Sometimes we talk to facility owners who are reluctant to invest in an FEC POS system. These owners have been using a cash register for years or even decades. They don’t want to switch to an FEC POS because it isn’t what they are used to.

Marcus has discussed the return on investment of a point of sale system at a high level in recent blog posts. I’ll take a different tact and discuss a few specific things that you can do with an FEC POS but not a cash register. Now we could create a list of dozens of things an FEC POS can do that a cash register can’t, but I chose just 4 to talk about today.

1. Automate your discounts.

Using a cash register, you can often apply a discount, or manually calculate a discounted price when ringing up an item. Using an FEC POS, however, gives you much more power. You can, of course, create different discounts that automatically apply a discount percentage or a flat discount amount. Discounts can be set up to require different levels of security authorization or only be valid on certain days. Also, you can set up discounts to only apply to certain inventory items, to all inventory items, or to any item in a certain division or category. Using these options, you can be sure that discounts will only be used for eligible items at eligible times and they will be calculated correctly every time.

2. Offer multiple levels of security functions.

Cash registers typically use a key as a way to allow and disallow certain managerial functions (no sale, refund, paid out, etc.). But there is just a single key. This means that you have exactly two options when it comes to granting access to managerial functions: give access to everything or nothing. With an FEC POS, you can create different security groups which have different security rights and then assign employees to those various groups. This way, for example, you can give cashiers access to the “no sale” function, assistant managers can authorize returns and no one but you can perform a “paid out.”

3. Produce advanced sales reports.

Most cash registers offer a Z-report that shows the day’s sales totals. Some more advanced cash registers offer slightly more advanced daily reports, but nothing substantial. An FEC POS, on the other hand, can provide extremely detailed reporting. Rather than just providing total sales for the day, its reports can show sales by category or by item. Reports can look at historical information such as sales for one day last month or sales over a range of dates. You can even run comparative sales analyses that compare sales for the year to date to sales for the same portion of last year.

4. Automatically show and hide point of sale buttons on certain days of the week.

Some items, such as a Tuesday family special, should only be sold on Tuesday. As was discussed in a recent post about optimizing your POS screens, setting up point of sale buttons to only show on certain days of the week serves two functions. First, it decreases the number of buttons shown on the POS screen, speeding up transactions. Second, it decreases employee theft by preventing your employees from selling the discounted Tuesday special to their friends on a Saturday. Cash registers don’t offer this kind of flexibility.

Can you operate your business with a cash register? Sure you can. You could also get along just fine with a horse and buggy. Cars offer more speed, power and reliability than the horse and buggy ever did so eventually everyone switched over to cars. The same can be said for FEC POS systems.

For some more reasons to leave your cash register behind, read Marcus’s series about calculating the ROI of a point of sale system:

How Long Will It Take to Pay for a FEC POS Software?

How Loss Prevention Can Increase the ROI of Your FEC POS

4 Ways a FEC POS Assists in Management Efficiency and ROI

3 Uses of a FEC POS that Will Decrease Labor While Increasing ROI

To see some other features of point of sale software, see the point of sale feature list:

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Or, to schedule an online demo to see CenterEdge’s point of sale in action, call (336) 598-5934 or click below:

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