Why Your Restaurant Needs a POS System

For those who don’t know, POS stands for Point of Sale, and is commonly used when referring to the system of tracking sales transactions, payments, controlling stock and tracking food inventory within the hospitality sector for hotels, restaurants and quick service outlets.

So, What Are the Benefits of Using a POS System?

One of the many benefits of using a POS system is that it helps simplify communication between waiters, bar staff and kitchen staff. Whenever a food order is placed it goes directly to the kitchen to be printed out and acted upon.

A POS system allows you to easily track everything in your business, from food usage to table bookings. Some pos solutions allow the tracking of staff though clocking in and out which can be used in conjunction accounts for payroll and tax calculations.

Along with the daily operation of running a restaurant, a POS system can help with the organisation of profit and loss and sales tax statements.

Other benefits include:

Using a POS system can help reduce customers waiting times giving guests a better dining experience.
A good restaurant management software solution will allow you to be efficient in ordering and preparing customer food, as well as keeping things running smoothly behind the scenes in terms of stock and staff management thus reducing mistakes.

Easier control of multiple restaurants.

If your business covers more than one restaurant then keeping track of menus, offers, pricing staff etc can be difficult. Using a POS solution will make the task of managing your chain easier as updates to a menu can easily be transferred to all your outlets with the click of a button. On the other hand, if you want localised pricing/menus for each of your restaurants then this can be easily accomplished from one centralised system providing flexibility, adaptability and uniformity at your fingertips.

Track Everything.

Staff, ingredients, tables, prices, cooking times. Everything can be tracked. Being able to track the ingredients you need against what you have in stock helps ensure you should never run out and always able to offer that menu product.

Ability to track how long it takes to prepare and cook a dish helps in planning menus and may allow you to see ways to become more efficient.

Better data reporting = less waste

As mentioned above a restaurant software tracks details of every sales transaction your restaurant has made and as such holds a wealth of useful data that can be used to prevent food waste, over-staffing, theft, under or over ordering and other valuable data

Easy loyalty program creation

According to recent research over 46% of UK customers are members of at least one restaurant loyalty program. A POS system will make creating a loyalty reward scheme easy and allow a business to offer targeted product, promotions, customer discounts, voucher schemes, points scheme and many other customer enhancement experiences all aimed at bringing repeat visits.

Keep things mobile

Mobile tablets are everywhere, using a software solution that integrates windows mobile tablets makes staff more efficient and productive hence speeding up service times and as a result reduce customer waiting.

Using windows based devices to accept orders directly at the table from dining guests and sending this information directly to the bar or kitchen for preparation can greatly reduce waiting times, making a restaurant more efficient. This allows management to better control and check in real time the number of customers in house, orders in progress, wait times and other important factors.

Warranty guarantee

A new POS systems should come with at least a 1 year warranty as standard, this covers all hardware. Software support is normally an extra cost and depending on the type of support package purchased will depend on the support offered. Ranging from email, phone live remote and onsite visits.

There is usually an option of extending the hardware support for a fee, giving your business peace of mind.
If you purchase a yearly subscription model, then these will normally come with a set standard software support included in the price and the option to add more cover for an extra cost.