Point Of Sale Business Report: Calculate Profit And Advantages

Advantages of the POS system

Discuss about the Point of Sale Business Report for Calculate the Profit.

POS is an inventory software that helps business track the usage, monitor the prices of product, change the prices of various products depending on the analysis made from their sales, calculate the profit made and analyze inventory level per item. The POS basically records every sales of a product that happens in a business. The POS give much information as compared to the information derived from making the sales manually. The POS displays reports from the sales made thereby assisting the sales and marking department make valid decisions. The POS has a better look than the cash register. It is used in checking the customers, recording sales data and compiling sales information. Also the POS brings the sales, inventory, customers and employees together. This creates an effective environment for the business managers and business owners (Coleman & Peasley, 2015). Most POS run on desktops, laptop and on smartphones.  The data generated by the used of the POS should be safe and secure from hacker. The business owners can also implement cloud storage of the data. There are quite a number of vendors selling the POS. One has to make a decision with the type of POS a business may require. The POS has to fit in the businesses’ processes and requirements. Finding the POS to offer the best solution could be challenging and overwhelming. Before deciding on which POS to buy a business must confirm factors such as the services, the payment process, the hardware availability, the terms and costs of the venders and will fulfil the need soft the POS in the business (2018).

There are quite a number of the POS system (Taylor, 2012). The advantages are similar in all the business sizes. Depending on a case scenario of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery which is a small business that has incorporated POS system in the sales of the product there are quite a number of advantaged that have resulted.

First, POS has helped in the tracking of the sales and inventory of the business. For the goods whose sales a quick, then the business tend to add them often. For the slow goods, the managers tend not to add less compared to the fast moving products. The POS helps in efficient staffing. The business owner tends avoids paying wages to the employees when business is slow to cut on overhead costs. The business owner can tell when there are more sales in the business or when the sales are lower than expected.

Disadvantages of the POS

Secondly, the POS helps in the inventory control. When there is a track of the inventory, the less the goods are stolen. Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery experienced theft from the employee earlier. After implanting the POS in the business the loss of item reduced. This is because it became a bit difficult for the employees to steal from the business owner.

 The third advantage is that the POS helps in solving the employee accountability. The POS tracks the employee actions. It keeps track of the inventory, the event logs of the items sold, the time the products were sold and the employee accountable for the sales. If the employees realize that they can be tracked depending on the sales they make, they tend not to steal from the small company.

Finally, then POS helps in tracking the customer purchase and the return history. Tracking customer purchases’ shows the customer confidence with Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery products. Also, when a customer makes a return of the goods purchased. This return of goods is simple a record of the goods return and the reason as to why they were returned. The POS helps in good inventory maintenance and display the customer and suppliers of various products (McCarthy, 2018).

Despite the advantages highlighted above, there are some challenges experienced while using the POS. The challenges include lack of expertise in using the POS by the employees. Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery had to incur some express in training on how to use the POS. Despite training some took long to adapt to the usage of the POS in the transactions. Some of the employees were rendered jobless on realizing that the employee could not adapt to change and others opted to leave as they were not ready to be accountable on the sales of the products. The other disadvantage of the POS, is that it is expensive to implement into a business. Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery, used an approximate of 1000 US dollar in the purchase and implementation of the POS.

The POS has a competitive advantage in that one can change the price of products for promo (JONES, BARRIE, ROBINSON, ALLSOP & CHIKRITZHS, 2012). Some product may have a slight decrease in price to attract more customers. This doesn’t necessary make loss to the business. The business makes a plan on how to slightly lower the price of products but increase the number of items sold thus making much profit. The POS can generate some coupon for customer to use in buying products. This help in retaining the customers for a long time. Most customer will flow to the business thus the business makes a greater profit margin.

