Is an Efficient Restaurant POS System In Your Future?

Less purchases can have as dramatic an effect on your retail or hospitality business as a point of sale (POS) system. Let our Point Of Sale experts teach you how you can increase your profits and get control of your business.

Having A Control Over Your Business

The right POS system will lift you up to a new level of control over your operations, it helps fine-tune your business model, boost your profits, as well as your efficiency. The wrong system, however, can cause you a great amount of frustration and waste of money.

In a sense, your POS system is a glorified cash register! The basic POS system can see in any establishment in the food industry, which consists of a computer, cash drawer, receipt printer, and a keyboard. In addition to being more efficient than cash registers, POS systems are able to create detailed reports which can help you plan ahead for your business’ future.

A POS system saves money, provide productivity gains, and can cut down the amount of time you spend away from the primary focus of your business.

Save more money, getting more control over your business, and be more productive; sounds like a pretty good combination, right? Well here are some of the best ways a modern POS system can help you.

Getting rid of shrinkage

A computerized point of sale system can drastically cut down on shrinkage, the inventory that’s missing from your store or restaurant due to theft, waste and employee misuse. Because employees will know that you’re carefully tracking inventory, internal shrinkage will dwindle.

Accuracy

Using a POS system, you are assured of selling the correct price on any item in your store or on your menu. Your staff will never have to guess prices again, and you can change prices with just one tweak in the computer.

Get better margins

Having a detailed sales report, you can focus more on the higher-margin items. By moving items within a retail location, or promoting under-performing dishes in a restaurant, you can help boost sales of high-profit items.

Know where you stand

Using a POS system, you can instantly know how much money you have in your cash drawer, how much of that money is profit, as well as how many of a particular item you have sold today, yesterday, last week or even last month.

Better inventory management

Knowing what stocks you need to keep on hand can easily be tracked using a detailed sales report. Track your remaining inventory, spot sales trends, and use historical data to better forecast your needs. Your POS software can be used to alert you when it’s time to reorder for stocks that are about to run low. There are many store owners who are caught by surprises when they have this data, because they think that they know exactly what trends affect them.

Building a customer list

You can collect the names and addresses of your best customers as part of standard transactions. Then use this list for targeted advertising or incentive programs.

Reduce paperwork

POS systems can dramatically reduce the time you have to spend doing inventory, sales figures, and other repetitive but important paperwork. The savings here: time and peace of mind.

More efficient transactions

For retail, barcode scanners and other POS features make checkout much, much faster. And since processes are greatly streamlined, all orders from the dining room is quick and accurately delivered to the kitchen. With either of the two, your customers can get a much faster and more accurate service.

Keep in mind that realizing these benefits requires you to commit using your POS systems’ capabilities to their fullest. Without proper training and analysis, any sophisticated POS system will just be another regular cash register.

Retail vs. Hospitality Needs

The POS market is divided into two segments with very different needs: retail operations and hospitality businesses like restaurants, bars, and hotels.

Retail

Of the two above, retails are the ones who needs simpler POS. Retails complete their transactions all at once and uses less variation for the items that they sell. Because there are some POS features retailers that specifically want to include the ability to support kits (3 for deals), support for digital scales and returns/exchanges. If you run a business that sells items in a variety of styles, a POS system that supports matrixes would best suit your needs. For example, matrixes let you create one inventory and price entry for a particular sweater, but still track sales according to size and color.

Hospitality

Business have different requirements depending on the establishment, like in restaurants and other hospitality businesses.

Efficiency is the main focus for casual restaurants. For retail-style restaurants like sub shops, POS systems that relay inputted orders cut down on time-per-transaction and reduce the errors that can happen when hastily-scrawled orders are passed back to the kitchen. For quick-service restaurants, a POS system would be required in order to live up to their name: a customers’ order is entered on the terminal at the front which sends the order and displays them on a monitor in the kitchen where the order is assembled and delivered to the appropriate customer.

For table-service restaurants and fine dining, POS requirements are somewhat different. Their needs includes the ability to create and store open checks, as parties order more over time, and to determine which server is handling which table. The efficiency gains from better management can be impressive. If your restaurant has 20 tables and has an average check of , it can increase turnover by one party per table, that would be an extra 0 on one busy night.

Return on Investment Worth the Trouble

Migrating from your old system to a computers POS system can be difficult. There are many factors to consider and some pitfalls to avoid. However the return on investment and benefits to your business can really make it worth your time and effort.

 

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Need more information or an online resource?

Go to POS-For-Restaurants.com

The author of this article is the Vice-President of Customer Relations at POS-For-Restaurants with over 20 years of experience serving restaurants of all types throughout the U.S.