A powerful business management solution such as a POS system is important for any small business owner – retail, F&B, or service. And you’ve probably heard of the term POS or point-of-sale somewhere before. So what are the benefits of a POS system? And does your small or medium business even need one? Hmm…
Not to worry, we’re here to answer all these questions for you with our handy dandy list of reasons why your business absolutely needs a point of sale system!
But first… What’s a POS system?
So a POS or point-of-sale system is the combination of software and hardware that is used to centralise business management.
Point-of-sale refers to the point of where the sale happens.
A POS system is basically your high-powered, hulked out, Jarvis of a cash register. I mean, if Tony Stark had a brick-and-mortar business, he’d be using a POS system. So you should too!
A modern POS system does not only process sales transactions, it can also:
- provide real-time data and reports
- automate manual tasks
- help you manage your inventory, employees, customers
- and more!
This is all so you, the business owner, can make smart, data-driven business decisions to help increase your sales.
You definitely need a good POS system – whether you run a retail store, a cafe, restaurant, a food truck, or a vape shop.
And here’s why:
1. Save time and money with your all-in-one POS system
Time and money management are important for any small medium business owner, as you usually don’t have much to spare.
But here’s the good news…
An all-in-one POS system will help you save both time and money – two very important things in any small business owner’s life.
Phew!
For one, it’s easy to use, so you don’t have to waste hours training your staff.
For example, our F&B customer, Darren Tan of IDC KL, mentioned to us that it took his staff about 10 – 15 minutes to learn how to use our StoreHub POS system.
Amazing, right?!
An easy-to-use POS system also helps speed up your checkout process during peak hours, which helps drive more sales for your business.
So, the easier you make it for your staff, the more time they have to spend on customer service and sales.
You also save money because you’re able to track your finances better via its real-time reporting feature.
Your POS system will also help you prevent waste and loss via its inventory management system. This is particularly important if you’re running an F&B business with perishable goods.
Human errors are also reduced because it automates a lot of your tedious manual tasks and data collection.
2. Run your business from anywhere with a cloud-based POS system
Are you on-the-go a lot and don’t always have the time to go to your store to check on things?
Well, when you use a cloud-based POS system, you can run your business whenever and wherever you want.
A cloud-based POS system stores its data stored on the Internet, which means that it can be accessed anytime, anywhere.
This is great for busy small business owners.
You don’t have to go to your store or call your busy employees to find out how much stock you have left on a certain item.
All you need to do is access your backoffice like the StoreHub BackOffice on your device to view the data yourself.
3. Get real-time data and reports from your POS system
Data is king.
You can’t run a profitable business on intuition and insight alone. You need accurate numbers and data to help you develop successful strategies, and to make smart business decisions.
Imagine this:
- Without data: You order 1,000kg of meat because you feel you need more this week. You end up overbuying and wasting your money.
- With data: Your report tells you that you need to order exactly 450kg of meat for this week. You buy exactly what you need without wasting money.
A POS system like StoreHub is able to give you real-time data so you can make fast and smart business decisions to help increase sales and profit. All the information you need is stored in the system, so you don’t need to manually check to see your best selling item.
The analytic features of a POS system like StoreHub can give you useful insights such as:
- best selling items
- worst selling items
- peak hours
- off-peak hours
- low stock count
- and more!
You can then determine which products need restocking, more marketing efforts, or when to run off-peak hour promotions to increase sales based on the analytics that your system provides you.
This is all very important stuff that will determine the success of your small or medium-sized business.
4. Improved inventory management with your POS system
How do you keep track of your inventory?
With pen and paper? Or do you manually count your stock at the end of each day and key it in an Excel sheet?
Yikes! Sounds like a lot of work and potentially a lot of human errors.
Well… With a POS system, that’s all in the past.
A modern and powerful POS system will definitely come with an inventory management system that will help you manage and keep track of all your inventory.
So it doesn’t matter if you have one SKU or thousands of SKUs, you can easily manage your products wherever and whenever.
This is especially if you have more than one store in other location, as you’ll be able to keep track of all the inventory of all your stores without needing to be present at each store every time you need to check on your stock.
It also helps maintain pricing consistency between your different store locations, and it reduces employee theft.
So getting a point of sale system that has a comprehensive inventory management system is really important.
StoreHub‘s inventory management system, for example, lets you easily manage and track your inventory through its various features.
