The pet care industry has become a $60 billion business in 2015, and it is dominated by small businesses like yours. Running a pet business requires you to be more than a pet-lover — you are also responsible for making good financial decisions for your business. As your business grows, you start to have more clients; you buy and sell more products; you may even have a staff to manage. An easy-to-use and reliable point of sale system (POS) can help you do all these things easily and keep growing the business. In this article, we are going to talk about 4 ways the right POS can help your pet care business.
Make checkout easy
When you are busy serving clients, you don’t want to waste time at the checkout. Your POS should allow you to take various types of payments conveniently and make the checkout process fast and smooth. As a pet care business, you probably offer many different services and products. You might need to charge for appointments, physical products, and packages all in the same ticket, and your POS should handle this effortlessly. Your POS should also make it easy for you to run promotions by accepting a discount code or letting approved staff change the price. And if your business is mobile, your POS should work just as well checking out clients from the road.
Manage inventory seamlessly
Your POS should allow you to import and export your inventory history. You should be able to input product information conveniently. When you receive new shipments, you can either scan the barcode to update product quantities, or manually type in new product names. Your POS should enable you to enter various details of your inventory and make the information easily searchable. Your POS can also be your watchful eye on inventory levels. By setting up a threshold inventory level for each retail product, you can get automatic alerts to re-order when you are running low.
Understand profitability with reports
Your POS tracks and records everything — it should also produce insightful reports based this data to help you make better decisions and increase profitability. Your POS should allow you to create customized reports and tell you how your locations are performing, what services are most popular, and who your top employees are. Your POS should also automatically calculate their commissions on products, services, and tips for you.
You should be able to access key information on your POS from anywhere and at any time. The software should be constantly updating reports to give you an accurate sense of how your business is doing and help you detect any problems very early on. It should be accessible from your smartphone, iPad, laptop and desktop so you can manage your business on the go. With these reports, you will no longer be doing guesswork and can make business decisions with more confidence.
Retain your clients
Your POS should be constantly capturing information about your clients for you. Your POS should add purchase history to your database of customers, helping you get a complete view of appointments, revenue, and contact information for your customers and their pets. For example, when a client chooses to receive an email receipt, the email address should be directly imported into your contact list and connected with purchase history. This gives you an easy way to engage with your clients in the future by sending a marketing email to them based on their previous visit or related to a product they purchased.
Your pet care business deserves a good POS solution that helps you buy and sell easily, keeps you well-stocked, gives you strategic insights, and brings you repeat business.
Check out MyTime’s POS solution for your pet care business here!
