Are you harnessing the full power of your POS?
Point-of-sale (POS) systems come in all sorts of shapes and sizes with varying levels of functionality. When used correctly, they can be a really powerful tool for organising your business finances, saving a lot of work in the long run.
It can be painful setting them up at first if you have a large number of products to enter, but it’s worth taking the time to make sure you enter all the information you need in there and in the correct way. There are a few things that jump out at us as bookkeepers that can really save a lot of time.
Correct VAT coding - making sure you enter the correct VAT rating for your product. This can really help in the long term with preparing your VAT return, and in addition can help you keep track of your VAT liability in real-time so you can ensure you have enough in your account to cover it (we have tips for keeping your VAT aside too, but more on that later). Also, if you run a café, coffee shop or restaurant then make sure you set it up with both eat-in and takeaway options as many products will have different VAT ratings depending on this.
Inventory - some POS systems can keep track of inventory levels, either as a built in feature or as an additional feature at an extra cost. If used properly then this can save a lot of time for some stock checks. You’ll still want to perform checks to ensure the numbers are correct, but this can really save you a lot of time, for example you can set alerts for when stock is running low, so you don’t have to keep checking.
Reporting - Most now come with some really great analytics allowing you to track sales by hour, day, week, etc. and compare with the previous month, year, etc. This can really help you make strategic decisions quickly.
With many POS systems they can also feed information into your accounting software, so there’s a time saving there too, as well as a large amount of information tied together that can really help manage business finances and provide useful data that can lead to informed business decisions on growth.
Having run hospitality businesses ourselves we have experience of a number of POS systems and would be happy to either help you get set up or adjust your current system to harness its full power.