Running your own business brings a lot of potential headaches. You may wonder whether your sales will meet your goals, if your employees are satisfied in their work (and are honest), and if any of the checks you accept will turn out to be bogus. Another headache is verifying customer age so that you don’t sell products like cigarettes and alcohol to minors.

It’s a good thing that technology can help you cope with some of these worries. While it can’t fix an argument with an employee, it can help you better monitor the age of customers buying cigarettes and alcohol and be confident that your customers’ methods of payment are valid.

The most important technological device that you can have is a credit card terminal. People use credit cards all the time now, so if you are not accepting them, you may be losing out on business. And it has been shown that people paying with credit tend to purchase more items than those paying with cash.

When you research merchant accounts and payment processing devices, look into the option of getting a card reader that will allow customers to put in their PIN as well. What this does is allow you to accept debit cards, giving customers one more option for paying, and costing you less in the way of transaction rates.

If you expect to have problems with bounced checks, you should look into getting a machine called a check reader. It is analogous to the credit card machine, except it is for checks. You insert the check into the check reader, and the amount is automatically debited from the customer’s checking account.
A check reader means that you get payment within 24 hours, and that the money is deposited directly into your account. So you don’t even have to take checks to the bank for deposit. A check reader’s main benefit, however, is that you’ll be sure your customer can afford the amount of the check they wrote you.

Another piece of machinery that will make your business run more smoothly is an age verification device. This is vital if you want to make sure that you don’t sell products for adults to underage customers. An age verification device works similarly to a credit card terminal, except it will either scan a barcode on the back of a customer’s ID, or read a magnetic strip similar to the way credit card machines do.

The age verification machine will let you know if the customer is old enough to buy the adult product you’re selling. With one of these devices, you get rid of the guesswork of reading IDs for birthdates, or worse, skipping the ID process. In fact, many places are now required to look at ID on every transaction involving cigarettes and alcohol.

Though adopting new technology may seem daunting, it is usually worth it: after the initial learning process, things quickly become much smoother. Don’t get left behind by not adopting technology. Once you learn it, it can easily improve your sales and keep you from making expensive mistakes like selling alcohol to a minor.