Computer Hardware and Software
Twelve years ago, I was running a 24-person dive-charter business in Hawai’i. At the time, the fastest PC you could buy was a 486 (the last Intel processor before the Pentium I). We had a mixture of 386 workstations running our DOS-based Point-of-Sale (POS) systems (a task for which they were more than adequate). Our bookkeeper got the sole 486 PC; I was left with a 386 running Windows 3.x.
At the time, I was trying to develop a database application that could more adequately manage our reservations. The software I was using was up to the task; unfortunately, the computer was not. Simple tasks that modern computers could grind through in less than a second would take this machine the better part of a minute. The lag was too short to justify getting up and going on to other tasks — but too long to be productive at the task at hand.
Eventually I totaled up how many minutes (hours, actually) I had spent looking at the infamous Windows hourglass. Factoring that time against my salary, I discovered that the value of the time wasted could have more than bought us a faster, more capable PC.
The good news is, today’s computers are vastly faster and vastly less expensive. Even a fairly modest Pentium 4 computer, capable of running Windows XP, Microsoft Office and your Point of Sale system, is likely more than adequate to run your office.
Where you want to pay closest attention is to the computer(s) you use to run your POS software at the sales counter. If they have not been replaced in a while, you want to ask:
- Is their lack of speed and/or memory slowing down the sales process?
- Is your POS software easy enough to learn and use that new employees are not struggling to ring up sales or making significant errors in the process?
- Are you losing money because customers are getting impatient waiting for sales to ring up?
Odds are, the answers to these questions are all No — however, it never hurts to ask periodically. Of course, to ask these questions at all, you actually need to have a Point-of-Sale system. If you don’t, it’s important to realize how much its absence is costing you (see related article). Suffice it to say, a good POS system is one of the best investments you can make — and one that will more than pay for itself in the years ahead.
As your business grows, you will need to move from a single-workstation to a network/server architecture. Odds are, the same company from whom you license your POS software can make some good recommendations here.
Don’t forget to invest in a solid data back-up system; it’s cheap insurance. Just imagine what would happen if a hard-disk crash caused all your inventory, sales, customer database and other records to simply vanish. That’s a loss you can’t afford.
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