How POS Reporting Gives a Retailer Insight Into Their Business Operations
In this increasingly competitive marketplace, managerial success requires a rapid response team armed with the exact data they need to make quick and correct decisions, when they need it without the overburden of data overload. This is an area where point of sale (POS) technology can shine.
Every inventory control and point-of-sale function generates key information that can be filtered and quickly summarized into a wide variety of easily read reports and graphs.
On-the-fly inventory tracking, enhances response time allowing reports to be viewed, and communicated, in multiple formats, including instant multi-media analysis of any selected merchandise. A tracking module allows a manager to quickly view an up-to-the-minute analysis of any product in the inventory at a keystroke and to display the data on graphs exported into Excel.
Data gathered by efficient use of POS trend tracking, inventory control and integration with vendor data exchange can insure that hot
selling items are always on hand. If a shopper doesn't find a hot item he wants, he's likely to go elsewhere. Hot/Cold selling Analysis
lets a manager know what’s selling and what's not in time to act.
POS technology provides gross sale reports broken down by sales clerk, profit generated, units sold, and hours worked and quantity sold per hour for each sales person for any time period selected rapidly handles clerk tracking and check-In and check-out with passwords, and access codes even while a sale is being rung up so no time is lost. In addition, it can hours worked before, after and within the designated shifts and list overtime and absences. Never before has such accurate and fair control been possible.
A POS terminal can greatly facilitate routine physical inventories, speeding the process, and insuring greater accuracy while reporting discrepancies between the physical count and recorded inventory updating the recorded inventory to match the new physical inventory and providing a complete report in the process.
In addition to assurance that recorded and physical counts match, this can reduce loss due to internal and external theft, which can run as high as 4% of gross. Since it’s a rare customer that isn’t aware that losses must be made up for with higher prices, and that they tension in the workplace, for employee and customer alike, they tend to approve of such measures.
POS technology, for the first time, allowed for perpetual real-time inventory control through automated point of sale reduction at checkout and addition during restocking operations. But it went a good deal further than this, tracking stock on hand, in transit, and on order in multiple stores and warehouses.
This opened doors to tighter cooperation between retailers and vendors to the benefit of both by allowing the retailer to reduce warehousing costs and the vendor to ship in a timely and efficient manner with reduced confusion and guesswork.
A retailer can pull up reports as needed selected by parameters as vendor, department, style, size, color, price range, date last received or last sold, and flip from category to category, store to store at his choice.
A simple keystroke will display hundreds of size/color combinations. In less than a minute a user can view quantities in other stores, back rooms or warehouses "on the fly" while generating purchase orders on the spot or later. He can check sales history to compute minimum and maximum stock levels and devise a strategy that the system will implement automatically using history to calculate what and when to reorder, with less paperwork, guesswork and time consumption.
Comprehensive pre-set and user-designed reports permit instant analysis and valuable insight into every corner of a business. Built-in report designers allow a retailer to use POS technology to create, name, preserve and reproduce reports at will, laid out and filtered as he desires to include, or exclude, any areas recorded by the system. This permits peak efficiency in a customized environment while allowing him to combine his data with data from outside sources.
These types of features truly launch retail management into the space age and the resultant efficiency benefits even the customer who probably doesn't suspect it exists.
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