In this article Easify Developer Richard Moore answers the frequently asked question "What is POS Software?".
"If you sell products or services over the counter, the chances are you would benefit from using POS Software within your business. Read on to find out the many benefits that using POS Software can bring..."
In a nutshell, POS Software is computer software that runs on a computer at your businesses Point of Sale that allows you to easily sell your products and services.
To elaborate on that, first of all let's define what POS means...
POS is an abbreviation of Point of Sale and is taken to mean the physical area within your business premises where you sell products and/or services face to face with your customers.
You might sell products and services to your customers via the telephone or via mail order, and you may logically consider that this is your Point of Sale (in many ways it is), however Point of Sale is typically considered to be a location in your premises where you are face to face with your customers.
If you think about the way we used to do business at the POS in the old days before electricity, retail shops would have a wooden cash drawer (which was literally a drawer under the counter) and all sales would be written out and recorded on paper. Money would be taken and placed in the cash drawer and change given from the cash drawer.
At the end of the day, the sales would have to be manually added up from the written paper records and the money in the till counted. If everything added up then all well and good - the money could be banked or put in the safe and then the sales records would be manually entered into a sales ledger (a ledger being nothing more than a big paper book).
So as you can imagine, this system worked well for probably hundreds of years but it suffered a number of drawbacks:
To improve the quality of life of the average shop keeper, Cash Registers were introduced in about 1880. These were nothing more than mechanical adding machines but they at least allowed the shop keeper to ring up the sale items one by one and then pull a lever to be given the sale total.
While the first cash registers could improve efficiency on the sales floor, they didn't really help with end of day cashing up or recording of sales into the sales ledgers, and you still had to manually write out receipts.
Moving on a bit, electronic tills (which are still widely used today, though their use is declining) moved a long way towards automating many POS tasks, allowing you to not only add up the total price of a sale, but also allowing you to automatically print till receipts.
Many electronic tills also allow you to print out the days sales totals (known as X or Z reports) at the end of the day saving you from having to manually add up the total of all the sales.
However, electronic tills have their limitations and although they are very relevant to the right type of business even today, there are certain areas in which they fall down. Typical limitations of electronic tills are as follows:
POS Software is the latest stage of evolution when it comes to retail point of sale systems, and gives you the maximum possible functionality when it comes to making and recording sales.
POS Software overcomes all of the limitations of traditional cash registers and electronic tills and gives you the following features (among others):
To set your self up with a fully functional POS system all you need is a Windows PC or Laptop (Windows XP or later version) and a copy of Easify POS software which you can obtain here as a free 30 day trial.
Easify POS software gives you the ability to convert a PC or laptop into a fully functional POS system, and because you install it and set it up yourself not only will you fully understand the system and how it works, meaning you can support it yourself saving time and money, but you can also configure it exactly how you want it too.
You can add EPOS hardware as and when you need it, including receipt printer, barcode price label printer, barcode scanner, electronic cash drawer etc...
And if you run into difficulty we are always ready to offer prompt support via a number of channels.