I would like to tell you why it’s so important to have a POS software in your company. POS software is going to one of the most important pieces of software that you have in your business, because it can actually increase your profits. Sounds crazy, but it’s true. Using a POS software will help reduce pricing errors, reduce employee theft, keep inventory cost down and it will even print out reports on demand for all of the listed items.

Now that you can see why it’s so important to implement a POS software system into your business, no matter what type of business you have, I want to talk to you about using an open source POS software. Open source POS software will not cost you a single penny or it will be extremely cheap, so it’s very tempting to want to download it. But stop right there, often times you get what you pay for.

Open source POS software doesn’t always have every feature in it that your company may need. It’s those functions that you are going to need to purchase in order to even use the open source POS software. This can end up costing much more then you ever expected. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Your business is at stake here. If you are planning on using an open source pos software system you will quickly find that they are extremely limited. They are basic pieces of software that will do no more then keep track of your cash transactions. But what about everything else that they are suppose to do, like keep track of your inventory trends so you don’t overstock, and record employee theft.

POS software is important and this is not an area to skimp out on. Your POS software system needs to be effective so that it can help to increase your profits. Remember you are investing in your business and it’s worth spending a couple of hundred dollars to have the opportunity to save yourself from overstocking of your stock room or prevent your employees for stealing your merchandise. And let me not forget to mention that if you use an open source pos software you will not have any type of customer support, so you will be completely on your own when using the software.

P Abbey owns and operates http://www.possoftwarefacts.com/opensourcepossoftware.html Open Source Pos Software