I remembered reading this a while back.
Here are ten important questions to ask an EPoS supplier:
- Is the EPoS software robust? Are system crashes the norm? And if you have a catastrophic failure that may or may not be your fault, will you be helped back on your feet ASAP? And what’s the supplier’s definition of ‘ASAP’?
- Support. Is it there? Are you confident there are enough bods in the support department to service the client list now and in the future? This has been a key failure of trade specific EPoS systems in the recent past.
- Who does your product file maintenance and updating? Do not under estimate how much time it takes to maintain products and prices. It can take from a month to three months of a key personÂ’s time in a year to maintain the product file. It is a drain on resources for you to have to enter in all the information when suppliers bring out new ranges or change prices? Does the EPoS system come pre-loaded with key lines and are they easily updated remotely?
- Can you see reports on screen as well as on a printer? Make sure that you donÂ’t have to send all your reports to printer. It can be slow and use an enormous amount of paper. If you can see reports on screen make sure you can go backwards and forwards through the pages. If you canÂ’t go back, and many systems canÂ’t, you will waste a lot of time scrolling through pages.
- Can the system run a series of jobs overnight? For instance can it automatically close end of month; print valuation reports and movements reports for month end audit; communicate with other branches; receive pricing and availability information from your key suppliers and, finally, make a tape backup of the system as a single task? If it canÂ’t you may have to tie up screens, printers and your valuable time during the day, or worse, stay late at night to complete the jobs.
- Can the re-order system adapt as your business changes? Can the system perform intelligent re-order suggestions that adapt themselves by learning about the popularity or non-popularity of items? Can it learn what the sales rate is of any item that you stock? You may be left with a system that relies on static information only, such as minimum and maximum stock levels that you set up manually, probably by guess work. As you are likely to have many thousands of SKUs it is a mammoth task to constantly review the min and max stock levels for each and every item. Chances are you wonÂ’t bother because it requires so much effort. This will then make your re-order suggestions next to useless.
- Can you instantly see on-screen sales and margin information? If a salesperson calls and offers you a special deal on a specific product, can you instantly see on screen how many of that item you have sold in the last week, last month, each month this year and what profit you have made on that item in all these periods, or would you have to run a report to printer that has to trawl through daily log files for hours to give you the answer?
- How difficult is it to temporarily suspend a sale? Imagine this, a queue of customers are waiting to pay at the checkout. As you are ringing through a sale for a customer, he asks to buy an item you'Â’ll have to go in the back to get. Do you simply press a button to stall that sale for later recall when he comes back, or would you have complete the partial sale, then credit it out before you can serve the other customers in the queue? Some older systems can be a real pain.
- Do they dongle? Who owns the rights to the software? Is it the EPoS company or have they bought in a software package from another supplier? (PS a dongle is a software ‘license key’).
10. Do you need trade specific EPoS software? Is your trade really, truly different to mainstream retail?