Reduce Theft. By computerizing, you can
reduce theft in your business by an average of 2
½%. An average small business doing $500,000
per year can reduce in-store theft by an average
of $12,500. How? Your employees become more
involved in watching the store inventory if they
know that every piece of inventory in your
business is being monitored.

Reduce Inventory Shrinkage. By watching your
inventory and comparing on shelf inventory to
your computerized reports, both you and your
employees are much more careful about giving
away inventory, retaining obsolete inventory,
monitoring breakage and non-theft inventory
that "walks" out of your business, as well as
checking inventory as the items enter your
store. You can reduce inventory shrinkage by
up to another 2 ½% by computerizing.

Reduce Your Inventory. By watching your
inventory reports, you can make sure that you
order more wisely. You don’t need 150 snow
shovels on the shelf in the summer.

Increase Your Inventory. You don’t need 150
snow shovels in the summer, but you may need
500 more batteries for your store during the
month of August. Many stores order products
based on what they think they sell. If you check
your inventory reports and see that you sold
500 batteries last August, it gives you a good
clue to help make sure that you don’t run out of
batteries this August. Watching your inventory
reports increases your efficiency.

Watch Your Margins. By reading your reports
you may find that you sell 10,000 batteries that
cost 48 cents for 50 cents each and that you sell
100 flashlights that cost $1.98 for $9.95 each.
Your inventory reports will help you to stock
more products that give you greater profits and
fewer products that give you the least amount of
profit.

Speed Customer Checkout. Computerizing
speeds up your customer checkout. With a
barcode scanner, you can checkout a customer
in half the time required with a cash register.
Even if you don’t use a barcode scanner, your
checkout is still faster and more accurate
because you are entering inventory item
numbers which are automatically tied to prices
for each inventory item.

Accuracy. Every item in your store has a price
associated with it. Never again will you have to
figure out how much that flashlight sells for.
Your clerks will stop guessing those prices.

Keep Track of Your Customers. Your best
customers are your present customers. No
matter what type of store you have, you should
try to obtain the name and address of every one
of your customers. Keeping a customer list is an
obvious asset for a clothing store. You want
your customers to keep coming back, especially
when you have a sale. The importance of
keeping a customer list is less obvious in a
hardware store, but extremely important. Mailing
to your customers periodically keeps them
coming back. Your vendors may even help you
pay for the cost of the mailing. Mailing to your
customers is the best form of advertising – even
if it is just a quick postcard listing a few new
sale items. Every mailing to your customer list
will always be a positive to your cash flow. What
about a store such as a convenience store? You
don’t have to get the name and address of every
customer that walks into the store, but you
should get the names and addresses of your
best customers.
POS Systems