POS SYSTEM : MANAGING YOUR GIFT SHOP WITH POINT OF SALE IN TODAY’S TOUGH FINANCIAL TIMES .
You’d think the hospital gift shop would be doing well. Unemployment in the health care industry, last month, was second lowest, second only to government employees.
However, consider these facts:
- A California gift shop reports that their hospital carpenters have been put on a four day work.
- Middle management in some of our hospitals, including some senior gift shop staff, has been downsized.
- It may not be hospital staff whose positions are being eliminated, but it may be somebody’s husband or wife.
- The first procedures cut in a slowing economy are elective procedures, resulting in less business.
Business wags are still describing retail sector as soft, for January and February after, a horrendous December! How do you cope?
With a really good POS system, you’ll be able to focus on to the two areas that matter most – your inventory and your customers!!!
With a good POS system, like ARBAPRO Point of Sale system, you can shape inventory to meet customer needs, and how to find ways to improve the bottom line.
With a good POS system, like ARBAPRO, you can keep customers loyal, and keep them spending.
It’s more important now than ever to understand where you stand financially. You need to know where you are now, compared to where you were last year. We bury our heads in the sand, comfortable with current figures. “If we have enough to pay the bills, we’re okay.” If you have good (POS System) point of sale software, it will give you monthly sales reports!
Some of our hospitals reported strong first quarter sales, after a good Christmas, including a store manager who reported December figures up by 63%. Some of our other hospitals are not doing as well. Last month was a bad month for a number of folks (an east coast hospital reported her numbers were down by 16%; another customer reported that her revenue from her huge annual February uniform were way off last year’s; another Midwestern hospital said his January and February sales were flat).
POS SYSTEM AND GROSS PROFIT?
It’s not enough just to look at your day’s sales and your deposits. A good (POS) point of sale system will show you how much money you’re making!
Do you know what your average gross profit margin is? Monthly? Annually? That’s how you pay your non-merchandise expenses and how you develop your pledge back to the hospital. Merchandise is, of course, is replenished and paid for under cost of goods!
Think about what increasing your gross profit can do for your bottom line. Do you know just how much more money you can earn if you raise your average gross profit percentage by only 3%? Take an annual sales figure of $500,000 per year. If your gross profit is 50%, your merchandise cost is $250,000; you earn $250,000. If you can improve your gross profit percentage by 3 points to 53%, on the same $250,000 in inventory cost, you’re now up to annual sales of $531,915, and you’ve made an additional $32K! You’ve paid for a raise for yourself and a part time assistant. But how does that play into where we are in today’s economy? Is it possible to increase our gross profit percentage?
You must know what your store is doing now! What are your strong departments, today, this week, and this month?
A good (POS) point of sale system lets you review gross profit with consistency, where your departments represent merchandise that have similar markups, NOT similar names! Inexpensive candy and Lance products should be in a different department from gourmet products, or you’ll not have an accurate picture of either. A catchall department called seasonal or the department called Christmas can distort accurate reporting on profitability. Christmas cards have a different gross profit percentage from XMAS candy
and XMAS ornaments. For an accurate profit picture, keep like items in like departments.
If you don’t truly know what your gross profit is, you can’t make a decision to change it -- up or down!
Sandy McLain
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