by Richard Heitmann – Sales Director
AURES Technologies Ltd
Downtime of your payment systems can have serious consequences on your business, even if the problems are short-lived and infrequent. Every minute that your POS system is down can directly translate into lost sales and frustrated customers.
When it comes to customers, your best-case scenario is they wait in line for a solution or need to visit a nearby cashpoint if their debit or credit card cannot be used. Worst case scenario, you cannot process sales full stop, you lose income and even worse, customers choose to visit a competitor instead.
There are other costs associated with downtime as well. Your staff are getting paid to stand at the checkout whether they are idle or not.
Identifying problems before they happen
Wouldn’t it be great if you could identify potential issues with your EPOS system before they begin to impact on your operations? Real-time reporting solutions do exactly this.
A fully integrated EPOS system can show the status of networked devices across your whole business. With reporting tools, you can see any modules or device which are offline, or even those which are not performing to their optimum. This way, you can spot potential problems early and take proactive action.
You can also see if an issue is only affecting a particular checkout or store locally, or if it is affecting the entire network.
One of the worst problems you can run into in a retail business is having your debit or credit card payment systems go offline. Rather than having customer transactions fail before you’re made aware, EPOS reporting software can warn you that payment systems have gone, or are about to go, offline. This gives you advance notice to seamlessly change to a backup plan. For example, if the problem is with your internet provider, you can switch to a 3G or 4G mobile solution to transmit the payment information instead.
Other benefits of real-time reporting
Real-time reporting can help in a number of other ways besides just reducing downtime. It saves you time as a manager or owner by reducing the need to generate or print reports. Instead, you have them instantly available, as EPOS reporting platforms log and update all transaction and performance data as they go.
Real-time reporting also gives an accurate overview of your daily operations. Rather than relying on experience and a general feeling of how things are going, you can use hard data to make informed decisions.
For example, you can use data from your EPOS system to track footfall and identify peaks and troughs in business. At busy times, real-time reporting can give you a warning that you might need to call in additional staff for the day, or during slow periods it can allow you to confidently make decisions about reducing staff numbers. You can also easily track staff sick days and wastage all in one place.
It also gives you a deeper understanding of your customers. Real-time reports can let you see which products are selling the best on a given day and which are underperforming, allowing you to rearrange shop displays or offer promotions accordingly.
The latest cloud-based EPOS reporting systems even allow remote access, allowing you to check up on the business when you are off-site for peace of mind that everything is running smoothly.
Find out more
If your business isn’t already taking advantage of real-time reporting, AURES can help you find the right solution. Get in touch to start taking advantage of all the benefits that our products and services can offer your business today.