6 Essential Features To Look For When Buying A POS System

Posted by medusasmith on January 26th, 2021

POS systems are rapidly growing popular due to the wide range of advantages they offer retail businesses. From cutting down expenses, improving productivity to enhancing returns on investment, all of these advantages are being promised in several POS solutions. However, not all POS software solutions are capable of performing the same cutting-edge functions, each of them are built differently. 

As they are long-term solutions, you must carefully choose the right solution that aligns with your business functions and requirements. Picking the wrong solution can do more harm than good for your business. So if you’re looking to purchase a versatile and powerful POS system, then there are 6 essential features that you must look for before buying one. Let’s take a look at each of them in detail.

Employee management

Regardless of the scale of your retail store, you will need to manage your employees on a regular basis. Without a proper management strategy, you may find your store under or overstaffed at any given point of time. Moreover, it is difficult to track employee productivity levels manually. 

To mitigate this problem, you must choose a POS system that has an employee management feature. It autonomously tracks the entry, exit and productivity levels of employees. Additionally, it gives you an easy way to manage employee shift hours, leave permissions and more.

Accounts management

A wide range of transactions occur in a retail store. Along with them, there are extensive tax calculations and compliance regulations. Overseeing these processes manually can be incredibly exhausting energy and time-wise. Besides that, performing such operations manually gives room for an assortment of errors to occur.

When you purchase a POS system, ensure that it can track sales, categorize transactions by mode of payment and can ensure compliance. This saves you plenty of time and money. Furthermore, ensure that the system can auto calculate GST values and file for taxes on-time.

Multiple modes of payment

Long gone are the days when the only mode of payment was cash payments. Today debit / credit card and mobile wallet transactions have increasingly grown popular for how easy they are to use and carry. In fact, customers prefer paying through digital means instead of paper currency. Given this, if your store doesn’t have the technology to accept multiple modes of payment, then it’s high time to invest in a Point of Sale software.

It must also possess the ability to accept transactions even when offline. As digital payments rely on online servers, an interruption in your network can obstruct you from accepting payments. POS solutions that can process payments offline will sync up payments to the server when the internet is back on.

Customer management

Customers are the most valuable assets in a retail organization. And the higher the customer satisfaction is in a store, the more customers it will garner and in turn generate good profits. Customer management includes getting to know your customers and enhancing their shopping experience. With a POS solution, you can offer them better service.

The POS system that you want to buy must have cutting-edge customer management features. It should allow you to seamlessly collect customer ratings and also contact information such as where your customers are from, what age group they are in and more. Additionally, the POS software must be able to launch promotional campaigns and send customized notifications.

Advanced integrations

If you’re using a spreadsheet software to manage retail operations, then you might have identified its shortcomings. One of the major limitations of spreadsheet software solutions is that they don’t have integrations. They cannot connect to external devices and most often even the cloud. 

To get your money’s worth when you buy a POS solution, make sure that the software is rich in integrations. It should be able to seamlessly sync up to the cloud and connect with tracking technologies like barcode scanners, RFID and NFC devices. Being able to connect with bluetooth printers and electronic drawers is an additional bonus.

Business analytics

Your retail store accumulates a large swath of data. It ranges from inventory data, sales data, customer data to accounting data and more. By consolidating and processing them, you can gain valuable insights into several aspects of your business. As advantageous as it is, performing this task manually is quite daunting.

The Point of Sale software that you wish to purchase must be able to scan through all the data in its databases, process them and extrapolate them into insightful statistics. This is an accurate way of knowing the latest developments and prospects of your retail business. 

Conclusion

A high-quality and feature-rich POS system will allow you to expand your operations in no time. Its features will enable you to effectively take control of all your retail operations from a single software application. If you’re looking for the most secure, reliable and fast-performing POS solution, then I highly recommend SmartPOS from SmartPoint. Contact them to know more.