First of all before you can decide if your company needs a POS system you need to know what POS systems are. POS stands for point of sales system. The best example of where you might have seen a POS system is at a restaurant. They are the computers servers use to punch in your order to the cooks/chefs in the kitchen. Larger restaurants usually have a few terminals in the dinning room.

POS systems are a great way to organize your company’s purchase orders—simply put a very fancy cash register. They can cut down on and can even eliminate “human errors” that are bound to happen during business transactions. Going back to the restaurant example if restaurants operate with out restaurant POS systems (and there are many restaurants and they perform great with out them) they can run the risk of having poor communication between the servers and cooks. This can make for angry guests and lost money for the restaurant.

The main reason most businesses decide to purchase business POS systems is because they save your company so much money. If you have to keep track of inventory, or spend too much time recording reports and calculating your key customers whom spend the most, POS systems are defiantly something your company can benefit from. They can streamline all of these items for you. Implementing a POS system can make it more difficult for employees to give unwarranted discounts and even free products because you will be keeping a better controlled inventory. If you do encounter a problem or have problems with security it will be able to be addressed sooner and more specifically.

When shopping around for  POS systems  it is a great idea to remember the cost isn’t cheap. A lot of companies suffer from “sticker shock”—remember these are investments. In time these systems will save your company money and it could possible even pay for itself in the long run if employee theft is a problem at your company.

Shannon Suetos is a writer and based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for Resource Nation, an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs.