How To Use Categories In Retail POS Software And Get The Best Results – Part 1

The first tip should be simple and powerful way of increasing profits. Also, it's something you have to start doing immediately!

When you start using your retail POS software, you have to add your stock, Right? You take each bit of merchandise and enter the product number, price, selling price and other pertinent data into your POS system. At that point when you sell those products, the retail till software recollects the details of every transaction - so you can pull up a large variety of reports at a later date and time.

For example, you can pull up a report that shows what number of XYZ devices you sold yesterday. Presently this is amazing in itself, yet there's an important and powerful way to use your point of sale software.

One of the most important steps is to get on your retail POS software is to assign departments and categories to each inventory product. In any sort of situation, few retailers use departments and categories effectively. This is an important step to getting the most of your retail POS software.

When done in a right way, categorizing your inventory can give you powerful data that allows you to manage with your business more effectively. Let me give you a simple example and show you how to use this data to maximize your profits...

 

Above all, as a general guideline you should not have in excess of 10 departments and 10 categories within each department. In case if you assign more than 100 categories, you'll end up with an excessive number of insignificant categories that record for less than 1% of your business. Most of the retailers think they need more categories, however even the biggest retailers in the world manage their businesses with great success by using under 100 categories.

The technical definition of category can be defined as a group or combination of merchandise that the customer finds interchangeable. While creating your categories, consider what your customer is going to purchase. For example, if a customer walks into your store searching for a tent, they likely won't purchase a bicycle, but may choose an alternate size or brand of tent. So tents could be a category.