4 Ways POS Software Employee Reporting Helps Your Business

To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace. – Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup

POS software employee reporting tools have advanced far beyond the basic time clock ‘punch in’ and ‘punch out’ of old. In addition to keeping track of working hours, effective POS software can track performance through ‘sales by employee’ reports and help you monitor, educate, and remunerate your staff efficiently. Here are four ways you can use POS Software employee reports to improve your business:

1. Employee Evaluation

Whether you’re paying commission or a flat hourly rate, it’s vital to track employee performance. As such, your ‘sales by employee’ report from your POS software should be a weekly – if not daily – read. This useful report will tell you which employees are responsible for the majority of your sales. Differentiated pay can be a powerful tool in a small business and this data will allow you to reward high performers and weed out under-performers. After all, we all know how expensive it can be to ‘carry’ poor employees in a local business environment. The great thing about this kind of report is it provides employees with concrete metrics that they can try and change. Evaluations and reviews seem less reliant on ‘who the boss likes’ and are tied more to measurable aspects of performance. You can tell employees not only how much they are selling, but what they are selling – or failing to sell. This data will really get you into the nitty gritty of your employee performance.

2. Employee Training and Incentivization

Once your employee reports have helped you identify the high performers, you can incentivize them further through commission structures that are based on real-world benchmarks. You know they sold 100 widgets last month, now you can task them with selling 120 and provide them with a cut of the increase. In addition, you can analyze what makes these people high performers and try to encourage those behaviors in your other staff. Even better, you can arrange for your top performers to provide training to the others. Experienced staff often enjoy having their expertise recognized and publicly lauded, so most will be willing to engage in this kind of educational effort.

3. Shift Allocation

Employee reporting is also invaluable when it comes to planning your shifts. Imagine you’re a restaurateur and you have to decide which of the following two servers to schedule for the busy Friday evening shift. * Megan gets high average tips and sells the most of your high-margin specials.

• Fred gets lower average tips and hasn’t sold any specials in his last three shifts.

Not rocket science, is it? It’s easy to base these kinds of business decisions on ‘gut’ instinct, but you’ll be more profitable in the long run if you let the data be your guide.

4. Employee Theft Prevention

It’s a sad fact that there are light-fingered employees out there who will take advantage of the trusted position they hold in your business. Luckily, Modern POS Software has a number of features designed to monitor employees and ensure that your business doesn’t become the victim of fraud or leakage. First and foremost, robust tiered access levels (e.g. cashier login vs. manager login) operate as a control on who can perform certain actions, e.g. doing a cash-drop, or providing a discount. And if that doesn’t prevent issues, your employee reports can highlight offenders by allowing you to spot trends over time. Employees who think they know how to game the system will often try to only lift small amounts over time but by analyzing their shifts against others over time, you’ll often be able to spot the employee who is giving a disproportionate number of discounts or refunds, or seems to systematically put less transactions through each shift. It’s often not enough on it’s own to implicate someone, but this kind of analysis will often point you in the right direction.

Employee reports can make a significant impact on your business if used to their fullest capacity. If you use employee reporting in your business, we’d love to hear how you use the data to evaluate, monitor, and remunerate your employees.

Paul Nugent

Paul Nugent is a small business advocate who uses his background in the startup space, along with his POS system expertise, to allow small business owners to make informed decisions within their specific budgets.