If your business hasn’t yet adopted a Point of Sale (POS) system for handling customer transactions, you may be falling behind.
POS systems have become one of the easiest ways for small business owners to process payments, manage their digital assets, and gain a higher level of business intelligence that supports future growth. In this arena, Square’s POS system is one of the best options; it’s easy to deploy, easy to master, and comes with a wealth of features that help small business owners improve their payment processing.
Let’s review just a few of the advantages that Square’s POS application offers small businesses.
Payment Processing
Most directly, Square’s POS gives your business a modern way to instantly process customers’ credit and debit payments. Square offers merchants a transaction fee of 2.75 percent per swipe—ranking well within the average for mobile processing vendors and perfect for small businesses with lower transaction volume.
Platform Customization
Square’s POS is ideal for customization. Regardless of your business, you can set up your store any way you’d like and group products, services, and add-ons in whichever categories make the most sense to your team.
This simplicity has two key benefits. It’s great from a customer UX standpoint, but it’s also ideal for employee training. It’s simple to understand and easy to learn, perfect for getting new employees up and running. And speaking of employees…
Employee Management
Square’s POS goes beyond payment processing and acts a complete employee management tool. Managers can set up specific employee accounts for each worker, complete with custom permissions that restrict access to specific functions based on the employee’s role in the company. It also provides handy clock-in tools to help with payroll tracking.
It’s also noteworthy that Square tracks sales based on these employee accounts. Compared to traditional payment processing, this visibility gives management information about who’s performing the best. This can open new doors, such as building employee incentive programs and prioritizations to support the company’s top earners. From an employee satisfaction standpoint, this type of intelligence can be a great way to keep employees motivated.
Customer Management
Square’s POS can even act as an entry-level Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. By logging and storing all pertinent customer data (either provided directly or tied to the card used for payment), Square lets you create customer directories directly within the app.
You can search, sort, and organize these directories to learn more about your customers and their behaviors. Plus, this database of customer data can help improve the experience of your most valued repeat customers. By storing their vital information in the system, you can enable one-click ordering and remote ordering options that saves time at checkout.
Inventory Management
When paired with Square’s Dashboard app, the POS system can be a great way to manage your company’s inventory. Each sale is logged, organized, and made available for review at later dates within the Square platform—all built on the customized entries you create for your business. Think of it as an inventory tracking tool that’s seamlessly coordinated with your CRM. This gives the small business owner visibility into their inventory, but also lets them tie specific purchases to customer profiles.
When combined, this type of business intelligence provides valuable information about which customer demographics are most likely to purchase specific items, and which marketing strategies will best resonate with each customer.
Metric Reporting
Square’s Dashboard gives you insight into the metrics that matter most to your company. The platform generates sales summaries, inventory reports, rundowns of your best selling items, and side-by-side comparisons of performance over time. These types of analytics are important tools for monitoring business growth—particularly for smaller organizations—and are a necessary part of the due diligence that all small business owners must perform to keep their companies competitive.
Third-Party Integrations
Aside from the benefits that the POS system itself provides, Square’s application can seamlessly integrate with other applications you need to keep your business moving. Financial management tools from Intuit, advanced inventory management platforms like Shopventory, and ecommerce integrations like Weebly are just a few examples. Square was built to integrate with the tools small business owners need to expand their business, and the POS system is a natural extension of this goal.
Comprehensive Business Planning Through Square
There are few platforms on the market as helpful to small business owners as Square. From POS functionality to customer relationship management to inventory tracking and reporting, the platform can expand your business in ways you may never have considered.
This is true regardless of what type of business you run—it’s certainly not limited to retailers. For example, restaurateurs who get Square’s POS up and running can leverage applications like PoppinPay: A mobile order-ahead app that gives customers new options for interacting with your establishment.
And at its core, this functionality is what Square’s POS is all about. Regardless if you need a new way to process payments, a new system for employee management, or just a new way to accept payments outside of your brick-and-mortar store, POS systems will do the job.