Three Tips for Choosing the Right Fiscal Till

Choosing the right fiscal till is how you start digitising your business

Many micro and small businesses — hairdressers, beauty salons, garages, repair shops, kiosks, greengrocers and others — use ordinary fiscal tills that look like a mobile phone with a printer attached. These tills are largely useless for digitising a business or for improving how you exchange data with your accountant. If your fiscal till is built on proper software, however, it can give you a great deal more than fiscal receipts. A till like that is much more than a till, because with it you will no longer need a hand calculator, a diary, or to enter and track your figures by hand in Excel. You will be able to analyse your business quickly and automatically, from data and reports produced for you. So here are three things to look for when choosing a fiscal till supplier, or renewing your contract with one. When you choose a till, ask for one built on software your accountant can use too, and that will let you:

1. Manage your business better with reports and information

If your till is built on software your accountant can also use, you can have figures updated daily and track and manage your business better. Reports you could follow include:

• margin over a given period,
• revenue from a given product category
• turnover across all your locations
• a profitability report,
• a cash flow report,
• a forecast of your cash position on particular dates, such as the first of the month (when wages are usually paid) and the fifteenth (when VAT is usually due).

2. Have an automatic electronic trade ledger

Tills that only issue fiscal receipts are usually able to do no more than that, plus daily and periodic turnover reports for the tax authorities. A till that is part of a software system lets you record goods coming in, manage stock, and keep an automatic trade ledger — the report inspectors ask for first when they arrive. And you gain far more than the ledger itself:

• Your accountant has the documentation for posting in real time, and works considerably faster as a result, which means they can deliver daily postings
• The system can alert you when stock of an item that matters to your business falls below a defined minimum
• The system can send you daily turnover and profitability figures at the end of each day

3. Have an appointment booking system and track employee profitability

If you run a hairdresser or beauty salon, a garage or a similar business, an appointment booking system is an important tool. A fiscal till built on software can also give you:

• booked and completed appointments,
• the performance of the staff assigned to carry out those services,
• time spent and similar figures, which form the basis for calculating bonuses or wages.

By now you will have concluded that if you use an ordinary fiscal till whose only function is issuing fiscal receipts, you are missing enormous scope to digitise, improve and better manage your business.

A fiscal till built on TiramisuERP offers everything described here, and with some additional configuration you can also list your products in an e-commerce shop.

This is a product from a local company, which means that if you choose this till, a team of local engineers looks after it, and you have local support and help with implementation.

This software-based fiscal till provides a complete business solution at a price similar to what you currently pay for comparable tools and accounting. It is a monthly subscription of 8 to 15 EUR + VAT, depending on whether stock is tracked or not.

If you would like to improve and digitise your business with a till like this, sign up free at this link.