Every business, big and small, should be conscious of their role in taking care of the environment. If no one took responsibility for protecting our earth, the future generations wouldn’t have a healthy world to live in.

One of the best ways that businesses can help in improving the environment is by going paperless. Instead of printing out documents, receipts, reports, or other materials, you store and process them in a digital format. Going paperless reduces your impact on forests, decreases the amount of waste that is dumped into landfills, cuts energy use, and helps lessen the effects of climate change.

Go Paperless with a POS

You can do this by automating your business processes and transitioning to more eco-friendly solutions like a POS. With a trusted and modern POS to digitize and automate your essential business processes, you can start your green initiative by reducing your carbon footprint as much as you can. 

The best thing about this is that it preserves our natural resources and saves businesses tens, hundreds, and millions of dollars by cutting down on labor, printing, and lost and misplaced document costs. 

Sustainability Efforts for Customer and Employee Retention

More than ever before, the COVID-19 Pandemic has shed light on our global interconnectedness and the need for collective actions to create a more sustainable world. This is why supporting a business with a sustainability initiative in progress has become increasingly important to both employees and consumers. Now employees and consumers are more concerned about whether a brand’s business practices are kind to the environment and are more likely to want to be part of the initiative. 

POS: Increasing Productivity and Reducing Cost 

Here are some ways this digital transformation can benefit you while making your business more environmentally friendly:

First, digitizing your documents makes information transmission and retrieval easier. For example, if you’re looking for a particular invoice, you can look it up on your computer instead of digging through piles of paper files.

Need to monitor your employee attendance? Digital solutions for clock-ins and clock-outs will make you and your staff accurately keep track of working hours. 

Digitizing your business processes also has several benefits for your customers. Instead of filling their wallets and tiny purses with paper receipts, you can send them out via email, SMS, or Messenger chats, where customers can access and see them with just a click.

Here are some ideas below on how you can start going paperless in your business:

 

1. Reduce the Clutter with Automated Reports

Say goodbye to pages and pages of lengthy spreadsheets and paper charts for your business reports and analytics. These take up so much space filling up your cabinets and stretching across your office walls. Instead, start relying on your POS to keep track of your business performance with digital data analytics presented in neat visualizations. Not only are they updated in real-time as your business grows, but they are also easily accessible with just a few clicks on a handy computer.

There will be no need to sort through mountains of paperwork to find documents with paperless business systems. Advanced POS even has a unique analytic application called a Dashboard which allows you to access data from any device with an internet connection. 

Going digital significantly alleviates a lot of the disorganization and chaos that come with paper files. Once you eliminate some of the space devoted to paper records, you might find more ease to access important business data.

 

2. No More Spreadsheets and Clipboards For Inventory Count

Manually counting your inventory is as arduous of a task as it is. The last thing you want to do is make the work even more tedious with manual tools such as a pen and paper. Do yourself and your staff a favor and go for digital solutions that will count your stocks for you with barcode scanners or stock adjustments and inventory counting features.

Today, most modern POS or retail solutions have stock adjustment and inventory count functionalities. Taking advantage of these automation will save you time and reduce the chances of human error, helping you keep a more accurate record of your inventory.

 

3. Speedy Product Ordering

Instead of sending purchase orders by jotting them down on paper, you can switch to electronic invoicesorders to save you costs that usually go to paper, envelopes, and postage. Aside from saving money for supplies, going digital will expedite the delivery process. When you send an email order, your supplier will receive it immediately, which will speed up the delivery. 

However, the digital purchase orders might not work for all of your suppliers. There will be some who prefer to receive paper ones. Thankfully, most POS offers both options to print out paper orders and electronic ones if they choose. 
 

4. Send receipts via email

“I misplaced my receipt.” your customer says as he demands a refund. You rummage through boxes full of crumpled-up receipt copies to find this customer’s receipt, only to fail because there are too many. If this has happened to you, it’s time to consider going digital with your receipts.

Use a POS system that lets you send receipts via email. This way, they never lose a copy of their receipts, and you’ll always have an organized file system of them easily accessible in your Back Office. Customers appreciate this, too, since receipts get crumpled and lost in their wallets and bags most of the time. This method will also cut down the wait time payment terminal since they do not have to wait for their receipt to get printed out. 

You can also use email receipts to build your customer database. When people provide their email addresses, you can ask if they’d like to be included in your mailing list. If they say yes, you’ve got one more person to engage with. Plus, you got to help the environment. Win-win.

 

5. Use a digital employee management tool

With digital employee management tools, you can say goodbye to time cards, Bundy clocks and employees manually clocking in and out of their shifts. With advanced employee management features in your POS, you can digitize the way your employees take their shifts, log in their hours, or even when they request a day off. 

Sharing knowledge among your staff is an integral part of running a successful business. But when everything is scribbled out on notecards, getting knowledge and information around can be difficult. Your employees will be happy with an automated and hassle-free way of going about their most basic tasks, resulting in more productive employees. 

With this, you can stop worrying about their schedules and shifts and focus more on growing your business and attending to your customer’s needs. This feature doesn’t only reduce paper usage, but it can also help you run your business efficiently.

 

6. POS-Based Loyalty Program 

You are wasting many resources if you’re still printing out application forms and cards for your loyalty program. A POS loyalty program eliminates the need for cards. Modern POS has a basic loyalty program that runs on a point-based system.  

All customers have to do is provide their names and email addresses, and you will be able to keep a record of their purchases, recurring engagements and point rewards using your POS. You can also issue an electronic card with a barcode on it that can be stored in the customer’s phone.

Paperless systems can make pulling up customer information faster and more accessible. And, you can send tailored email campaigns to customers. 
 

7. Kitchen Display System

Enjoy less paper and less hassle with the Kitchen Display System of your POS. It significantly simplifies the communication process between your servers and your kitchen by having orders transferred digitally. Your servers ring up orders right at the POS, and the Loyverse Kitchen Display System immediately flashes them right onto the screen in the kitchen for your kitchen staff to see, with no time wasted.  

With this technology, not only are you able to say goodbye to kitchen printers and those chunky paper rolls, but you can also improve your ticket management and accuracy. It will display all necessary order information such as items, modifiers, and notes. 
 

The Bottomline

So if you have been wondering where to start in your green initiative as a business, look no further because a POS is just the all-in-one solution you need to cut down on paper and optimize your efficiency and productivity. 

The rapid development of science and technology are not excuses for us to completely neglect our corporate social responsibility to the environment. If anything, science and technological solutions just like a POS are our partners in making this world a better place to live in. With a POS, not only can we save ourselves by cutting costs that go to usage of more paper resources, time and effort, but we are also able to do our parts in protecting our earth’s natural resources.