How can an EPOS system help my business?

EPOS systems offer so much more than just a way to take card payments. They make the day-to-day running of your business more manageable, they bring customer-winner dating to your fingertips and they can shape the direction you take your company.

Sound too good to be true? Well, you’ll be pleased to know it’s not. Here are just some of the ways an EPOS could transform your business.

1. Real-time visibility 

EPOS’ provide live data on everything from stock levels and sales to staff performance and profit margins. So, you’re never more than a few clicks away from finding out exactly how your business is fairing. 

Better yet, you can access this kind of intel whenever you want, from wherever you want.

2. Less scope for error

Everyone makes mistakes, it’s what makes us human, but some mistakes can be more costly than others and as a business owner you know all too well, every penny counts.

Well, an EPOS minimises opportunities for error by taking the human element out. You set your products, prices and promotions up once and then they’re stored on the system for your staff to apply - gone are the days of someone accidentally charging 99p for a £99 purchase!

3. Streamline stocktaking

Stocktaking isn’t anyone’s idea of fun - especially if you’ve got a whole load of it to get through. But it’s not just the tediousness that makes it inconvenient; it absorbs time and time is money. 

Enter an EPOS. It tracks your stock for you so you can easily see when you’re running low and put an order in before you run out.

4. Spot trends

With an EPOS you don’t just see what transactions were made, you see when they were made too. With that kind of information to hand you can build a really accurate picture of when you need resource and how much of it you need.

For example, if you work in a restaurant and you have a sales slump between 2.30-5pm every day, you could switch up your shift patterns to reduce how many staff work between those hours. Or, on the flip side, if you have a mad rush every Easter you know to put extra staff on.

This has a couple of benefits:

1. It saves you money during quiet periods, and
2. It ensures you’re well prepared to meet demand over busy cycles.

5. Tailor your marketing

Because you can see which items are and aren’t popular at a glance, you can run promotions to:

1. Get rid of slow-moving stock if it’s perishable, and/or 
2. Drive loyalty towards items you know customers want.

The benefit? More sales, less lost revenue, smarter stock management and greater customer satisfaction.

6. Cut your queues

Nobody likes queues. Customers don’t like waiting in them and staff don’t like the pressure of serving them. Well, EPOS systems help to alleviate them quicker by reducing the average time spent serving each customer.

How? Because your employees don’t have to spend time manually entering the product’s price, it’s all on the screen for them to find by category, service, brand or whichever way you set yours up.

7. Staff management

You can have multiple users on any single EPOS system (included in the price) which makes tracking what your employees are getting up to really easy.

Sticking with our makeshift restaurant, here are a few scenarios it might come in handy:

• Identifying underperformance. For example, if employee X only made four transactions between 5-6pm but employee Y made 14. Could it be a sign employee X isn’t pulling their weight?
  
  
• Rewarding top-performers. Let’s say you’re trying to get rid of a box of crisps before they reach their expiration date. You could run a competition to see which employee shifts the most bags, easily access the exact numbers, and then reward them at the end.
  
  
• Get to the bottom of an issue. If, for example, someone put the wrong meal through but no-one was owning up to it, you could quickly find out who it was - that’s not to say they should get a rollicking, of course, but it can be used to show them how not to make the same mistake twice.

Sticking with the ‘rewarding top-performers’ point, putting on some sort of incentive scheme on a more permanent basis could be a great way to engage your teams - which could naturally reflect in your employee retention rates - and increase your sales. Win-win. 

8. Save time

From cutting out manual stocktaking to less time spent serving customers we’ve listed a whole load of areas an EPOS can save you time. And that time can be better spent on other revenue-generating areas in your business - like speaking to customers, marketing your products and training your teams.

A minute here and there might not sound like much but when you multiply that by day, week, month and year, it soon adds up. 

9. Improve your safety measures

With an EPOS all your data and information’s stored in one secure place, making it easier and safer for you to manage. Better yet, you can even set different access levels for your employees too.

For example, you could set James up to see only your restaurant's menu, John could see the menu and your stock management system, and then you could see the menu, the stock and reports.

10. Manage your money better

In just a few clicks you’ll be able to get an overview of all your transactions and if you wanted, you’d even be able to run automated reports on specific days for certain timeframes. From that, all you’d have to do is forward your report onto your accountant for them to do the fiddly bits.

The money management side of things extends to your payroll too. Because your staff will be able to clock in and out via your EPOS, you’ll have instant and easy access to their hours to get their pay right the first time, every time.

Can’t wait to get your hands on one?

We don’t blame you. Here at Payzone, we offer two different types of EPOS system: our mobile EPOS system and our EPOS till system, and which is right for you will largely depend on a few things:

1. Do you accept cash payments?
2. If you answered yes to question one, do you already have a cash drawer?
3. Do you need to be able to settle up from more than one payment point? I.e. from the bar and by the customer’s table in the restaurant.

If you know you want an EPOS but you don’t know which is best for you, get in touch with us and we’ll send one of our payment consultants round to help you out.