POS Training Guide for New Staff: What You Should Know

Your point of sale (POS) system serves as the bridge between your customers and their purchases. When the transaction runs smoothly, your shoppers are in, out and happy before they can even think “refund”. However, when it goes wrong, it can result in long lines, frustrated customers and lost sales opportunities.

You can prevent this with proper training, which is precisely what this practical guide is all about. Read on to learn more about POS training, including what training methods to utilize, the nuances between POS in restaurants and retail, and an essential checklist for getting your team up to speed quickly.

What Is POS Training — and Why Does It Matter?

Point of sale (POS) training, also known as cashiers’ training, is the process of teaching employees to use the POS system. It should be completed at the start of their tenure with you, and their learning reinforced regularly to ensure confidence and accuracy.

Proper cashier POS system training makes a huge difference to the customer experience. It’s the last step on a shopper’s or diner’s journey and one of the moments they’re most likely to remember. A well-trained staff member will be confident, chatty and efficient while serving, creating a better all-around experience for the customer.

Similarly, training your staff members will reduce transaction errors, such as applying incorrect discounts or mishandling refunds. These errors, when they’re caught, are time-consuming for managers to correct.

When they aren’t caught, they can lead to revenue loss, stock discrepancies and even customer complaints. Over time, repeated mistakes can eat into profits and damage trust with your customer base.

Some businesses prefer to extend their POS system training only to trusted colleagues, like supervisors or floor managers. However, this is shortsighted. You never know when a manager might call in sick or when a sudden surge in customers might happen.

Having multiple team members trained on your POS ensures that transactions are processed efficiently and everything runs smoothly.

Equally, training only certain staff members on your POS can create an uncomfortable “them and us” mentality, leading to low morale, frustration, and even resentment among the team. The best way to handle this is to make POS training a standard part of the onboarding procedure.

You can make it exciting with hands-on practice, real-world scenarios, and positive reinforcement. Encourage questions, celebrate milestones (such as a first solo transaction) and regularly promote ongoing learning. Framing POS training as an empowering step will foster the “above and beyond” attitude that retail and hospitality industries thrive on.

Core Skills To Teach All Employees

Your exact POS training methods will depend on your checkout system and business needs. However, it’s helpful to teach every employee some essential skills that can be useful, no matter their role or industry.

Processing sales and payments

Taking payments is the whole function of a POS system. Taking cash, card, mobile wallet and split payments should be your top priority when it comes to POS training.

Show the employee how to reach the checkout stage, how the card reader connects to the POS system, how to do quick troubleshooting and how to confirm a transaction has gone through successfully.

Inventory lookups

Slightly more retail-specific, but inventory lookups are a key part of using the POS system. Your team should be able to locate a product based on its stock keeping unit (SKU), identify its storage location in the store, track incoming deliveries and, if the product is out of stock, assist colleagues in finding it at another store.

Refunds, returns and voids

Mistakes happen. Customers change their minds and employees occasionally ring items incorrectly. Ensuring refunds, returns, and cancellations are processed correctly protects your sales data, keeps inventory accurate and maintains customer trust.

Small details, such as ensuring a payment is returned via the original payment method, may seem like minor technicalities, but can actually protect your business against money laundering claims.

Receipts and invoices

Teaching your team how to print receipts, invoices, gift receipts and tax refund documents is essential. Customers often request duplicates for expenses, warranties or exchanges, and your staff should feel confident providing them quickly and accurately.

Discounts and promotions

Ensure your team is updated whenever a promotion is announced or new discounts are introduced. Teach them how to manually apply these promotions, just in case there’s a register error or system malfunction.

Incorrectly applying discounts and promotions can have catastrophic consequences. Imagine if an employee accidentally applied a 100% discount to a transaction. Or, worse, if they continued a limited-time promotion long after the sale price had expired. The impact on your bottom line can be devastating.

Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are a haven for consumer behavior, and the information you can collect through them is incredibly valuable for your business. Training your staff to confidently sign up customers, explain benefits and redeem points correctly ensures the program runs as intended and strengthens customer relationships.

Training Methods To Utilize

Here are some tried-and-tested training methods you can use for your next training session.

Roleplay exercises

Best for: Training multiple team members at once

Roleplay exercises are a great tool for training groups of new hires. They can help your team get to grips with the system in a controlled environment, while still mimicking the pace of real-world scenarios.

Examples:

• Ask employees to pair up. Have one act as the customer and the other as the employee, and see how fast they can process a transaction.
• Have your team roleplay how they would deal with a difficult customer complaint. This is a great way to practice their customer service skills while also navigating the POS under pressure.