Competitive advantage

The POS is installed in computer within a network. The computer should be having the same operating systems for convenience. The computers are supposed to be connected to a router. The router is set up to handle DHCP so as to give each computer an IP address. The identification of the devices in the network is determined the IP address. The POS vendor’s advisee that, all the networks handling the POS system, should be connected via a LAN cable. To be specific on the type of the LAN cable advised, CAT 5 or higher is advised ("Point of Sale Manual - POS Network Setup", 2018). This is to ensure that the network connection not intermittent. With the use of LAN, the businesses is assured of no loss of data, no interruption by other items that emit the frequencies ("POS configuration", 2018). With the LAN network connection, the data transfer, request and response to and fro respectively are efficient.  Use of wireless connection ("Wi-Fi at the point of sale", 2013), there might be the interruption of frequencies leading to delays and loss of data (Castro & Shaikh, 2016). The data should be centralized. This ensures that all computers in the network and connected to a single database, get information from a similar with similar information. This ensures that the information view for any computer id up-to-date. Also, if one employee sells all the products of a certain type, the other employees will that the product is finish. With the inventory o the POS, there is no need of looking for products manually ("MyPMS POS Setup Guide | BookingCenter PMS", 2018). The POS shows the number of items in the inventor. Therefore, the business owner therefore easily make decision to determine what is going to be bought next and the quantity to be bought. For safety measure, the database could be on cloud. This will reduced the chances of the data mishandled. When data is stored in the internet, the data is safe and it is easy to access from anywhere. The POS should be connected to the ETR printer to print the receipts of the products sold. The POS is also connected to a card reader. The card reader is used for credit card payments. Other devices that are connected to the POS include scanners, touchscreens and others to making payment process more efficient ("Point of Sale Hardware Setup — Odoo 9.0 documentation", 2018).

Configuration of the POS

The POS should be secure from hackers or malware. When the system is secure, then, the business is assure of secure data hence making good decision for the business. Every employee to access the system by logging in by his/ her own password. If the system is set to have strong password for the employee’s accounts, it becomes difficult for the hacker to get to the system. The employees are not required to share the login details. This helps in tracking the employees’ actions and events in the system. Every system that accesses the internet must be secure to reduce cyber-crime (Gomzin, 2014). 

Conclusion

From a look at the uses of the POS in business, it is very importance in the business compared to mankind decision from the information that is manually computed. If data is done manually the business miss a lot of information in making decision thus making poor decision resulting to failure. The quite a number of question a business owner can answer from the report given by the POS system. The questions include: how much profit is made monthly? Who are the royal customer? Which product make the most sale? And more questions. The POS is so effective in the business processes ("Point of sale: The last chance to get it right", 2013). The POS technology is dominating in the emerging and the developing technologies. Business that have no POS installed are dragging behind loosing much of their customers. POS system is an important aspect in business today. It does not matter whether big-sized, medium-sized or small-sized business. The POS system is helpful. The POS are sold by different vendors but can be customized to suite different retail and wholesale businesses. The POS is also linked to the merchant account. The POS can also process the traction immediately as the events occur. The POS enhance accurate recording as the item are feed in the database. The employees work is to add products purchased to cart and generated a receipt. This enhance the employee efficiency in the daily activities (Syed, 2015).

I would recommend all the business to get a favorable POS that’s suite their business to manage the sale of products and to keep track of the inventory, sales, customers, suppliers and employees ("How to choose a point-of-sale system for your business", 2018). The POS will help the business in making valid decision for the business (Reinartz & Imschloß, 2017). Valid decisions result in making more sales and increasing the margin profit and eventually the business will grew, The POS may be expensive during installation but later, the benefit will be many. The result of the POS system is that, it will lead to effective and efficient management of sale of products. A good POS will help in reducing the costs, increasing the profit margins and improve efficiency in the business.

MyPMS POS Setup Guide | BookingCenter PMS. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.bookingcenter.com/point-of-sale-pos/pos-setup-guide/ 

 Point of Sale Manual - POS Network Setup. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.accupos.com/support/management-operation-manuals/pos-network-setup/ 

Point of Sale Hardware Setup — Odoo 9.0 documentation. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.odoo.com/documentation/user/9.0/point_of_sale/overview/setup.html 

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McCarthy, M. (2018). The Benefits of Moving to a Point-of-Sale (POS) System | AllBusiness.com. Retrieved from https://www.allbusiness.com/the-benefits-of-moving-to-a-point-of-sale-pos-system-10206841-1.html 

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Castro, L., & Shaikh, N. (2016). A Reference Point Logit Model for Estimating Substitution Probabilities Using Point of Sale Data. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.3121822 

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