Key Features of a Point of Sale System
The purpose of a point-of-sale system is to give your business an accurate method of tracking sales and for many businesses track product inventory. Better POS systems offer even more features like loyalty, purchasing, online ordering or ecommerce, alerts, advanced reporting, managing multiple locations and more. However, more isn’t better if the POS system doesn’t offer the key features you need. Watch the video below as Tim breaks down features of a point-of-sale system.
Top 10 POS Deal-Breakers
No one looks forward to spending a lot of time that they don’t have talking to different POS vendors. However, you also need to make sure that you implement the right POS system for your needs. The easiest way to narrow down POS systems is by making a list of your top 10 deal-breakers. Determine which features you cannot live without. If you find a POS system doesn’t have all 10 of these features, you can quickly move on.
The top 10 deal-breakers are not going to be the same for every industry or maybe even for businesses within an industry. At minimum, you will want a POS system that rings up transactions. Most business owners and managers need systems that are easy to learn and teach, especially if they experience high turnover. You might want the ability to run standard or custom reports. You probably need a system with automatic inventory reduction at the point-of-sale. Other key features vary depending on your industry.
Key Features of a POS System for Restaurants and Bars
Any food service establishment needs a POS system that prints to the kitchen. You will also need a POS that allows you to create and change menus, and potentially alter recipes and deduct from inventory as items are used. Other options could include customer loyalty, online ordering, reservations, mobile transactions, managing purchases from vendors, integrations to other systems in specialty environments, and the ability to manage quick service, table service, drive-thru, or delivery.
Key Features of a POS System for Retail Stores
Loyalty programs have become a mainstay in retail establishments. You need a POS system that easily tracks a customer’s activity. The POS should also accept multiple forms of payment and apply discounts. Other options could include managing purchases from vendors, optimizing inventory to save money, more efficient inventory processes, mobile ordering or inventory tracking, eCommerce integrations, alerts, additional controls, multiple location management and more.
Key Features of a POS System for Thrift Shops
Thrift shops require a quick turnaround, especially when accepted donations. Look for a POS can that quickly print tags for items as they arrive and manage color rotations. They may also want to make sure that the system also adds the item to the store’s inventory as it is accepted and scanned. Other options could include customer loyalty, rounding up transactions to donate to charity, reporting on productivity of employees tagging products, ability to manage purchased goods, and ability to track products that will need to be picked up later and add a “Sold” tag.
Key Features for Specialty Boutiques
Shops that have unique, hand-made, or antique items may not have a standing inventory that can be accessed for pricing. A POS system should be flexible enough to allow new items to be added on a regular basis and then accessed later.
Whatever the key features are that you need, it is important that you don’t settle for a point-of-sale system that doesn’t provide everything. Contact us at Bepoz to talk about your needs. We will help you pinpoint your deal breakers and show you how we can help. Likewise, if we don’t have everything you want, we can guide you to the POS system that is right for you.
Learn More:
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Point of Sale Software for Retail Businesses
Video Transcript
Hey, this is Tim with Bepoz Enterprise Point of Sale Systems. In this video, we’re going to talk about key features in a point of sale system.
There are many different kinds of point of sale systems with many different niche markets and different things that they can do. And not all point of sale systems are created equal. So it’s important to know what some of the key features are that you should be looking for in your point of sale system.
So first of all, it depends on your business. So your business could be food and beverage, in which case you might have a restaurant or thing like that. Or you might have a retail operation. Now there are also lots of different sub-niches that have very specific needs to your business.
If you’re looking for a point of sale system, it’s important to identify quickly what are the key features that you need for your organization that are specific to your niche.
For instance, if you’re a cell phone shop, most likely you need to keep a serial number, or what they call an IMEI number. That’s the individual serial number on each phone. Not all point-of-sale systems will do serial numbers. So you need to know that if I go start looking for point of sale systems, I should ask do they do serial numbers.
If I’m going to look for a system for a restaurant, I should be asking do they do print to the kitchen and print kitchen displays. Do they have modifiers that you can use to adjust the product and send off to the system? If it’s important to you that it has a loyalty system, it’s important to you to ask upfront, do they have loyalty systems.
You should in general assume nothing. There are many different point of sale systems, and hundreds of different features, thousands of different features that could be in your point of sale system. And it’s important to ask the question, does your system do the things that I need?
But again, specifically, if you’re a niche, it’s important to ask the features that are specific to your niche, does this system do that. Because usually you can get done in ten minutes with any point of sale system vendor, the top 10 that you have to have, that are deal breakers for you to have in your system. And make sure that that includes, that’s included in your system.
And it is also important to know that because there are so many different niches, not every point of sale system will do what you need, and you need to know what those things are. So ask questions,
But on top of all those things, you know, you should look for if you want inventory in your system, does this system track inventory and does it track inventory for the kind of products you have? Foodservice products are different than retail products. Do you want to be able to do other things, more advanced things with inventory? Have them show you how the inventory works. Does the system have the kinds of reports that you need? Because reporting is not all the same. I know this because Bepoz has probably the strongest reporting engine that I’ve seen on any point of sale system in our price point.
Does the system have integrated loyalty, and can you do loyalty programs if that’s important to you? Can you easily ring up the transactions? What is the workflow for transactions? Is it simple enough that I can teach my cashiers how to do it? Some systems that I’ve seen that are more recent, that are cloud-based, it’s quite difficult to drill down and find products that you have more than, let’s say 200 products, it gets quite difficult to find them. And you’d be surprised for many of you, how many products you have. I’ve talked to people all the time that underestimate the number of products that they have. So knowing what that’s going to work like for your business is important.
If you have questions about how Bepoz could help you identify the right category for your business, the way that we always operate is that if we can’t help you, we’ll help point you in the direction to some vendor who might have a system that would help you with the needs that we can’t provide. We’d love to talk to any of you. If you want to talk to us, please call the number at the top of the page or click the link below to schedule a meeting.