It allows you to easily:
- create audit trails, and manage stock take and stock return
- bundle products as composite inventory and add product variants
- organise your products through categories
- centralise your product catalogue for your brick-and-mortar and online store
- and more!
It even warns you when your stock is running low so you never run out of stock, and essentially, never miss out on more sales!
5. Better employee management
Managing employees is hard. Especially if you’re running a small business and already have a lot of other things that need your attention.
Well great news!
A smart POS system will help you with that through its employee management feature. You can:
- manage employee information
- track the number of hours each employee works
- track how much sales each employee generates
- and more!
Cool huh?
There’s more!
The employee management feature of your POS system will have a shift feature that requires employees clock-in and clock-out using a PIN. This allows you to track all their hours worked properly so salary can be calculated fairly and accurately.
This feature also lets you see what and how much your employee sells during their shift. So you’ll know who’s working and who’s slacking.
We do all this at StoreHub, and we even let you assign different BackOffice roles (eg: cashier or store manager) to each employee so they’ll only have access to certain functions and parts of your point-of-sale system necessary for their role.
This great for fraud prevention and if you want to control access to any sensitive information such as sales reports and so on.
Additionally, you can use our employee management feature to identify and reward top-performing employees to motivate your entire team to do better.
You can even find out your busiest times so you can efficiently manage the schedules of your staff.
6. Increased customer loyalty with CRM
Based on our data, we found that loyal customers tend to spend 3 times more than new customers.
So, how do you determine a loyal customer from a new customer?
With your POS system’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) feature, you can!
You’re able to see who your loyal – and essentially – most valuable customers are.
Using the CRM feature, you can:
- hold special promotions and sales
- notify your loyal customers first via email or SMS blasts, as they have a higher probability of spending at your store
You can also use this data to motivate and reward your loyal customers with things like loyalty or referral programmes to keep them coming back.
So always remember that loyal customers = higher sales potential, and that using a CRM feature will help you get closer to more sales.
7. New sales and payment channels with your POS system
A modern and powerful POS system will give you new sales and payment channels like ecommerce and ewallet options.
This is especially important because technology is only getting better, faster, and cheaper. The world is moving towards ecommerce and cashless payment adoption, and if you don’t get involved now, you’re going to get left behind.
Let’s talk about ecommerce first.
Retail ecommerce in Southeast Asia is projected to generate $87.8 billion dollars in sales in 2025. Back in 2015, that number was only at $5.5 billion. So that’s going to be a huge jump in sales in 10 years!
As a business owner, don’t you want a share of this?
So don’t miss out. Either set up an online shop on your own or set one up using your POS system.
StoreHub, for example has StoreHub Ecommerce. It allows you to easily put your entire online. And the best part about it is that you can sync your offline and online store so you can manage both business operations from one account.
This means you’ll never oversell or over order stock.
It takes away the hassle of setting up an online shop on your own and managing two businesses.
Cool, huh?
Now, let’s move on to ewallets.
Carrying cash around isn’t the most preferred method for payment anymore.
Instead, it’s cashless payment that is now becoming more popular in this vastly growing digital economy.
But then again, not everyone has access to a credit or debit card.
So the solution? Ewallets – a payment method that involves loading funds to a virtual wallet in an app, and then using those funds to make payments.
There are over 2 million ewallet users in Malaysia alone involved this form of cashless transaction. And many retailers have taken note and started to accept ewallet payment.
To give you a competitive edge, StoreHub has partnered up with various ewallet providers so you can accept ewallet payments with ease.In Malaysia, we offer Boost, GrabPay, and Maybank QRPay. In Thailand, we’ve partnered with KBank to allow ewallet payment.
Ewallet payment is a secure payment method that is scam proof. It also saves time and eliminates errors.
You can also fully integrate with your StoreHub POS and see your ewallet sales reports in your BackOffice. 😉
So, does your small retail or F&B business need a POS system?
The answer is obviously… YES!
Any retail or F&B business needs a cloud-based, all-in-one POS system as your business management solution.
Modern POS systems like StoreHub‘s offer you affordable and intelligent technology that’s easy-to-use and setup so you can make your business awesome.
Why?
Because small businesses are the backbone of our economy and they deserve all the support we can give.
So, if this article has yet to convince you, give us a call: +(603) 7890 2880 or book your free StoreHub demo now and we’ll show you what your business is missing out on. 😉
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