There are many reasons why a Point of Sale system is essential for retail businesses or wholesale and retail sales. It helps owners manage and automate inventories, transactions, offers (such as discounts, coupons, and specials) and improve employee efficiency, allowing them to spend more time interacting with customers.
In addition, these systems provide important reports, such as performance monitoring, use customer data to help generate more business, allow the owner to have control when he is not, etc.
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A Point of Sale consists of various components, including hardware, operating system, software, etc. An important part is, precisely, the Point of Sale software.
There are many alternatives on the market: Custom Developed, Commercial, Specific, Point of Sale in the Cloud, etc., choosing the most suitable, is a complex and important task, which we hope we can help you carry out in the best way.
What must we do to properly choose the software for our POS?
There are many criteria that we must take into account when choosing the software for our Point of Sale Terminal, ranging from the amount of money to invest, the needs of our business, the limitations of the hardware, the support to the software, among others.
Broadly speaking, we observe 5 steps that we must carry out to choose the software for our Point of Sale Terminal, but these must be complemented by your criteria:
Define the needs of your business:
Each business model has different operational needs; we must adequately define what are the main characteristics that the software requires to satisfy our needs.
It is important to highlight that there is software for Point of Sale Terminal designed to work in specific business models, that is, software for restaurants, hotels, schools, among others, there are also those that are designed to work in anyone, using functionalities that they are standard in any company.
Creating a list of your business needs and comparing it with the software that is available is the easiest way to do this step.
Evaluate the Hardware you have:
One of the main problems that users have when choosing software for their point of sale, is that they have hardware that does not guarantee the correct operation of the tool. For this we must correctly analyze the characteristics of our hardware, highlighting: the operating system, the processor, the memory, the storage capacity, the ports, accessories, connections and the possibility of improvements.
Evaluate the functionalities of each software:
This step is directly related to your needs, we must evaluate each of the functionalities offered by the software we are analyzing, the ability to update, improve, adapt to your POS Business Solutions, model, scalability, usability, among others.
Make forecasts with the hidden costs of the software to choose from:
The most common mistakes that we make when choosing our point of sale software, it is the null importance that we give to the evaluation of administration costs, of the additions that the software in question requires, of the limitations that some Software companies apply, among others.
It is important to clarify exactly the following questions: What does it offer? What does it cost? What does it require? How much is the support worth? What is free and what is paid?
Test and verify software support:
As much as if you choose proprietary or free software, you must bear in mind that the support that you can obtain from the tool, whether from a consultancy, the help of the software, or the communities around it is essential.
The normal thing is that you investigate its documentation, the steps to follow in case of an error, the user manuals, the personalized support, the forums and blogs, read comments about the software and interact with the developers or representatives of the tool.
