7 Must-Have Features of Any POS System – A Quick Guide

7 Must-Have Features of Any POS System – A Quick Guide

point-of-sale-system
point-of-sale-system


7 Must-Have Features of Any POS System – A Quick Guide

Are you struggling to find and buy the best POS System for your retail business? Does your retail business need to be digitized efficiently? Need software that should handle its inventory and accounting from anywhere on any device? No worries! Get all your answers here. Read the guide below to improve your buying experience for any POS management software.

When buying any POS Software, you need to make sure that it must possess the following necessary features.

1 – Inventory Management

The first and foremost feature is inventory management. The POS System you wish to buy must have a complete inventory management feature. It should efficiently update the inventory in real-time whenever a sale is made. Also, it should be able to inform if the stock count touches the threshold level.  This means it should timely notify you which items are about to deplete so that you can avoid stock out complaints. Consequently, you get timely alerts for the necessary stock replenishment in the inventory. Therefore, a good POS software must have an efficient inventory management feature.

2 – Product Variants

While looking for the right POS System, you need to check how well and smartly it manages the product variants. For instance, if you are a clothing brand, you always have to manage several variants for each of your clothing pieces. Let’s take an example of a shirt in order to understand the difference between bad and good management of variants. Say, the shirt you are selling is in ten colors. A good system should create and store ten different variants of the shirt instead of storing records of ten different shirts. Similarly, it should allow you to store product variants in a 3-D matrix as well. It means, against each color, you should be able to set shirt sizes too. So here, the shirt is one, its number of variants depend upon its sizes and colors. 

3 – Accounting Software

Being an online seller, secure transactions are one of the biggest concerns. The same goes for the purchasers, they never want to face any horrible transaction experience. So, a good POS software must be able to process transactions in a secure way. Therefore, the money flow should be completely error-free, smooth, and secure.

Many such systems do not have a built-in accounting feature so they allow accounting software integration in this regard. But it’s an additional hassle to do – that most of us don’t prefer. Therefore, it’s nice to have an ‘in-house’ cash flow management feature. This feature should allow you to generate accounting reports so that you can track all transactions in one go. Besides, it should enable you to get a clear insight into the budget as well. Hence, with budget comparison, you can easily forecast costs and expenses for smarter future decisions.

4 – Mobile Payments

In this modern era, technologies have made it a common practice of carrying no cash in pockets. So now, credit cards are more common as compared to cash. On the other hand, mobile payments are also in this race. They are more likely to outdo the use of credit cards. Therefore, a POS system you’re looking for must accept transactions via mobile payments.

5 – User Roles and Permissions

For every business management, there are multiple user roles assigned different permissions. Similarly, for your retail business, you need POS Software that should allow you to create separate users, for each of your departments/modules, like a salesman, accountant, audit personnel, etc. Apart from the ability to create user roles and permission, there should be other benefits too. This feature should also allow you to track and identify the sales activity of each salesman. Similarly, you should be able to examine their performance and see if they are honest or dishonest.

6 – Barcodes

Each retail business management software must incorporate barcodes or other label printing. Barcodes save you from a tiring hassle in many ways. At the time of sale/purchase, barcodes printed on products allow you to quickly track its information via a barcode reader. Nevertheless, it also helps you to read order information as well – like when the item is purchased, sold, and shipped.

7 – Device Compatibility

One of the popular features of cloud-based POS Systems is mobility. This refers to its ability to be operatable from any device, either desktop system or mobile phone.  Along with compatibility, user-friendliness should also be considered. You always need to get a system with a user-centric approach. Also, you need to ensure that the system should be equally secure on small devices too. Generally, POS solutions run smoothly on iPads and tablets as well. Whereas, many also come in PDA forms. They incorporate additional hardware installations too like receipt printers, and card swipers, etc. While you may not necessarily need these types of add-ons, there is no harm in having knowledge about their availability. Anyway, choose the software according to your business, size, needs, and nature.

Moreover, the advantage of this cloud-based technology and mobility is that you can process any business operation from anywhere anytime. So, ensure that the software you look for works for small devices too. Simply get everything just a few taps away and make your processes quicker.

Summed Up

Well, it’s all about the necessary features you need to look for while buying the POS software for your retail business. All you have to do is,  examine your business nature, size and needs then decide what type of POS fits best for it. There are many such solutions available on the internet in this modern age that can benefit your business. I have personally used SMACC for my retail business, it has many useful features with detailed modules and configurations. A plus point of this software is, they have amazing customer support as well. You can try it too or check other similar POS software having ultimate inventory management solutions. Hope you enjoyed reading the post and found it fruitful.  Stay tuned for more related content.