Short YouTube advice segment (Donna Genie) arguing small businesses should avoid integrating point-of-sale (POS)/e-commerce systems with financial accounting systems. She explains that POS systems are for item-level sales, inventory, and product metrics, while accounting should record aggregate revenues and expenses; integration risks data contamination and unnecessary complexity.
Do you have a point of sale system or some other e commerce system that you process your sales in something other than your financial accounting system? If you do, chances are you've looked into the possibility of integrating the two systems, so lining it up so that the sales flow from one system into your accounting system. I have dealt with a lot of integrations. I used to work in the programming side and looking at custom integrations, so I've got a lot of experience in that area and I'm going to offer you some advice. Please don't integrate them. Usually it creates more of a mess than it solves and each of those systems has a different purpose. Your point of sale system is meant to track which items you sell, track your inventory, track the cost versus the sale price, those types of statistics. Your financial accounting system doesn't need to duplicate that information. It should just simply be tracking the amount of income that you've received and all the expenses associated with it. So in a very simplistic case as as most small businesses are going to have, I do not recommend integrating those two pieces of software. Each of them can stand alone. So allow your point of sale system to produce the information you need about what products are selling and how quickly they're selling and allow your financial accounting system to do the job of recording the revenues that you receive as well as the expenses. You may have to make a once a month adjustment to include the sales tax or move that properly. Or if you want to do a once a month breakout on your financial statement, probably no more than five to eight categories in income. If you have much more than that, it really dilutes the effect of looking at the financial statement. So I don't recommend breaking it down into very tiny granular pieces that should be left for the point of sale system. So hope this helps you because if you get garbage into one system and it doesn't sync right, you'll be contaminating the other system. So do yourself a favor and don't worry about the integration. It's just not necessary. Have a great day.
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