Not using a Point of Sales system is like using a rotary dial telephone. Scratch that, it’s like using a switchboard. Nah, scratch that, it’s like using a can with some damn string attached to another can.
Where to begin?
One problem is making sure that people aren’t ripping you off. There are plenty of tricks to rip someone off with most point-of-sale systems, and there are infinite amount of tricks to rip someone off with pen and paper.
Even the simplest tasks take at LEAST two times as long, some would probably take five thousand times as long with pen and paper. Take payroll for instance, adding up time time-clock sheets manually versus clicking a button to print a report that not only shows each employees hours, but also a complete breakdown of labor details and percentages with comparisons for each day, week, month, year, whatever you want, instantly.
Daily sales, monthly sales, yearly sales, going back 10 years for comparisons.
On road versus in store
Performance measurements
Average ticket time
Table turnover rate
Coupons sold
Most popular coupon used
Top customers
These are just a drop in the bucket of my reports that are instantly calculated whenever I need them.
Delivery commissions
Online ordering
Not having to know the price of all 79 menu items, or even worse their 639 modifiers.
Not having to run every ticket to the kitchen.
Not having to write the same thing down four different times.
Staff members not having to decipher everyone’s chicken scratch or their own custom abbreviations for each item.
Manually calculating prices, taxes, oh man the list goes on.
Just way way way way too much room for errors here. My company would probably lose the cost of the point-of-sale system every year if we didn’t have one.
Does not having a point of sales system work? Sure it does, but sheesh, what a big step in the wrong direction.
Anyone doing any kind of real business, and I mean that in the nicest way, could never get away with using pen and paper. Not in today’s modern world. If they still are using pen and paper, they are doing it for two reasons. One would be the most obvious, to hide sales, labor, etc to pay less tax, and two would be… wait, I can’t even think of a second reason.
I’m not saying that you wouldn’t be able to operate without a point of sales system, because you would, and you can, and people do, but you’d be wasting a massive amount of time, losing a massive amount of money, and wouldn’t have any kind of real statistical tools to help you build your business. You’d be spending all your time to calculate every single ticket you’ve ever written and every single time sheet from every employee who’s worked for you from the day you opened in all 500 different ways that my POS can with the click of a button. Simply absurd.
Now, if you make a few items here and there, just opened the doors and times are tough, have just your family working for you and could really care less about the details or statistics of your business other than your bank account being positive or negative, by all means, don’t bother using a point of sales system.
But if you take your business seriously and plan on growing, drop what you are doing and get yourself a point of sales system.
P. S. I know I’m going to have someone respond with, “I know this guy or that gal doing 8 million a year with just a few cash registers. All done by hand.”, and yeah, there are those people out there, and if you want to give it a shot, I can’t stop you, I can only tell you we’ve been doing it for 50 years and would never even think for a second to go back. The thought is comical actually.
