Feature Spotlight - Stock Items

You've taken the plunge. Spent the money a brand new Idealpos system. Now what?

One of the big things that we talk about before, during, and for the life of your POS product is your inventory, or Stock Items. Stock Items are the most vital component of your database for a number of reasons:

1. It's a record of your entire menu that you sell to your customers. If you own a café, you can't run your business without a menu. It's the same with your point of sale.
2. While you would be able to still perform department sales, Idealpos would just be a big expensive calculator without them.
3. Each item has its own cost/sell prices, allowing you to easily manage and see profit margins.
4. Reports are more detailed, giving you the ability to view best/worst sellers, among others.
5. Stock Control helps you to keep the right amount of items in stock for sales, while not holding too much at any one time.

Stock Items are not only the items that you sell, but the instructions you send to the kitchen printer, coupon items that trigger promotions or raffles that you sell to offer a prize. Whilst Idealpos has 1000's of features, they are all there to allow Stock Items to perform their duty properly. It's in your best interest to spend time organising and maintaining them so they can be easily used.

Holding too much of any stock item increases the chance of shrinkage of that product. Shrinkage is lost money on a product that can't be sold for whatever reason and gets written off. You usually hold too much of a product because you haven't set, or use, par levels for your stock items. In the case of perishable items, the shorter amount of time it's sitting on a shelf the better. While starting out it hard to estimate this, but as time moves on, and using reports on how your stock items are selling, you can easily know how much of each stock item you need to order each month, week or even day.

When creating your stock item database, think of everything that you need to use on the POS system. Not only the items that you sell, but instruction items that need to be printed to the kitchen or coffee machines. These are time-savers that many people forget about. Although many of these items don't have a price, they are nonetheless so important to be added to your database. Extra Hot, Weak, Skinny, Double-Shot, DeCaf, 1 Sugar etc can all be configured with a nominal price, or no price at all. The beauty of these items is they are all reportable, so you can see what your customers are purchasing frequently together, and maybe create a specific product from them, saving your staff precious time searching for multiple modifiers.

So remember, your Stock List is one of the most important aspects of your Idealpos Point of Sale system. Nurture it, maintain it, and most importantly of all, utilise it.