Finding the right tools to manage your business

Is running your business starting to stress you out? We get why. Especially for people doing it all themselves, managing a business brings lots of little tasks you’ll be jumping between constantly. From managing your inventory to face time with customers to doing your accounting, you need to be in a few places at once. 

Wouldn’t it be great if you could lighten that load? You can, and not by hiring more people. Well, you could hire people too, but that’s expensive, and there’s an easier way. SumUp offers a host of tools to make operating and managing the business that you started easier. 

From making and managing sales to organising your inventory and optimising your processes, we have you covered. 

Selling anywhere with SumUp Solo

The Solo card reader is the next-gen way to accept payments. Like our other card readers, it accepts all major credit and debit cards, as well as contactless payment, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. And it’s entirely free to use after you buy it – no recurring fees or contracts. You’ll only pay a small 1.69% fee per transaction. 

You can take Solo anywhere. It’s engineered to fit right in your palm, and the unlimited 3G SIM card and Wi-Fi connectivity mean you can get online to process payments wherever you are. Not only is it a convenient, quick way to get paid, but the smartphone screen interface gives you an overview of your sales. With Solo, you can:

  • Enable tipping. When you turn on Smart Tipping, an option to tip will pop up whenever a customer finishes a transaction. The tipping options depend on how much was spent, but you can customise them to your liking. 

  • Issue refunds and receipts. After the sale, a screen prompting you to send a receipt pops up. You can issue a receipt via email or SMS. Refunds are also easy to issue; just open your sales history, find the transaction you want to refund, and select either ‘Full refund’ or ‘Partial refund’. 

  • Create multiple employee profiles so that you can keep your profile details private and track individual sales histories. 

Just like a smartphone, Solo is being updated all the time. These updates are free, automatic, and everything we do to improve the reader is based on feedback from merchants like you. 

10 tools in 1: SumUp POS

Whether you work in retail, hospitality, a restaurant, or any other service industry, SumUp Point of Sale gives you every tool you need to keep track and stay ahead of your business. More than a way to accept payments, the platform lets you integrate outside apps, so you always have a way to fulfill your business needs. 

A powerful interface that’s easy to navigate, SumUp POS is individually priced, so you only pay for the features you need. Among those features are: 

  • Data and analytics reports. You have access to sales reports, average sale volume, analysis of your most popular products, and comparisons of your business across time. It’s all presented in easily digestible charts and graphs that you don’t need an accounting degree to understand. 

  • Customer loyalty and rewards options. Save customer purchase data so you can offer more personalised experiences next time. With integrations like Yoyo, it’s easy to offer repeat customers rewards and incentivise loyalty. 

  • Tools for managing your staff. Easily pull up and arrange employee schedules, track employee performance, and communicate quickly with your team. 

  • Inventory management, so you always know what and how much you have and never have to say ‘sorry, we’re out of stock’. 

  • Accounting software. Paying your bills, your staff, and doing taxes doesn’t have to stress you out. With apps like QuickBooks included in our system, bureaucracy gets a lot less bureaucratic. 

In addition to these assets, SumUp POS boasts features specific to your business.

 Let’s say you run a restaurant, bar, or cafe; we can make it easy for your customers to order straight from their table. When their order’s ready, it’ll be brought over. Customers can even split the bill or pay with a combination of cash and card. 

You can edit your menu at a glance in case there’s something new your chef is trying or you want to change your prices, and customers can even order from you online thanks to Goodeats. 

Maybe you’re in retail, and you need a way to manage your store. SumUp POS gives you full control over your product catalog, so you can add new products in just a few clicks, and arrange them however you like. It’s easy to track your inventory because everything is automated. When a customer makes a purchase, the POS updates your inventory without you having to lift a finger. 

Introduce discounts and special deals so customers keep coming back, and give them points for shopping with you that they can use on future purchases. Store customer data to give everyone who shops with you a personalised experience. 

Manage your business from home with Online Store

Do you want a tool that lets you run things from your living room? If you’re interested in having a business but not in going to and from the store every day, consider SumUp Online Store. With an online store, you can sell to anyone, from anywhere, without worrying about opening hours or even time zones. 

And ours is strikingly simple to use. In just four steps, you’ll be online and ready to bring your business to the world. With Online Store, you can:

  • Add and remove items in seconds, including variants based on color, size, or weight. Upload photos and item descriptions to really catch your customer’s eye. 

  • Include options for shipping anywhere. Want to sell to someone in Singapore or New Zealand? You can. Want to deliver orders yourself or have customers pick them up in store? You can do that too. 

  • Make your store your own by adding your logo, banners, and contact details. Connect with customers easily across multiple channels.

  • See your transaction history and access an analysis of your store’s performance in real-time. 

You can manage your Online Store from your computer or from a mobile device, as long as you have the SumUp App. That means you’ll always be connected to your business. 

Track payments with Invoices

One of the more awkward parts of managing a business can be tracking down customers who haven’t paid. It’s tricky to know how much to force the issue, plus putting together the bill can take a while. 

We’ve taken care of both of these things with Invoices. Just go to the ‘Invoices’ tab on either the SumUp dashboard or mobile app, and you can send customers professional, automatically generated invoices letting them know what they owe. 

When you send an invoice, your customer will get a link to a secure payment site. Once there, they can enter in their card information, and you’ll see once you’ve been paid. You can set a due date for the payment and see an overview of all your invoices, so it’s easy to track anything overdue. 

Invoicing doesn’t have to be used for overdue payments. It’s perfectly valid as a normal payment method, since it’s less error-prone than a bank transfer and easier to keep track of. Our payment portal is also encrypted, so there’s little chance of fraud. 

At SumUp we make it a point to support business owners and give them whatever they need for success. That’s what drives us to provide affordable, easy-to-use business tools like these. Whatever your venture, we’re sure we have a product that can help. 

Max Elias