Setting up your own startup is not an easy task. The challenges faced are insurmountable and it’s inevitable that you take necessary steps to ensure that your start-up survives all tides. There are million things that you need to manage. While pain points may vary business to business, there are few problems that all startups face like managing the inventory, cash flow, staffing and so on.
A reliable and secure Point of Sale (POS) solution can prove to be a lifeline for your business. It will not only help you manage your payments and billing seamlessly but also streamline processes, inventory, customer data and allow complete automation of sales, reporting and analytics. This frees up time to focus on more pressing matters such as delivering great customer experience and ensure work-life balance. This article demonstrates the role of POS in reducing some of the pain points that startups face in their everyday life.
Cash flow management
When you are starting out your own venture, maintaining you cash flow can be an uphill task. In fact, this can be the most daunting task. With the help of accepting your payments through POS you can be rest assured that all the money that you collected from your sales is deposited straight in the bank. Moreover, by setting up POS startups have the ability to accept payments through multiple channels such as mobile wallets, online payments, bitcoins and never miss out on a sale.
Maintaining accounts
When it is your own startup it’s imperative that you keep track of every penny that is being spent. Every investment made, be it big or small is thought through and maintaining accounts becomes extremely sensitive. With the help of POS, you eliminate the need to sort through hundreds of receipts. Simplify the accounting process by using the built-in reports, shuffle between reports, look up past transaction and receipts that are saved on cloud and save up on long hours spent on stifling with stack of bills.
Inventory Management
You need to ensure that you are always ahead of your game, POS helps you automatically update every sale and sends you alerts when you are running low. This allows you to easily place an order in for the items you need to have in stock and monitor which items you are losing sales on. Knowledge about this data and awareness of the lull periods will be beneficial to a successful startup. Most importantly if your inventory is managed and tracked the chances of tracking a theft also becomes easier.
Employee management
In recent times job attrition has become a huge problem with startups as most of the times employees are unable to understand their roles and potential. Employee reports can have a significant impact on your business. Hence it’s essential to empower your staff with the right tools that will help in growing the business. POS will not only keep track of working hours but can also track performance by employee and allow you to monitor and remunerate them expeditiously. What’s even more interesting is that the modern work force is comfortable working with the computerised point of sale systems and as a result of which they perform efficiently.
Reporting
As a startup estimating what works and what doesn’t can be risky and there is a chance that you are likely put in too much cash in your low selling item or fail to properly allocate it to your high revenue generator. POS generates accurate reports weekly so that you can keep a track of how the business is performing. This will help you demarcate busy days, seasons and understand the consumer behaviour. It will also help you understand how the employees are performing. These reports can potentially help you increase sales and help you run a profitable business not just based on intuition.
Customer experiences
Consumer is King! And keeping the consumer happy is the most important part of running your start-up. Personalised approach towards the customers will give your business the competitive edge. Information about frequently bought products by the consumer, buying cycle, last date of visit, etc. can be accessed on the POS to better understand them. Nurture and encourage the customers for repeat purchase by sending out promotional messages and offer rewards for shopping or value added services.
With and outside in approach POS helps you understand what your consumer needs and helps your start-up overcome some of most challenging hurdles it faces.
