It’s unavoidably true: cash registers are on their way out. There’s a good chance that a majority of the people reading this have already given theirs up, and switched their business over to a more integrated, multifunction solution, with a touch screen POS. Still, there is a chance that a few hulking, dinging, cash drawers are out there, and this blog will break down why an upgrade away from a standalone cash register and toward the best mobile POS system, is one of the most essential decisions a small business can to make for itself.
The work that goes on in a cash register is actually very simple. It does the necessary math to know what money is going in and out of it, and it holds that money. That’s about it. This standalone nature of the machine in and of itself betrays how out of their element these gentle giants of payments past are.
The new way is connectivity. Every transaction from your store is chock-full of information, from what’s purchased, and what it’s purchased with, to what time those purchases take place. Connectivity is the way of the future, because it enables efficiencies where none were possible before, namely, integrations with software that runs other parts of your business.
There are two options here, which actually lie on the same future trajectory. For most brick and mortar businesses, you need to be equipped to accept cash. That requires a physical till that works together with the POS technology. It doesn’t quite make sense for a majority of businesses to deny their cash-only customers service because they don’t want to pay with a card at the moment. Those customers are becoming fewer and further between, however. Already, a number of the Big Guys are using their economies of scale to experiment with cashless locations. These places take cards, touchless payments, while ditching the till entirely. The results have been, if anything, not negative. Visa, for its part, is incentivizing the move away from cash by rewarding businesses brave enough to take the first steps. This points to a cashless future somewhere down the line; but for the time being, most small businesses will have to hang on to their till for purely practical reasons.
The point we’re making is that concerns about cash registers can be rather neatly solved by implementing the best mobile POS system. More than anything, it makes all new horizons of productivity come into focus. Most of all, with customers moving gradually away from cash, in the future, you may have to.