Did you know that you can use Retail Pro to capture important demographic information about your customers at the point of sale? A simple-to-use feature called POS Flags is available and requires very little customization to use. If you don’t know about this feature, you may be missing out on collecting important information to help you manage your business.

Retail Pro includes three POS Flag fields. Each field can be give a unique name based on the type of data you are collecting. For example, many businesses track the advertising source for their customers. “How did you hear about us?” is a question I hear when I make a purchase at just about every store these days.

Customize one of your POS Flags for marketing and you can include responses for all of your advertising campaigns: direct mail, television, internet, word of mouth, and so on. Once you define the potential responses for each POS Flag, you can also set a default value. If you cater mostly female customers, set the default gender flag to “female” and your associates only need to change the value when you have a male customer. Another unique default feature is the ability to automatically default to the last value entered. POS Flags are included in the default receipts screen. They can be easily added to your custom screen designs.

One of the nice features about POS Flags is that you can use them even if you are not tracking customer information on the receipt. The information you collect is included on the receipt and not stored with the customer data. Our clients have found many created uses for the POS Flags. If you’re not using them for your business, take a few minutes to think about what kind of data you would like to be tracking for every sale. By simply customizing the values for each flag, you can begin tracking important information that will help you analyze business trends and make critical decisions.