Audits are crucial for your business. But why? Auditing has several benefits, for both small and large businesses. When you conduct audits, you can analyse your business’ performance – both successes and losses – as well as monitor your employees, identify the efficiency of your inventory management, and also protect your business from fraud or theft.
But there are several types of audits that you need to consider, all of which have their own uses and benefits. Let’s get into the 4 types of auditing your Point-of-Sales (POS) system can do that you may not even know about!
1. Order Audit
Enhance the security of your operations with order audits. This is one of the most useful types of auditing your POS system can do! No one likes to distrust their employees, but there is always a possibility of fraud.
With order audits, you can detect potential fraudulent activities, monitor suspicious work shifts, and receive records of orders being cleared or item quantities being reduced. Hence, this type of auditing also provides a report with the staff, outlet, number of transactions processes, cleared orders, deleted items and more. Based on such factors, the POS system’s analytical features will issue every staff member a suspicion rating.
In these situations, order and shift audits can help you greatly reduce the possibility of fraud and prevent internal theft.
2. Product Audit
What does a product audit do? It provides the history log and details on changes made on your registered products. Using this type of auditing on your POS system, you can see a change log of updates by date, time, actions, and staff involved.
When you’re auditing your products, it’s also beneficial to do a full audit of your inventory management. That’s where combining data from product audits and inventory reports comes in handy. You can then get insights into not only the product audit’s changelog mentioned previously, but also the quality of your products, sales volume and pricing strategy.
3. Promotion Audit
The promotion audit feature on a POS system allows business owners to view the details and history of any promotions registered in the backend. This includes the actions completed, date and time, and the staff involved.
Why is this feature useful, you may ask? One of the more common reasons for employee theft is due to your employees offering special, unapproved discounts or promotions to friends and family. Hence, promotion audits means you can keep track of if any unauthorised promotions have been used or if there have been any unauthorised changes to existing promotions.
Not only that, but this type of audit means you can see your past promotions and how successful (or unsuccessful) they were. Using that information, you can plan for future promotional and marketing activities.
4. Purchase Audit
As mentioned above, audits can help you monitor how well your business is actually doing, supplementing POS data analytics. In that same vein, in instances where there are confusing orders, refunds or customer complaints, you can choose to view the purchase details and changes to resolve any issues.
Conclusion
Of course, there are several other types of audits that you can explore to completely assess the health of your business, but here are 4 types of auditing your POS system can handle for you. Did you know these existed? Check your own POS system to see!
Want to learn more about features you may not know your POS can do? Check out these featured articles!
• Written by Adrija Chakravarti
