Is your retail business or restaurant having a hard time keeping track of products sold and their inventory stock? Do you need to improve your functionality by managing your Point of Sales (POS) in a way where your sales data is integrated with your inventory data and even your accounting data? With Odoo’s user-friendly Point of Sale app, you can do just that. You can sell products from multiple locations while keeping track of your stock in real-time through Odoo’s Inventory app, helping streamline operations. Set-up new stores within minutes with Odoo’s POS app which is also compatible with any device and can work both online or offline. In this article, learn more why Odoo’s Point of Sale system is a simple and effective solution to your business needs.
What is Point of Sales?
A point of sales (POS) is a place where a customer makes a payment for a product or service at a store. Users can create sales orders, invoices, and receipts for the customer and even input pricelists and discounts.
Challenges in Sales
1. Ineffective sales strategy
Without a proper system, a company’s operations in multiple areas of a business such as the sales area will not be efficient. Tracking your employee’s sales targets and objectives may be difficult without a system to record their sales data. Problems will also arise for employees when customers want to know more about an item being sold since the employees don’t have the information they need. Companies often suffer from long
queues at the checkout especially during the holiday seasons. In addition, as a result of the lack of customer and product data collection, they could not immediately determine how much an item is sold during a certain period of time. This leads to companies opting for poor strategic planning.
2. Difficulty in keeping track of stock
When a purchase has been made, the stock of the product that was sold should be decreased automatically. A company that does not have the tools to keep track of their stock levels often face errors due to employees having to calculate the stock manually. When these errors start accumulating, a major loss in profit is often followed.
3. Difficulty in recording payment transactions
Many problems can arise when a company does not have a modern system to record their cash flow data. With a traditional cash register, employees often make mistakes or even guess on the prices of a product. Keeping track of all your payment transactions is crucial for your business to run smoothly. Without allowing your customers multiple payment methods, your customers will often be disappointed in the lack of customer service.
4. Keeping your customers to shop at your store
It is a lot more difficult to find a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. Companies that do not take advantage of their existing customers are often unable to grow their business smoothly. Without rewarding your existing customers, they won’t feel appreciated and will start shopping at other places that offer more appealing prices and rewards.
Solution to the challenges
1. Managing your sales data in this era is now easy with a modern POS system. Companies that take advantage of a system that has an easy-to-use interface that records all sales data online and offline will see an increase in efficiency in their sales area. With a simple interface, your employees will be able to navigate through your system much faster which consequently allows customers to be managed well.
2. A system that is able to access inventory data in real time is highly recommended for businesses. It is extremely important to manage stock well by having a system that is able to update stock data when a product moves.
3. Giving your customers options for payment can make your customers more comfortable in shopping at your stores because it will simplify their payment process. Also, having a system that can record all transactions instantly without having to create invoices and bank statements manually will save a lot of time for your employees.
4. Businesses should start using loyalty programs to reward loyal customers with points, gifts, and discounts. Keeping in touch with your customers through email, sms, etc. informing about any promotions or sales also provides a way for customers to keep coming back to buy more.
Why use Odoo’s POS System?
1. Odoo’s Easy to Use POS System Interface
It’s important for a business to have a POS system that is simple and user-friendly to make the employees' jobs much easier. Odoo’s easy to use interface allows you to manage multiple customers at the same time. With barcode scanners, you can apply discounts from both the interface or a global discount, recognize loyalty cards automatically, and get the price of a product. Processes like refunding, tracking warranty, adding promotions, using pricelists, registering your customers to keep track of their buying habits, and printing receipts and invoices can all be done easily with Odoo’s POS system. Odoo also keeps track of your sales data and provides an analysis and statistic about your sales.
Although Odoo’s POS app runs on a browser and needs an internet connection to start the session, if for whatever reason there is no connection, you will still be able to continue working even when offline. Everything is recorded on your device and will be synchronized again once you are connected to the internet. For more information on setting up your POS system, click here.
2. Integrated Inventory Management
Because of the integration of the Inventory app to the POS app in Odoo, as soon as a product is sold, its quantity is updated as well. Even with multiple locations, your stock can still be organized easily. If a product was sold in two locations at the same time, as soon as a product is sold, the inventory level will be updated in real time which indicates the product availability. Since you can monitor the product moves and make accurate forecasts based on the buying trends of customers, it can tremendously help to avoid out-of-stock sales and strategize your purchasing methods based on your consumer’s behavior. For more information on inventory management in Odoo, click the link here.
3. Accounting
With the integration of the Accounting app in Odoo, you can use various payment methods and print invoices if a customer requests for an invoice when buying from your POS. Accountants will know in real time when the products are being sold because the accounting app keeps track of the data. Taxes will also be viewed from the POS interface without having to input the tax manually. Retailers can also catch any discrepancies in pricing or cash flow with the POS system. For more information on the accounting app, click the link here.
Not only for Retail Businesses but also Restaurants
Odoo’s POS app is not limited to retail business, it works with restaurants too. You can set up tables so that when a customer orders from the table then the order will be associated with that table, process and print orders, send those orders to the kitchen, receive payment from the customer, and print the bill. For more information on setting up a POS system for restaurants, click the link here.
Conclusion/Bottom Line
With Odoo’s simple and comprehensible Point of Sale application that is also fully integrated with other apps such as the Inventory and Accounting app, your business does not need to worry about keeping track of your sales, inventory, and accounting data anymore. Odoo keeps all the data recorded which gives an analysis of your company’s performance and even your employees’ sales performance every day. With an advanced integrated system, you can easily streamline all of your operations. So what are you waiting for? Try Odoo’s Point of Sales made simple right away!
