POS Software Blog

3 Ways to Protect your Business with POS Solutions

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As a small business owner/operator, you are faced with day-to-day challenges that affect your bottom line and ultimately, your livelihood.  Obviously, the best way to increase the bottom line is to increase the top line through growing your sales.  However, in the current economy, this is sometimes a greater challenge than putting controls in place to increase the bottom line through gained efficiencies.  The perfect balance of building new revenue and protecting the current revenue and assets yields the most significant positive outcome.

It is also easy to become so focused on building the business that small business owners lose sight of some of the simple methods that can be deployed to protect what is already in place.  After working so hard to build the existing business, it makes good sense to protect what you currently have.  POS solutions (point-of-sale solutions) can help SMB’s (small-to-medium businesses) protect current revenues and assets from several threats. 

Below are 3 key areas of protection provided by deploying and properly utilizing a solid POS solution in your facility:

1. Employee Errors and Theft – Most successful small business owners trust the employees that have access to their internal systems and cash.  However, people make mistakes.  Sometimes, these mistakes are honest errors.  Other times, that sense of trust can be broken.  In either case, POS systems provide the controls necessary to reduce errors and monitor all employee activities.  This monitoring is particularly important when it comes to cash management and inventory controls.  The right POS solution will provide all the functionality necessary to hold employees accountable for money and to reduce inventory shrinkage caused by transaction errors and theft.
2. Supplier Errors and Theft – One area that is often overlooked in regard to error and theft is the role that suppliers and vendors fill in the protection of your small business assets.  If the proper controls are not in place and procedures are not followed to the letter, significant losses can occur in the ordering, receiving and invoicing of shipments.  The “Point of Sale News” recently published an article that speaks directly to this concept.  If all the controls are in place but procedures are not followed correctly, losses occur and the ROI on the POS system is diminished.
3. PCI Compliance and Security Breaches – Payment processing is a necessary evil for all small-to-medium-sized merchants.  Visa and MasterCard and the PCI Council change the rules frequently in order to minimize breaches and protect cardholder privacy.  A sound POS solution will provide PA-DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) compliance throughout its suite of products.  Deploying a PCI-compliant POS system significantly reduces the merchant’s liability and protects merchants from fines and penalties (up to and including discontinued service) issued by Visa and MasterCard.

Protecting your hard work and investments can sometimes be as simple as deploying the right POS system and utilizing all the tools provided in the appropriate fashion.  With all the POS solutions on the market today, merchants sometimes need some assistance in deciphering which system is the absolute best fit for their business.  If you find yourself in that situation, download our free guide that provides 10 items to consider when seeking a POS solution for your business.