Every business needs a cash register to tackle sales, inventory and storage issues. A cash register is essential to run a business efficiently but using it today may be an out-of-date idea. A cash register is just one step ahead of calculators and it has been decades since its invention. On the other hand, benefits of pos or the point of sale system is a comprehensive cash management system in today's market. It makes every step easier for a retailer while processing sales
What makes benefits of pos a better system to help you manage your cash in comparison to a cash register?
benefits of pos system gives you a variety of new features that a traditional cash register is sadly unable to provide. These features make a POS system far more superior and beneficial in managing inventory for any business. A more detailed review of these benefits is listed below.
The Benefits of benefits of pos over a Traditional Cash Register
Detailed reports: The basic feature of any benefits of pos system is that it can store much more information and that too much faster than a traditional cash register. It gives you the facility to pull out information from any terminal of the business within seconds, directly through the central hub, which has access to all inventory data of your business. A point of sale system has the ability to pull out reports on the fly and brings up to date and exact information about sales, items, time log and much more.
Faster checkout speed: Since benefits of pos system primarily uses bar code scanning or similar feature, hence modifying and completing a transaction is done at a faster rate. When you make a comparison between the traditional methods and the point of sale method, you can easily see the transaction time difference. Keyboard entry of a 12 character data, which is a typical UPC length, would take about 6 seconds and scanning it in the form of bar code would take just about 2 seconds. Obvious now, this system is faster and accessing data is easier too. POS system facilitates using features like 'refunds, void or no sale' so simple that it's just a click away.
Accurate reports: Accuracy is the most important factor when you are dealing with a large inventory. One single mistake can lead to a blunder. "To err is human." This has been a long known proverb and no one can prove it wrong even today. Using a benefits of pos system makes your calculation and database almost 100% accurate. Unless the machine somehow malfunctions, there can be no mistake for even the 10th place of decimal in your calculations.
Fast Facts: As per studies, normal keying of details by even experienced cashiers is one error in every 300 characters typed using a keyboard. Now let's see the case with benefits of pos system. A bar code reader for an example here has an error in 15,000 to 36 trillion characters scanned and it depends on the type of bar code. Yes, this is a huge difference. Apart from making mistakes through the traditional method, it also incurs extra cost of correcting the mistakes and making the final reports faulty. Some of the times, the prices of some items need to be changed and it might be a hectic task to make the correction at every junction the data is stored. In the POS system, you can make the change at every place by just making the change at the hub or the back office primary database. Some of such software prints shelf labels and you might not need to change the price tag on every item.
Easy tracking of inventory: Point of sale system keeps better record of the inventory. It gives you an accurate figure of how many items have been sold. It keeps regular track of all the product movements taking place. This is a very effective and helpful factor for any business. The inventory details have all the data about the product movement like the sales, date of sale, price and much more. It helps you to manage sufficient amount of inventory in stock and makes sure that it never lacks in any particular item.
In the traditional system, you might need to enter the sales data into the excel sheet after getting it from the cash register software and then calculate the inventory movement for each item. However, in the benefits of pos system, you can do all this in the same system and there is no need to fetch data from anywhere else and type it again. It saves huge amount of time and prevents errors with manual data entry.
There are software types that allow various types of inventory tracking methods. Two common types are perpetual and periodic. Perpetual inventory tracking is a type of real time inventory tracking in which the inventory items record is updated as items move out. The number of items remaining in the inventory is reduced as the item is sold and passes through the checkpoint. The periodic inventory tracking system counts the inventory at every week, month or year. It is done after a specific time interval.
Features Expandability: A traditional cash register has very limited options to upgrade, but still won't be able to compete with a basic POS system. Unlike this, a POS system has several additional features that can be added to it. Several modules are available for specific functions to be added to the primary software and you can make your POS software much better than it was before. You can add new modules to the software and integrate it with the primary software. It also provides you the facility to control your entire inventory from one hub maybe the head office or the department head.