Big Data can be an intimidating term, and it’s been used more and more as the technology bar to harvest it has progressively lowered. Still, if you’re a small business, the term probably calls to mind the massive amounts of data that the big boys like google and Facebook compute. You may feel a little company like yours has neither the ability nor the need to invest in collecting information. But that just isn’t true.
Collecting data related to your sales transactions is by no means a new concept. Even before the advent of all the shiny payment processing technology, business owners did it, whether on paper or in their head. Your inventory tracking, accounting, and other processes were an essential and time-consuming part of running a proper business. This was also the main way you gained the insight into what, if anything, in your business needed attention, change, and action. Now, often when businesses make the upgrade to the best mobile credit card processing, they are confronted with the opportunity to update much more, in the form of cloud-based programs that leverage data for you.
Setting up the proper systems to better report on the transactions of your shop is not a “new” way of doing things; it’s just a better, far less labor-intensive way, and the reason is automations. When your point of sale is wired to talk to the other systems that you use to run your business, the real difference is that things just happen!
Here’s what getting insight from your data can do for your business.
With cloud-based point of sale and the best mobile credit card processing, you can easily view historical sales, which in turn can prepare you for future growth. That’s because you’ll be able to plan for new products, and know when to run promotions to clear out old merchandise. When you have a more complete understanding of your peak business times on the daily, weekly, monthly, and annual levels, you’re going to be better able to plan your staffing, which can save you thousands, annually.
Product shortages can really take the air out of your sails. There is nothing worse than losing a sale that would have happened because you were out of stock of something because of lack of understanding of the demand. At the very least, analytics allow you to more easily know, through reporting, when it’s time to place orders on what. Over and above that, your smart point of sale can allow you access to cloud-based solutions that can automate things, enabling you to set up automatic reorders of the things you sell out of quickest.
If you’re looking at changing your credit card processor, you may be in the perfect place to look at what other cloud-based business intelligence systems might also benefit your company. Start with the best mobile credit card processing: start with Moolah!