Back to basics: Taking control of your stock

Efficient operations and customer service are at the heart of success for any business. Whether you’re running an excusive restaurant or a busy high street chain, the ability to give customers what they need, quickly and efficiently, is fundamental to growth. An ePOS solution has a lot to add to operational efficiently. The right system will go above and beyond simplifying point of sale transactions to enabling you to take control of your stock, marketing and data management too.

Supporting improved customer service

There are obvious advantages to an efficient ePOS system when it comes to improving the speed at which your staff are able to serve customers and the options available when it comes to payment. However, the transformation you can achieve with an ePOS investment also goes deeper than this. Perhaps most fundamentally, it provides an infrastructure that encourages better stock management, enabling you to take control of your stock and improve the accuracy and impact of decision making relating to inventory.

EPOS and inventory management

Particularly if your business relies on perishable goods in order to create products or services for customers, the strength of your inventory management can make a big difference to your margins. Without an automated system, managing stock relies entirely on the manual skill of staff. Even at its most dedicated this can still result in waste. An ePOS system is an almost instant upgrade when it comes to taking control of your stock and will enable you to better manage inventory in order to improve profit. There are a number of key advantages to using a system like this on a day-to-day basis, including:

• Cloud-based, mobile data. If your stock data is contained within an ePOS system then you can access it anywhere, which can be incredibly useful when it comes to making business decisions on the move. It will also be reliably backed up so that even if other technology goes down you will still be able to stay on top of stock handling.
• Accuracy improvement. Manual stock management is rarely renowned for its accuracy. Often, by the time manual stock checks have been completed and recorded the situation has changed once again. Using an ePOS to handle inventory provides a much more accurate real time picture of stock, which can be essential when it comes to making key decisions.
• Taking a more strategic approach. An ePOS system will enable you to analyse the data that the system collects and use this insight to make better, more strategic decisions. For example, you’ll be able to see which dishes on the menu sell best and whether your existing stock management approach is supporting or hindering selling more of the most popular items. You’ll be able to identify potential shortages well before they actually materialise and to better manage the way that your business spends on stock.

If your current method of stock management feels unwieldy, an ePOS system could be the ideal way to take back control.