POSWizard

A feature many people forget when shopping for point of sale software is the loans function. This function is mostly used for more expensive items, which the customer is allowed to take home for some days to try out. Or in fashion, when your customers are shopping for their busy husbands, and want to try these trousers at home.

The loans function allows you to register each loan and have a up-to date inventory of each item that a customer has at home. When the customer returns the item, you can either invoice it when the customer liked the item or put it back in stock when it was not what they were looking for.

A very simple feature, which might make your life a lot easier.

Certain items such as machines, weapons, cars, televisions, etc. bear a unique identifier, the so-called serial number —or nominal number of the numbering is not serial. Serial numbers allow for detailed item tracing throughout the lifespan of the item. Typical Point Of Sale software will show you the purchase history, transfers from one storage location to another, sales history and service history. Often, serial numbers are linked to a batch or lot number that can be use to check warranty dates and related units of the same product.

Some types of items require various serial numbers. Mobile phones are an example of such an item: just as any other electronic device they come with a regular serial number supplied by the manufacturer. Furthermore they have an IMEI or ESN number which is used to identify the device on the telephone network. Check carefully whether your EPOS software supports multiple serial numbers if you are dealing with such items.

A good POS system will request the S/N for each item when totalizing a sale and some even present a list with serial numbers on stock to choose from. From that moment on, that serial number is linked to the customer record and maintained in your system for future reference.

Sales tax is money collected on behalf of the government. It could be Federal, State, County and even City tax. It could become very simple or tedious to manage it. Depending on the service or good sold what taxes have to be collected. Telephone service pays taxes at all levels, federal, state and local (county and/or city), whereas for example groceries will just pay state and/or local.

Based on the complexity of the taxes collected attention must be given to the software selected. Most Point of Sale (POS) software cannot handle multiple sales taxes. All the percentage must be added up and then defined one Sales tax that will cover all. Some will allow discriminating if the POS software is integrated with an Accounting package, in the case of QuickBooks POS.

Source: 1-StepTechnology

Sometimes you want to sell some items packaged together instead of separately. Such a package is usually called a kit in your Point of Sale software, or a Bill Of Materials if the package is the result of a manufacturing process.

Normally, kits appear in your software just as any other item, and can have a price independently of the sales price of the individual component. Of course the software calculates the costs of the kit based on the sum of the costs of the components. In the properties of the kit, you can specify which items are part of the kit, and how many units of each item are included. Sometimes you can even include kits as a component of another kit. The latter comes in handy in food processing, where for example you pre-prepare the pizza foundation using flour, yeast, milk,… and after that use the foundation as one of the components of the final pizza. You might also see such layered kits in the computer shop, that bundles a printer with the corresponding printer cable, and might want to offer a complete set containing a PC, monitor and printer (including the cable) for a special price.

A handy trick is to add the time needed to physically create the kit as one of the components of the kit, so the costs of the kit reflect the real costs. The software usually allows for modifications in the bill of materials when finishing the work order to reflect breakage and variations. If you fill in the actual time needed to create the kit, the POS system will calculate very precise margins on each sale!

Loyalty Lab releases Loyalty 2.0, a new product to help grocery stores and specialty retailers replace their outdated first-generation loyalty programs. Loyalty 2.0 is designed to help marketers leveraging their reams of unused transactional data to launch new initiatives such as targeted e-mail, sweepstakes, sub-clubs and personalized Web-based communications.