A good EPOS system will do many things for you, including helping you to forecast future trends. Powerful business software does much more than help you complete transactions. We’ve spoken previously about the help the software can provide with inventory management and the benefits that a good Electronic Point of Sale System can bring to your business, but now, it’s time to explain how your EPOS can help you to forecast.
An EPOS system is an essential piece of equipment for any business. Its ability to monitor inventory and staff, manage tables, and automatically split bills, among other things, on top of taking payments gives you the opportunity to streamline all of your business processes giving you more free time to concentrate on customer experience, and maximising your profits.
Depending on the software that you choose, the capabilities of your epos system are endless. Every action taken and every payment received is tracked by your EPOS and saved, then while you’re concentrating on other tasks, that collected data is being cleverly pooled to create sales reports that you’ll see at the end of each working day.
These reports are incredibly important for making predictions on customer behaviours, forecasting financial growth, and managing stock levels. Your EPOS system is designed to help you make the best decisions for your business, so we’ve come up with four ways to help you.
1. Manage your Inventory
Stock counts can be one of the more tedious roles when running a business and it is certainly a time-consuming task, but gone are the days where you need to count each item and log it on paper and pray you don’t lose it. Once your products are in your EPOS system stock levels will adjust automatically every time a sale is made or an item is returned. This can help you to make better decisions when re-ordering stock as you will be provided with real-time reports of which product sells at what times, which products are regularly returned and if a particular item is suddenly selling more than usual. By knowing when to expect higher demand, you will know when it’s best to increase stock, decrease stock or remove an item from your inventory entirely.
Inventory reports are based on gross margins allowing you to get the most honest review of an item’s profitability.
2. Customise your Reports
When reports are customised to your needs, it is much easier to identify products that are best-sellers, the optimum price points and your best sales days. It can help you to understand more about your customers and their habits, or whether the promotions you ran have worked to increase sales and profit margins to justify any promotional discounts that have been given. By monitoring your sales regularly and generating reports you’ll be able to see your successes and adapt your business strategy to ensure growth.
3. Manage your Staff Appropriately
Your EPOS also allows you to see how your staff are performing. As with any team, someone’s strength is another person’s weakness, and so ensuring your team is best equipped with skills for the different needs of the day is important. Basing its judgement on the insights it gains every day, your EPOS software is able to provide productivity reports for employees. This allows you to assign shifts appropriately.
This is easy to explain to new employees, the system helps to keep track of what they’re selling and to who. The system is there to primarily monitor sales, but can also assist you to reward top-performing employees, or ensure that busier days, weeks, and months are well prepared for.
4. Give your Customers a Great Experience.
Your EPOS will provide you with so much insight into the shopping behaviours of your guests that it’s likely you’ll see patterns that they didn’t know they had. If you use this information to identify your most loyal customers and offer them some additional love and offers, you’ll ensure that they continue to return. You can add customer details to the database and create a bespoke loyalty program tailored to your business’s needs and the desires of your customers. After all, it is much cheaper to keep an existing customer than attract a new one.
There are many more ways that a bespoke EPOS can help your business, from stock control to multi-site connectivity, but the advantage that custom analytics and insights can provide to your business strategy is second to none.
You can read more about bespoke EPOS systems and software here. Or you can grab a free demo to see how easy to use our software really is here. Alternatively, you can call us on 01646 601992 or get in touch online.