Building a furniture business plan requires a lot of thought about your point of service (POS) system — the software that handles your checkout process and credit card handling. But POS software can go far beyond that, and choosing the right software can add many more features that benefit your furniture store business, such as creating a delivery schedule.
The Most Important Part of Any Business: Payment Processing
The driving force behind any business is your income through sales. On a fundamental level, that means being able to process payments. Can you imagine going into a store, shopping carefully for your purchases, then getting to the payment counter and they only accept cash? Nowadays, almost everyone uses a credit or debit card for purchases, especially large purchases like furniture.
A POS system should be a part of any furniture store’s business plan because credit card processing is crucial to making purchases convenient for your customers.
It should also include a feature for loading sales information into your internal bookkeeping, automatically tracking payments received and payments made for inventory and supplies. A good POS software program transfers this information into your bookkeeping software to save many employee hours from having to manually enter this information.
Keeping Track of Your Stock and Managing Furniture Store Inventory
Keeping furniture in stock for customers is also important. POS software can help with that. Who wants to be doing inventory manually all the time? That’s a lot of manpower hours on the clock.
With POS software, ordering new stock is a breeze because you can see exactly what you have on hand and exactly what you need. You can review what’s selling and what isn’t. A furniture business relies on having what customers want to purchase in stock, and delivery delays for backorders may cause customers to shop elsewhere.
Point of service software will also help generate invoices to track payments due for your wholesale furniture purchases or can also help if your business is manufacturing custom furniture that you sell to other stores.
Creating a Customer Database and Tracking Leads for Your Furniture Store
Retaining good customers is a lot easier than finding new ones. Storing customer information is crucial to any business. Along with customer data like addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, you can customize preferences from past purchases.
People like to feel they’re more than just an anonymous sale to a business. When you save their information and have it readily available for another purchase, it creates a personal touch that customers remember.
Information Helps Create Custom Marketing Plans To Boost Furniture Sales
This database of customer information helps create marketing campaigns tailored to your clients, and offering incentives such as coupons through a newsletter can encourage people to sign up for your newsletters.
Those who are more experienced in business can tell you that email lists are a great tool for generating new sales. Besides coupons, if you’re having a special sale surrounding a holiday such as Memorial Day or Christmas, that creates a customized list of potential customers to send advertisements to that promote the sale. And this advertising doesn’t cost a dime!
Scheduling Deliveries Made Easy
Trying to schedule deliveries can be a headache and hassle. It always has been, but now that gas prices are so high, optimizing your delivery routes is more crucial than ever. Now it’s more than a matter of delivering top-notch service to customers with efficient deliveries — it’s about cutting fuel costs, as well.
Having a POS system that can help with scheduling and optimizing delivery routes is going to enhance your bottom line and your profit margins by cutting fuel costs.
It can also cut employee hours — by scheduling deliveries more efficiently, you can save a lot of travel time on the clock for your delivery crews. Saving time with your delivery crews not only saves money but means quicker deliveries and happier customers.
If your POS software features GPS tracking, you can also keep track of your employees and how your delivery schedule is going. You can see right where they are and if there is a delay, you can notify customers in advance.
While we always want to trust our employees, we certainly don’t want them making personal errands in company vehicles, and GPS tracking insures a renegade employee won’t be tempted to use your precious resources on company time for their own needs.
Making Your Furniture Business Plan Function More Efficiently
When choosing your POS software, look for something that can do all of these functions and tasks for you. The more processes covered by your software, the fewer employees you’ll need, and that is certainly a money saver.
The right software also saves time from mundane tasks like inventory and manually entering bookkeeping information. If you are the one doing that, wouldn’t you rather be using that time to create your marketing campaigns and brainstorm ideas to grow your business?
There is a software program out there that can do all of these tasks and can save you a lot of money. It isn’t that expensive, either. ServiceWorks can handle credit card processing, customer information, scheduling, and route optimization tasks for any business, including a furniture retailer.
Give it a try with our free trial — no credit card needed — and start running a smoother, more efficient furniture store business today.
