Top 7 Reasons Your Small Business Needs a POS

It’s no secret that running a small business is a lot of work. Some call it a labor of love (fingers crossed that you’re chasing your dreams), but its still a huge responsibility with a hundred little details to manage daily. The last thing small business owners need is more hassle from an outdated accounting system. You may be holding on to your tried and true way, but do yourself a favor set yourself free with a smart POS system. 

Say goodbye to the headaches of manual everything

If you’re one of the holdouts who still uses a pen and paper or excel spreadsheets to track your sales and inventory, it’s time for an update. Not only are you leaving yourself wide open to human error, you’re also spending more time than you need to on every transaction.

Wouldn’t you rather all those moments you spend calculating charges and plugging in transaction details be spent instead interacting more with your customers? After all, it’s better to use your time to engage with a warm customer and encourage return visits. Don’t let tedious bookkeeping distract you from focusing on sales.

Read on for the top seven reasons you shouldn’t wait one more day to upgrade your business with a complete merchant solution POS system.

1. Be dynamic and track sales efficiently

There are a few things that separate small businesses that grow from those that don’t. One of the key elements is accurately tracking sales. Without the ability to track sales efficiently, your small business is vulnerable to all kinds of upsets. It’s better to prevent running short on inventory, overestimating income, being a victim of internal theft and dozens of other avoidable incidents.

With a point of sale system in place, you can multitask without even trying. A POS provides a seamless checkout process. All at once you are now tracking the sale, managing inventory, and creating a record of the transaction. Most importantly, you can use this data at anytime to gain valuable insight about your business.

Suddenly it’s not a challenge to calculate taxes, or a guessing game to uncover which items sell the best vs. which are most profitable. All the capabilities you need to make your business more dynamic and to work smarter are right at your fingertips.

2. Have more time to engage customers and up sell

Obviously using a POS system saves you time. But also it will give you the freedom to connect with customers in meaningful ways. Once you’re not bogged down with pen and paper calculations, you’ll find you have much more time to engage your clients in conversation. And confidence is gained in knowing you have correct calculations.

Conversations during the transaction are also a time to shine with great customer service. You can find out why clients are shopping for what they’re buying. You may uncover deeper needs that could lead to a very easy up sell. Excellent service can be a difficult task when you cannot focus on the customer because you’re running numbers.

3. Stay organized with minimal effort

Most small businesses know what it’s like to have a bad day. It’s already overwhelming and stressful when things go wrong, and nothing’s going your way. And if you’re disorganized, overcoming the pitfalls can be even more challenging. It’s operating in chaos.

Sometimes a lack of organization just looks like lots of extra time spent trying to complete simple tasks. You may often find yourself starting one project and then being pulled in an entirely different direction. Trying to find something you need can be distracting and make it difficult to actually finish jobs.

Nothing can streamline your busy day quite like improved organization. With the right point of sale system, so much of that worry and chaos disappear. Because your sales and inventory are all managed in one program, you are alerted about what you need to reorder before you run out. You can determine where you might increase sales by stocking extra of more profitable products.

Features like built -in customer data can help you more efficiently manage your clients.  You can spend the time you’ve gained back on keeping them engaged with your business. And an integrated calendar allows for service businesses to track the transaction from reservation to sale to customer insights. The ultimate in staying organized.

4. Reduce human errors

Human error in accounting is a danger to businesses of every size, particularly small businesses that don’t have the budget to overcome a potential mistake. There’s a lot of ways human errors can create problems including inadvertent mistakes like miscalculating costs and underselling your products. There’s also more purposeful human error like internal theft by employees who know how to manipulate a manual system.

With a reliable POS, there’s less opportunity for errors. Instead of transferring data numerous times, you can carefully input your costs, prices, inventory, taxes, and virtually every other piece of data one time, and let the system do the rest.

5. Offer customers their preferred payment option

We’ve talked about how important it is to offer customers payment flexibility in the past. The struggle for small businesses is that accepting credit cards and other forms of payment (like PayPal) adds another layer of difficulty to accounting.

However, with a smart POS, accepting a variety of payment options is simple. Integrations are easy and powerful — allowing you to effortlessly link to credit card processing systems and platforms like Square and PayPal. There’s no extra work because all the systems communicate directly and the customer can pay however they want. You now even have the option to issue digital receipts and go paperless. This leads the way to continued customer communications from asking them to leave a review, to staying connected with your future mailings. 

6. A smart POS manages all your inventory in one place

The flip side of tracking sales is managing inventory. Without the right processes in place, it’s easy to lose track of how much of a particular product you’ve sold and how many you have left in stock. And the more types of products you sell, the more complicated it gets.

Complete POS systems simplify your work by constantly updating inventory counts based on the daily transactions. Just input quantities as you receive new products, and the system will keep track of what’s sold for you. Not only is it a time saver, but it creates a system of checks and balances. You can double check your physical inventory results to catch any discrepancies right away and correctly adjust.

7. Run reports that help you stay on track

Knowledge is power. Without the ability to run comprehensive business reports, it’s hard to know how your business is doing day to day, month to month, and year over year. You can run reports manually, or use a separate program to input your data, but there are a couple of issues you’ll run into.

Manual entry leaves room for error, and every time you transfer numbers is another opportunity for little mistakes that can result in big discrepancies. If your programs don’t communicate (or they’re entirely manual) identifying errors and correcting them is a difficult task.

Using a POS system provides reporting features so you can check on your business as frequently as you want – adding confidence that numbers are correct and current. You can analyze your data in ways that you couldn’t see before. When you’re armed with insights, making the right decisions about your business becomes clear.  

Bonus! Provide currency conversion and make your international customers feel welcomed

With the digital age, the world has seemingly become smaller. We can now transact like never before with international customers. But the currency conversion can still be tricky. When you opt to use Quid POS, you’ll have the unique ability to easily calculate a sale in multiple currencies at once. This real-time price discovery feature provides transparency and confidence for everyone. Grow your business by attracting global customers and transition simply from one currency to another, convert prices, and calculate change. Your customers will purchase confidently, and you will appreciate the hassle-free flexibility to accommodate more patrons.