When you’re choosing a POS system for your restaurant, there’s a lot to think about. Ultimately, you want to have a system that’s easy to use along with offering functions that will allow your business to expand and grow.
Simplify Order Taking
Gone are the days where servers take orders and hang them in the kitchen. It’s time-consuming, difficult to get accurate reporting, and makes it harder for the cooks. A reliable point of sale should make it easy for your servers to take the orders and get them into the system. Advanced systems will provide effective ways for the kitchen to get the orders, too. This includes sending tickets to different printers or showing the orders on a touchscreen for cooks to clear out when the order is complete.
Inventory Management
One of the least desirable tasks in a kitchen is to perform restaurant inventory. However, it’s a must in order to know how much food you have on hand. It’s the only way to get an accurate food cost report at the end of every week. Your POS can actually help you conduct inventory. This will help you to see what you’ve ordered and what food items are the most popular so that you can see how it should impact inventory.
Table Management for Hostesses
A good POS system can help you in all areas of your restaurant. Some of the advanced restaurant POS systems will make it so that you can manage the tables in your dining room. You can assign certain tables to certain servers. Your hosts can see which ones are empty and which ones are occupied. When the dining room has reached capacity, POS can then be used to manage the waitlist.
Obtain Quality Reports
All sorts of quality reports can be obtained when you use the POS for all aspects of your operations. You can even use it as time tracking software for everyone to clock in and out of their shifts. Reports can be run at the end of the week as well as in real-time to provide all sorts of important information:
- Sales reports
- Labor reports
- Inventory reports
- Most popular entrees reports
Consider Ease of Use
Restaurants are often known for their turnover. As such, you don’t want to choose an overly complicated POS system that’s going to require a lot of heavy training. It should be easy to use with a speedy interface. This will allow you to train your employees quickly on the system. Furthermore, you want to make sure that all of your managers, regardless of how computer-literate they are, can figure out how to pull the reports. Cloudscape Technologies can be a huge help with this as it’s quite easy to use.
Knowing what to look for when choosing from the different restaurant POS systems can make it easier to get a system that you can rely on. You can purchase a system with confidence knowing that it will provide you with simplicity within your operations as well as more comprehensive reports to make educated decisions about the business.
