Find everything you need to know before deploying an accounting software for a supermarket and how to pick the best POS system for your supermarket/groceries and why QuickBooks may be the right recommendations.
A supermarket is a shop that’s organized into departments or sections with wider offers training from food, groceries, household and everyday products – usually, customers are required to pick what they want, package in a trolley and present to the counter for payment.
The operation model of this type of retail business requires a customer to walk around each shelf, select all they want to buy and pay cash or POS at the counter – from this, it’s already obvious that a point of sale software is the first solution to deploy before implementing accounting software.
Point of Sale Software for Supermarkets
The point of sale software, also known as POS, lets you track front-end sales of your products at the counter as well as the staff that recorded such transaction, the amount paid by the customer, and whether settlements are in cash, debit card, transfers or charged to the customer’s account.
The most popular POS application for small businesses right now is QuickBooks Point of Sale Software.
Whether you are just opening a supermarket or have been running one for a while, we always advise you to go for the multi-store version – the highest category of QuickBooks POS that not offers the full functionalities of a POS system but provides room for expansion into multiple locations which could be inter or intrastate.
Our team is experienced in this type of deployment – we have helped clients save thousands of US dollars on server infrastructure by adopting the dropbox approach for the transfer and exchange of data between stores. This guide will show you how we achieved it seamlessly.
Some of the core of QuickBooks Point of Sales for the supermarket are:
- Makes Sales
- Manage Inventory
- Track customers’ account and available credit.
- Multi-store setup and inventory centralization.
- Receive payment in cash, POS or cashback.
- General report
- Backup.
- User management.
- Plug and play with thermal printer, scanner and cash drawer
Accounting Software for Supermarket
The next setup to consider after setting up your store for front-end sales is the backend financials where you have your data from the point of sales automatically synchronized with the accounting software for complete financial reporting.
And if you are considering the type of inventory-based software suitable for a supermarket, we’d advise you with QuickBooks Premier.
From experience, the Premier version of QuickBooks works for a retail business except the number of concurrent users exceeds five (5), then QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions becomes a preferred option.
What Will Accounting Software Do for a Supermarket:
While the POS takes care of the sales and inventory side of your supermarket with options to segment your store into departments, here are the core deliverable of accounting software:
Data Synchronization
At the end of each business day, the front-end staff initiate an end of the day to generate sales report for the day while the “Financial Exchange” window lets you pool all the transactions posted into the backend financials – from new customer data, new inventories if any to sales transactions and transfers between stores.
Expenses and Banking:
The accounting software lets you track all the expenses incurred for the day as well as payments (office expenses, staff salaries, cleaning, maintenance, rent, etc) including the bank account debited. The banking section is designed to display your bank balances, transfer to other banks and reconcile any difference at the end of the month.
Financial Report
The reporting side gives you a complete overview of the supermarket performance. You can generate a profit and loss to see whether you are generating more revenue than the amount you have spent so far. This is the most important report every supermarket owner shouldn’t lose sight of. We have seen several supermarket deploy point of sale but no backend financials. To a very large extent, this makes them look like they are generating more money since there is no proper system for expense tracking, which is not a good practice.
While these tips can help you select the right accounting solution for your supermarket, you can also connect with our support centre to discuss specific issues that are applicable to your supermarket.
For inquiries and implementation services, email us: info@accountingsoftware.com.ng, bigresourcessolutions@gmail.com