Point of sale (POS) equipment is a critical part of the tech infrastructure for any customer-facing business. Across the retail, hospitality and leisure industries, POS is a must-have for processing sales, serving customers, and providing a handy interface for employees to access and manage different business systems.
POS is also a big investment. To keep up with the demands of fast-paced modern commerce, POS terminals these days combine powerful processing capabilities, high performance touchscreens and durable build quality, all packed into compact units that don’t take up much space and look good. Ticking all those boxes doesn’t come cheap. Buying a POS system outright can create a budgetary dilemma for businesses. There’s often a gap between the ideal solution a business wants and what they can afford to pay up front.
But there is another way. Hardware-as-a-service (HAAS) is a lease hire model we offer at ADVANTECH-AURES UK to help make access to the very best POS equipment more accessible and affordable for businesses. Here are three benefits.
Cash flow friendly
In the current climate where high operating costs are squeezing margins and, with them, capital reserves, finding the cash to invest in new POS hardware is tougher than ever for businesses. Many feel pushed into buying cheaper lower spec equipment than they’d ideally want. But that can be a false economy over time if the POS you buy doesn’t meet all your operational needs and isn’t as robust and long-lasting as it could be.
HAAS helps retailers and hospitality operators get the POS equipment they really want with a pricing model that fits their cash flow. It turns high upfront capital expenditure into predictable operating expenditure spread throughout the hire period. Initial outlay is no longer a problem, you can budget for a fixed cost every month, and you get to deduct that cost from operating profits before tax.
Maintenance and replacement included
The ‘service’ part of HAAS isn’t just a catchy phrase borrowed from the cloud software operating model (software-as-a-service, or SaaS). When you choose HAAS, you buy into a recurring service rather than a one-off hardware purchase. And a big part of that service is maintenance, repair and a commitment to replace any equipment that fails during the hire period.
Another way to think about it is that, with HAAS, you are buying a commitment from the vendor to supply a working system for the duration of the contract. If you have an issue with any of the equipment, the vendor will have service level agreement (SLA) terms spelling out how soon engineers will be on site, how long repairs will take, when replacements will be delivered and installed etc. You know how every glitch and outage will be addressed from the moment you sign up, with no extra costs and keeping downtime to a minimum.
Simplifies the upgrade cycle
Finally, for a lot of businesses, deciding when to upgrade POS is a tough decision. If you purchase outright, it’s a major capital outlay as we’ve discussed, so having the funds available plays a big part. Businesses often delay replacing ageing equipment that no longer performs as well as it should, hampering how they operate. Or else they don’t make the big tech upgrade they really want, risking competitors gaining an advantage.
With HAAS, the upgrade cycle is as predictable as the recurring payments and maintenance SLAs. You take out a contract for a fixed term, often three to five years. And at the end of that, if you choose to renew, you do so with a full upgrade to the latest models available. At a time when POS technology is evolving faster than ever, this is helping to shorten upgrade cycles to help businesses keep up with the latest innovations in affordable, predictable ways.
ADVANTECH-AURES UK’s offers HAAS contracts of either three or five years on a wide range of products, from full POS suites to single terminals and kiosks. To find out more, please get in touch with our team.