How to Select a Grocery POS System?

One of the biggest challenges in life is making decisions. Very few people find themselves comfortable in making decisions, most feel the anxiety, stress and pressure of making decisions when there’s something of importance in the stakes. Business owners face a similar situation when they look for a grocery store POS software. A Point of Sales System affects all the operations of your business and thus, choosing the right POS for your business is a significant decision that requires a lot of research.

The requirements of each store is unique depending on its scale, customers, employees, brand popularity, etc. You need to purchase a grocery POS that doesn’t go obsolete for quite some time, at least, is efficient and ready to help you in the fast-paced world. It should overall, give you a competitive advantage over your competitors. Buying a POS to support your business operations is a momentous decision so you should take your time to find the right one for you.

You really need to make all your business decisions by keeping in mind your software. For example, you might prefer using iOS gadgets but you need to go for an Android POS grocery system for your business as it’s much cheaper and easier to use for novices. The system you buy needs to meet your business requirements and still be in your budget! So, the very first step you need to take when you decide to purchase a POS is to determine your budget.

Essential Features of your Grocery POS:

Now that the first step is complete, let’s delve into the features that are necessary for grocery stores. Usually, the key features of a grocery store POS are common to all retail POS software. But choosing the system, ultimately, depends on your business needs. Still, we’ve highlighted the most commonly required features of every grocery store in their POS:

Inventory Management:

You can improve the profitability of your business by more than 30% by carefully monitoring and controlling your inventory. Using a pen and paper to do this will never bring as good results as an inventory management system. A lot of small businesses fail because they use this primitive method to manage their inventory. You need to have sophisticated features such as real-time tracking, inventory alerts and cloud synchronization to give your business a chance to survive in the highly competitive food industry.

Cash Management:

Maintain control of your cash with your grocery POS software. The days of counting cash by hand from the cash drawer are long gone. You don’t need to use a calculator to manually sum up your daily, weekly or monthly sales. Keeping track of cashflow is a necessary part of any product or service providing business. As products are added by entering their unique sales key or scanned using the barcode reader, there can be no discrepancies in their price entered and actual price. You also can check the cash you’ve received versus the sales that the system has recorded when you are utilizing a POS software.

Reporting and Insights:

For your business to operate effectively, you should have the ability to take a snapshot of your business at any given moment. A POS should, simply, provide you with a bird’s eye view of your system. The best POS systems give you quick reports on sales, employees, inventory and much more. All this information needs to be available in real-time to ensure that you can make effective, timely decisions.

Customer Database:

As customers are the most important part of a business, you should have the ability to contact them and promote your business. A POS is great at maintaining a customer database. So, their contact information and past purchases are available for you to view anytime you like. For marketing purposes, this is a huge blessing. You can send your newsletters, promotional emails and SMS to your target audience with just a single click. Similarly, you can generate custom discounts for your most loyal customers based on their purchase history from your store.

Howmuch POS’s Reporting and Analytics Tool

Let’s go a few decades back in the retail industry. The only way people could shop was to go to the store physically and the world of online shopping was undiscovered. The shop keeper also didn’t have any technological tool supporting him in keeping customer records or helping in the development of business trends. There was no way a small scale retailer could make forecasts about his business based on his limited data.

Physical notebooks/registers were used to record the sales data. Organized businesses created columns with their customer’s names and purchases, while many just counted all the products sold out at the end of the day. All this work was daunting and required a lot of effort too. Plus, there was a huge chance of human error. POS systems came in and changed the game completely. And soon, a lot of competition among POS Softwares was born. In Pakistan, Howmuch POS stood out and is Pakistan’s Award-Winning Cloud-based retail POS.

The very first version of a POS was a cash register. These machines had built-in drawers that were used for hand counting cash and had machines over it that did the calculations for the cashier. A paper roll was used to print receipts for the transactions. Technology kept on improving and by the mid-1900s, we had digital machines with LCD screens and the ability to process credit card magnetic strips. Next came the barcode readers that could be attached to cash registers and allowed product price to be entered by just scanning the products. This made the cashier’s job much faster and easier.