Supervised live transactions

Best for: Final stage training

Having supervisors or managers oversee live transactions with new staff is a great way to complete their training. This method offers all the pressure of a real-world checkout, with the comfort of knowing support is just behind them if needed. It’s a great way to build confidence and reinforce good habits. Be sure to offer coaching when needed and praise when it’s due.

Examples:

• If your colleague has a tricky transaction or a difficult customer, allow them to process the transaction on their own and only step in if really necessary. Afterwards, ask them how they feel the interaction went and offer feedback or praise.
• Use post-shift debriefs to ask whether they learned anything new on the checkout that day or if there’s anything they struggled with. You can then use this feedback loop to support knowledge gaps on their next shift.

Pro tip: Your supervisors and managers should be offered dedicated retail management POS training to ensure they can use all the supervisor functions on the POS system. Otherwise, they may struggle to support their team when they need overrides or authorizations.

Simulation environments

Best for: Getting to grips with the system

If your POS offers a “Practice mode” or training accounts, allowing your new recruits to click around it and experiment without consequences is a great way to build familiarity. This is a useful method when you’re just starting POS training, and it can help your team get to grips with basic system navigation and commonly used pathways.

Examples:

• Assign “self learning” time during an employee’s induction to allow them to explore the POS at their own pace.
• Create mock scenarios, such as processing a return, applying a discount or printing a gift receipt, for them to work through as part of their induction. Have them score themselves from one to 10 on how confident they felt and revisit any steps they struggled with.

Gamification

Best for: Driving engagement with the team

Tracking your team’s progress with points, badges or awards may seem silly, but it’s actually a proven method to keep your team engaged and motivated throughout their tenure. It taps into their natural competitiveness and is a great way to recognize their achievements.

Examples:

• Go beyond the standard training period and offer badges for when they’re able to train new colleagues, when they hit a sales milestone or when they handle a complex return without assistance.
• Create seasonal challenges like “Fastest Checkout of the Week” or “Most Newsletter Sign-ups This Month” to keep things fresh.

Best Practices: Restaurants vs Retail

When navigating the differences in POS training between restaurants and retail, consider the following:

Restaurant POS system training:

• Orders can get complex in restaurants. Teach your team how to quickly select menu items, customize orders and add urgent notes to inform the kitchen about allergies or intolerances. The best POS for restaurants will feature easy-to-use order entry pathways and clear table management capabilities to streamline transactions.
• You never know when a customer will change tables for a better view or spot an old friend at the bar. Front-of-house training should instruct staff on how to efficiently move orders between tables, combine tabs and automatically add various gratuity options.

Struggling with errors during service? Check out these five common POS problems in restaurants (and how to fix them).

Retail POS system training:

• Speed is of the essence in retail. Run timed practice sessions where staff scan multiple items to prepare for peak hours or busy periods, such as holidays or Mother’s Day.
• Workshop key customer interactions, such as returns, exchanges or price adjustments. Your team needs to be able to confidently navigate the POS system while also maintaining conversation and providing good customer service. This blend of technical and soft skills requires adept multitasking, which can take some time to master. Practice makes perfect!

A Manager’s Essential POS Training Checklist

Our comprehensive checklist covers everything you’ll need to get your team up to speed on your POS system. We’ve also included additional resources that you can create, as well as times when you may want to consider retraining or refreshing your team.

Before the first day

To complete before their start date.

• Register your new starter on the system
• Double-check their login and set a generic password
• Register a POS key or key fob for simplicity
• Check the correct access permissions
• Assign a trainer or mentor and inform them of their responsibilities

Essential training

To be completed with the new starter.

• Log in and navigate the POS dashboard
• Process sales quickly with cash, card, gift card or mobile
• Instruct how the card reader works and how to install new paper
• Apply discounts and promotions
• Perform voids and remove items from the transaction
• Handle refunds and returns
• Look up inventory
• Troubleshooting basics

Team refreshers

Conduct team refreshers or updates when:

• There is a substantial system update
• Before peak periods like the holidays
• If there has been a spate of recent errors
• Quarterly or biannually as standard
• If a new promotion or loyalty scheme is introduced

Handy resources

Create the following under-the-register resources for new starters.

• Quick reference flashcards with the most common functions
• Laminated policy reminders. For example, the returns policy or restaurant training manual
• A list of emergency contacts. For example, IT or the supervisor’s radio channel
• Full POS training manual