What Are The Key Features To Look In An Epos System?

A retail or hospitality business is to sell products or provide service where you need to have an epos system. But before investing in POS system, let’s understand the key features to have in a POS system. Since you understand what a POS system, here are 7 key features that you should look for while buying it.

1. Billing and Order Processing

Epos system should have the basic functionality of billing and order processing. It should be able to bill the orders by scanning products and capturing various types of payment modes.

It has the ability to generate order receipt, reprint and email to end customer along with adding the discount, customer details, remarks if any and sales representative's name to an order.

2. Sales Monitoring and reporting

The POS system must be able to generate a robust report on sales result. It should have the option to report hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly takings and outgoings so the merchants can easily understand the growth of their business.

Sales trends such as seasonal demand in products, forecast based on sales trends, insights on unnecessary products and data regarding stock management are some features of advanced POS reporting module.

3. Inventory and Stock Management

A POS system's stock management module should give complete visibility and accountability at store level.

The system should provide a view on stock, SKU transaction history about 'in', 'out' and 'inside' movements of any SKU, and inbound and outbound stock.

It should also have the feature to make stock adjustments for example increase/decrease stock while seeing stock and capture the purpose behind stock adjustments.

4. Cross Channel Returns Management

Accepting cross-channel returns and facilitating refunds and replacements from any store location are a few of the requirements of a POS returns management module.

The system should facilitate creating refunds for one sales order at various time intervals. It should capture details like the purpose behind return, salesman's name, and remarks.

5. Customer Relationship and Experience

A POS system can help you with retain your customers by storing customer data and buying history. This can be used to give a customized insight to your customer.

Customer data is highly helpful for advertising as this data can give experiences on which customer would be interested in your sale. For example, sending a sale flyer for "30% off on larger sized shirts" to the customer who wears a medium sized shirt would be a waste of time.

6. Employee Management

It is surprising if we say that a POS system can be used to manage staff. But, a staff management feature of a POS system can help you with managing with your staffing levels, employee hours, and sales performance which causes you to track staff productivity.

You can track your staff performance by connecting it with every transaction. This will help you with bifurcate the good and bad performers so you can make appropriate decisions to improve their productivity.

7. Loyalty Programs and Gift Cards

Rather than using traditional punch cards, you would now be able to track your customer loyalty incentives using the POS System.

As the sales of gift cards are increasing each year, your POS system should have the ability to manage with those as well.

The modern POS System goes past processing sales. As you have learned in the previous sections, a feature rich POS can help increase efficiency and provide insights to help you with improving your productivity. These are a few reasons to change to a modern POS system.