4 POS Reporting Features You Didn’t Know You Needed
When most people think of a Point of Sale (POS) solution, they think of the checkout process. After all, a POS is designed to streamline checkout for the consumer and the retailer alike. But the value of a POS extends well beyond the transaction. It’s a power tool for reporting and analytics, and your secret weapon for deeper retail insights.
It can help to think of a POS as less of a sales tool and as more of a data tool — one that makes it easy to capture and store insights about every customer and purchase. A POS empowers stores to analyze that data in depth and easily report on any strategic insights it contains, so that today’s sales can lead directly to even larger sales tomorrow.
Don’t settle for a POS that only upgrades the checkout process. Insist on one that enhances and enables every aspect of the business. Look for the following five features to ensure that reporting is as easy and insightful as possible.
Seamless automation
Reporting is a huge asset, but it can also be a time- and labor-intensive process that’s ripe for errors and omissions when done manually. A POS solution with advanced automation can handle a lot of this heavy lifting all on its own. As a result, reports incorporate more information, are available in less time, and feature bulletproof accuracy. By streamlining the reporting process with automation, decision makers are free to focus on putting that data to use.
Email marketing integrations
A POS that integrates with your email marketing solution makes it easy to turn one sale into the next. Customer information is automatically fed into your reports to help you to determine when and how to deliver emails that will resonate with specific consumer segments. Since the marketing strategy is developed around their actual preferences, the impact of each email is much greater. Instead of having your team conduct complex market analysis, these reports cut out the leg work, making the email marketing process simpler and more effective.
Actionable results
Raw data is just a massive collection of facts and figures. Having it consolidated in one place is helpful, but it still takes huge amounts of organization and analysis to make it valuable. A good POS system should have reporting functionality that highlights trends, indicators, forecasts, and anomalies, so that the data gleaned paints a clearer picture. It should also enable users to filter, sort, customize, and share reports intuitively. After all, the goal is to make the information and insights contained as accessible as possible for everyone involved — from retail staff on the floor to management teams assessing larger trends. Reports that not only provide data but translate this data into concrete takeaways and actionable insights will be most beneficial.
Online and in-store fusion
A POS that only incorporates data from in-store purchases leads to incomplete and ineffective reporting. Even if digital or hybrid channels represent a small percentage of revenue, data from those purchases should be automatically incorporated into the central POS. Therefore, reports that combine online and in-store data allow managers to segment consumers, products, or marketing campaigns by channel and practice sophisticated revenue management.
The depth and breadth of reporting features is what defines the best of today’s POS solutions. Any system will be able to handle credit card transactions, but only the most advanced options turn this data into a competitive advantage.
Ready to run reports that make a world of difference for your bottom line? See how RQ’s reporting can make it happen for your wireless or repair store.
Photo Credits: Shutterstock / Simon Kadula, Shutterstock / Rawpixel, Shutterstock / Kite_rin
