Having a point of sale system (POS) can greatly benefit your business in many ways. Many of them will work with external hardware allowing for an increase in the versatility and mobility of collecting payments.
What is a POS?
A POS is where the merchant collects payments from a customer. In addition to collecting your payments a POS can serve multiple other beneficial functions which will be discussed later on. There is a wide variety of systems you can choose from, and some are often tailored to better fit the type of business you run.
External Device Integration
One of the many features of a POS is that it can often integrate with a wide variety of external devices. These can be receipt printers, barcode scanners, scales, cash registers, as well as a number of other industry specific devices. The main difference between a POS and a stand alone payment terminal is flexibility in the amount and variety of devices they can integrate with.
Let’s say you want to have a main point of sale as a central hub, but also allow for your customers to pay anywhere in your place of business. A POS system can integrate with external terminals connected through wifi to allow for seamless collection of payments!
App Integration
A huge selling point for POS systems is the ability to integrate with apps. There are a number of POS apps that allow you to collect sales data which in turn will make it easier to make important business decisions. There are also paycheck and time management apps that make the payment of your employees a seamless process.
Restaurant owners love point of sale systems due to their app integrations. From pizza builders to custom order selections, to inventory management; standalone terminals simply cannot beat the complexity of owning a POS System.
Starting Small
If you are a business who is just starting out, you might not have the resources to pay for a full POS system and all of it’s extremities. Not a problem, you can almost always start with a single point of sale, and then continue to build your array of devices to better suit your needs.
A POS system has the ability to drastically improve your business. It takes tasks that would take hours or even days to complete and turns it into a simple tap on the screen. With the number of tailored solutions on the market, it’s almost a no brainer to find the point of sale system that’s right for you.