Retail companies have to have appropriate POS software to handle all their company needs, such as inventory management, full exception reporting, logistics, and more. Small retailers have a better option than larger retailers, because their purchase is usually made by the manager or owner, not an IT staff. This decision is dictated by the functionality of the POS software, responsiveness of the POS software support staff and a personal relationship developed with the sales and project management staff.

This POS software decision can directly affect the success and growth of your company. Dependable and efficient POS software can assure you improvement in sales efficiency, better income and less manpower requirement. POS software relieves you from employing further personnel to take charge of stock management, customer transactions, accounting, and other unique events inside your supply chain.

ProphetLine POS Software/Retail Systems prides itself on a more one to one personal relationship that gives comfort to the retailer that someone really cares about their business. Your calls are usually answered in a short period of time and if not, you are put into the system for a quick return call. You have a choice, call and talk to someone you don’t know and have never talked to before, or call and talk to someone you have developed a relationship with. I think you’ll like the way you feel.
 

Your website doesn’t have to be elaborate, expensive or fancy, but it does needs to exist to show people you are in business and serious about it.  Don’t spend a fortune; instead have your business logo, name and address, basic contact information, business picture and a description of what you do.  Have an image folder with a picture that matches the catalogue number that you want displayed and your POS Software can take over and do the rest.  Your products are arranged by the department/class structure you have set up.  The hardest part is the thought process in setting up your POS Software to align it with your web.   
 

Much talk is going around about applications in the cloud.  I was obviously a proponent of this when it was known as an ASP (Applications Service Provider) model.  ProphetLine won the Retail Developer of the Year award in 2001 for the thin client model we built for 70 Southwestern Bell retail mobile phone stores.   While band width is no longer an issue, SBC would simply put in a T-1 line and problem solved.  The issue that still surrounds this deployment method was taken from an article in the VAR Insider after Amazons big Cloud outage.   When mission critical applications like POS Software go down, there is pain.

The Cloud Will Go Out and Cloud outages are going to happen. They’re a reality, and if you can’t stand the outage, get out of the cloud, many solution providers said. "Outages, for better or worse, are part of the IT industry," said David Hoff, vice president of technology for Atlanta-based cloud solution provider Cloud Sherpas, later adding, "There are going to be outages at least for the foreseeable future, because the technology is so immature.  Cloud computing will fail, and you need to plan for that failure," said Jeremy Przygode, CEO of Los Angeles-based cloud solution provider Stratalux.

As a small retailer, you wear many hats and can’t spend all of your time trying to be an analytical genius. We have built a retailing process that is easy to use and gives you the information needed to improve your retail performance and still have time left over to lead a normal life outside of your business. Most Point of Sale (POS) software gives you a variety of lists which mean very little because they don’t tie several important factors together. ProphetLine has taken all the information gathered at the inception of the sale and put it into an easy to understand roadmap for success. We do all the heavy lifting by crunching hundreds of variables and you review and make informed decisions. The biggest task the retailer undertakes is defining the department/class structure, and everything else is done by ProphetLine POS Software behind the scenes. 

 If your first question is “how much”, instead of what can your POS Software do for my business, you are setting yourself up for failure. Many software companies can give you a bunch of lists, but how do you sort those lists to give you business valuable information? Apple Computer did not invent the mobile music player or touch screen wireless phone, they took existing products and refined them until they were the category leader. ProphetLine did the same thing in refining inventory reporting with the “Easy Retail” plan.

ProphetLine was developed as an integrated POS, inventory and small business financial solution for retail stores. We noticed that when retailers purchased some systems, they usually expected higher profit margins, lower inventory investments, lower shrinkage and better control on procedures. After a few years, however, they often find that little has changed on their financial statements. While most systems only focus on shrinkage and procedures, we designed ProphetLine to help you obtain the more important benefits relating to margins and investment. We call this the “Retail Easy” way of merchandising. We do a multitude of formulas and algorithms behind the scenes and come up with an easy to understand way to run your business and control your inventory, which is the life blood of retailers.

 ProphetLine automatically produces a department/class comparative that gives you the percentage of inventory in each department and the contribution of that department to the overall revenues of the business. If twenty percent of your inventory is in department “A”, but it only contributes ten percent to the overall revenue, you have a problem which can easily be corrected. The “Retail Easy” report is sorted by the best department, best class and best vendors in order of their contribution to your retail business. Normally this is a lot of work and time consuming, but the ProphetLine “Retail Easy” method does everything for you and promotes what you do best, sell your products.

When you see competitors advertising their POS Software prices at extremely low prices, don’t you wonder how they can do this and still deliver good service and good quality. They try to win your business solely on price and hope you never need a flaw fixed or a helpful person to talk to. We constantly replace the number one selling cheap POS software on the market because they only offer basic functionality and bad service. We are seen as a serious software company selling to retailers that have most of their net worth tied up in their business and want answers when they have questions.

POS software is not a recent invention but rather a discovery to better use the information gathered at the time of the transaction. Cash registers gave you cash counts and an end of day Z tape with dollars and cents, but where is the data that allowed a small business person to grow. If you don’t care who your customers are, I always use the analogy of selling T-Shirts at Times Square when you have a quarter million new potential customers come by every day. You don’t care who they are or what they really want as long as you have a shirt with “I Love NY” on it. Replenishment is as easy as seeing the stack has gone down a foot, so I order another foot of shirts. Good Retailing is not something that comes to you accidentally, but when you discover innovative ways to use the information gathered at the inception of the transaction. Select the POS software that you know will give you an advantage on your competitors that use the Times Square method of retailing.     

I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern ship building has gone beyond that.
– Captain Edward J. Smith, HMS Titanic

Some POS Software vendors are promoting a lite version of their software which will do remote sales. ProphetLine POS Software has been able to do this for years. Our POS software is a full functioning version that can be used anywhere to enable sales from trade shows to line busting. When a laptop PC is used in your company network, you can tell the laptop that you are going off-line and it syncs with the server and is its own self contained system. When off-line usage is finished, the laptop is reconnected to the network and it syncs up to the server again and all data is then shared. This is just another usage for retailers that need to squeeze every available dollar out of their potential clientele.  Why buy two systems when one can do it all.