Better stock control
Better stock control is the most often cited benefit of EPOS. If your products are suitable, it helps you to reduce stock levels by maintaining up to date stock information. This is good on its own, but what tends to get overlooked is that the resulting information can also be used to increase profitability. By identifying slow and fast moving items and pricing them accordingly, you can trim your prices to make the best of prevailing trading conditions. For instance, if an item is flying off the shelves, then adding a few pence to the price may be a shrewd move. At the same time, slower-moving items may be over-priced, and you can adjust them accordingly. The key is to base your decisions on facts rather than guesswork.

Take control of your purchasing
The same can be said for managing your supplier relationships. Through accurately monitoring your sales activities and stock movements you can take control of your purchasing through automatically generating orders for the products you really need. In a store with a limited number of lines, stock control may be irrelevant, especially to people retailing one-off items like antique furniture. However for others, the value of the stock released could pay for an EPOS installation on its own, while also increasing sales. It's worth doing the sums.

Manage your business more efficiently
Its not just pricing and stock reduction that will benefit from your increased knowledge of the business. There are other plusses in helping you to manage your business more efficiently. You can measure the results of changing opening hours; find out when you are busiest; and even see the impact of moving products around the store. Once again, any decisions are based on facts reported from the system; available at the touch of a button, at any time.

Monitor staff performance
If you are an employer, of non-family members in particular, then being able to monitor staff performance (and honesty) can pay significant dividends.

Save time
Although saving time is another frequently touted EPOS benefit, the impact depends on a number of factors. If your goods are already bar-coded, you don't need to price each item individually. And of course you also save time at checkout, because bar code scanning is faster and less error prone than pressing buttons. With a comprehensive reporting facility at your fingertips you will undoubtedly save time in producing detailed reports, and reduce paperwork.

It goes without saying that without knowing a lot more about your business, we can't really say whether EPOS is right for you. Hopefully, there's enough information here to make an informed decision on whether to take things further.

One final thought. All big retailers use EPOS systems, so there must be something in it. If there was any doubt about the business case, at least some of them would have rejected it. It's true that they may be big and you may be small, but with complete EPOS systems now costing as little as £1,500, small can also be beautiful.

For further information or advice call 0870 7607 417, alternatively, complete our online form.