Save time, money, and make inventory a breeze with a smart terminal.

Running your own business goes far beyond being a full-time job. What every busy entrepreneur like you needs is a multi-talented partner who can assist you in the numerous important tasks that you complete every day. To that end, here’s the best news you have heard all day: The right smart terminal can be your “right-hand man” in numerous ways that will enhance your efficiency and help you to provide even better service to your customers.

What are smart terminals?

Most likely, you already use a terminal and card reader to accept your customers’ non-cash payments. If your equipment is old-school, it may do nothing more than to perform that function by communicating with your payment processing company to validate and confirm transactions. These days this type of hardware is known throughout the payments industry as a “dumb” terminal.

A smart terminal starts by doing everything its “dumb” predecessor did. This hardware-software combination can read customers’ credit cards and can often accept contactless payments and EMV chip cards as well. In addition, these solutions come packed with additional features that can streamline your operations to save you time and money and take your business to the next level.

What additional features do smart terminals have?

They call these payment processing powerhouses, “smart” for a variety of excellent reasons. Here are the main advantages of this system over your legacy equipment.

• Inventory management. Your terminal integrates with your barcode scanner, allowing you to keep track of every item sold. The system can also be set to alert you when stock runs low so that you can never run out of popular items.

• Employee management. Keeping track of your workers’ schedules and vacations is difficult enough, but that’s only the beginning of your responsibilities. With employee management integrations, your smart terminal can keep track of which staff members are the most successful, enabling you to provide rewards and positive feedback. By the same token, you can use it to learn who is struggling in order to give additional training or reassign responsibilities.

• Report generation. With just a few clicks, you can harness the data stored in your smart terminal to gain valuable insights. These may include details about best and worst-selling items, which staff are performing well and which are struggling, buying trends by time of day or week, season, or store location, and much more. Instead of requiring hours of your time poring over spreadsheets and piles of receipts, you can now view this information instantly from anywhere in a form that makes sense to you, your staff, and even your investors.

Best of all, equipping your business with a smart terminal is easy and affordable. All you need to do is contact your payment processor to get started. Once you get it up and running, you will wonder how you ever functioned without this vital technological ally at your side.