The old cash register or cash box gave you very little more than simply a place to keep your money. Now that retailing & sales in general have become such a very sophisticated activity, they need sophisticated systems to enable the seller to fully participate and not be left behind.

The benefits of a Point of Sale system over anything else are massive and if you haven’t converted to a computerised system yet, commercial pressures will eventually persuade you. Even such a simple aspect as simplifying your accounting through using the built-in reports, which any decent POS system contains, is alone enough to make you think about changing over.

You need no longer be afraid to try to carry either a huge stock or inventory or provide a whole complicated range of services. Once you program your POS system, it will manage your inventory and immediately know what you sold, when you sold it, what your customers preferred in what week on month. IN addition, your stock will contain all the RIGHT items, based on your experience. You can do all that at the press of a button. Imagine trying to do that with nothing more than a cash register to help you.

You can even integrate with your suppliers so that even your ordering becomes automatic.

But it is not all about selling. As a seller you are also a buyer and with the POS system, you can have your purchase orders created for you. No more going into the stockroom to count how many boxes of beans or cornflakes you had left! It is all done for you.

If for instance, you are in the hospitality or catering industry, you will have noticed that the people at the sharp end tend to be in their late teens or early 20s – the computer generation. Needless to say they are far more comfortable with presenting a client with a point-of-sale device to make payment. No more endless training people on the till and the sort of mistakes that those of us who have been in business understand only too well.

One could argue, that you owe it to your staff to provide POS equipment!

One of the most precious commodities these days is time and by inputting the cost of several items, adding them up, asking for the payment, accepting the payment, opening a cash register, handing out change etc you are wasting the customer’s time. A simple POS device not only saves time but makes you and your business look slick and professional. Authorising a card and printing a receipt without asking your customers to queue at a till makes sense.

The old tally rolls were capable of showing no more than a total with maybe some strange codes which were meaningless to your clients. Nowadays, not only are you able to produce a properly itemised bill but at the same time your customer has your name, telephone number and sometimes address at the top of the receipt which gives you a great advantage over your competitor who cannot generate such user-friendly information.

POS devices also save time by cutting down on inputting errors because the operative can be pressing buttons with the actual name of the item rather than having to read or remember the price…….. and we won’t even bother mentioning one of the great after work traditions of the old-fashioned retailer of trying to balance the till and looking for cash ‘unders’ and ‘overs’.

Have you noticed how the word ‘maintenance’ is gradually disappearing from commerce. A modern POS system means that the old cash register of yours which every now and again needed a man with a screwdriver to come along to maintain, fix or service it, is a thing of the past. Plus the fact that modern technology is such that these days, a breakdown is almost unheard of.

To summarise, the advantage is of a fully integrated POS system: Increased productivity and lower operating costs. It’s a ‘no-brainer’!