POS Softwares

Howmuch’s Reports:

Technology kept on evolving, till we reached the POS systems we have now - the ones that can monitor your inventory, store information about your customer database, help you devise promotional campaigns, and most importantly, have a bird’s eye view of how your business is doing by excellent reporting and analytics mechanism. Howmuch POS has a remarkable reporting tool that can help your business grow leaps and bounds. Let’s look at why this feature makes Howmuch the ideal POS for your business, following are the reports you can generate using this POS:

1. Order Sales Report: You can get an in-depth analysis of your business’s popularity through order sales report. You’ll know which of the products in your store has been the most profitable for you.

2. Item Sales Report: This type of report lets you know which of how your product is doing. You learn the units of each product that are sold daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually; depending upon the filter you have selected.

How to Use Reports for Making Business Decisions:

Looking at your sales data, you can determine the number of staff people you need to hire. You can view seasonal trends too and make this decision seasonally. If you have multiple stores then you can compare the performance of each store by location looking at your reports data and then decide what changes you need to make on the location that isn’t doing as well as you had hoped.

There are so many other decisions that these reports can you help you in. When you have reporting insights with you, you have the ability to make informed and intelligent decisions thus, whenever you decide to purchase a POS system, make sure that it has an excellent reporting tool.

3 Steps to Use Howmuch POS

Howmuch POS is a renowned cloud-based retail POS used by retailers in Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Lahore. It has all the features you need to grow your business. A lot of grocery stores that look for grocery store POS software stop at howmuch because howmuch POS has the capabilities to offer you a bird’s eye view of the system so you can make timely, intelligent and effective decisions.

One of the main reasons why howmuch stands out is its simple interface and ease of use. No special training is required to use this POS and you require minimal time to familiarize yourself with Howmuch’s interface. There’s no point in investing in technology and then finding it impossible to understand. To further ensure that you understand how howmuch POS works, we have compiled the 3 simple steps you need to implement to use Howmuch POS:

Register:

First and foremost, you need to register your account on howmuch. Go to howmuchshop.com and you’ll find the ‘join’ button at the top right corner of your screen. Click on it and you will be displayed a form in which you’ll need to enter your name, email address and password to sign up for free.

Create Store/s:

After you sign in, you will be lead to a dashboard. From here you can add your shop name and upload your products. There are two ways in which you can upload your products; through CSV file or manually.

If you want to upload a CSV file then click on the product button from the hamburger menu. Then click on the variant report. Next, click the browse button and upload the CSV file. There should be 3 columns in the CSV, respectively; The SKU, the Product Name and the Price.

If you want to manually enter a product then click the add product button on the right side of your screen. You’ll be displayed with a form asking about your product details; enter them and you are done.

Set up Payment:

You need to set the payment for your store in the last and final step. You can add cash, which is the cash on delivery option (the most popular one). Or you have the option to add UBL’s credit card, Zambia Gigs Giveaway, Easy Paisa Credit Card, Store Credit Card or External Device Credit Card.

Multiple Shops?

You can manage multiple shops from a single account on howmuch. The initial package you have is free of cost and allows you to manage one store but you can purchase standard, premium and pro package to add 1,3 and unlimited stores to your dashboard.

Top Features:

Howmuch POS offers you the best inventory management you could hope for your store. All your items will be accounted for, and all your vendor information will be in one place. You can find the following features in howmuch’s inventory; inventory grouping, managing product variation, vendor management, tracking stock, discount, and much more.

Similarly, the reporting tool of howmuch POS provides you with insights about what you have sold and how each of your items is fairing. Other features offered by Howmuch POS include cash tracking, order management, alerts, etc. So, make give your business a boost and install howmuch POS start using Howmuch POS right now!