What is A Restaurant Point of Sale System?
A Restaurant Point of Sale (or Point of Service) could be any restaurant POS equipment, hardware and software combined like an electronic cash register, that is used to process a transaction. A restaurant includes many factors which makes a business function as it is supposed to. A restaurant Point of Sale terminal is used to accelerate sales transactions and secure the customers payment. Point of Sale means the transaction point, any location within a retail establishment where transaction occurs.
Now, in a restaurant, there are lots of moving parts that’s involved for it’s performance. Having a restaurant POS Software can greatly help in managing staff attendance and performance, inventory, accounting and customers’ transaction information, helps any retail business owner improve business performance. How is that? With features that provides powerful tools to help manage employee and customer data, a restaurant POS system increases both efficiency and profits.
Satisfying Customers To Increase Profit
Customer satisfaction is a very important factor for any retail business, meeting your customers’ expectations can increase customer return, wich will definitely increase your profit. The more customer returns you get, the higher your profit is! So your job, as the owner, is to make sure your employees are properly and accurately giving orders, providing assistance to customers and make an overall excellent performance all the time. With the use of a restaurant POS software, the ones with touch screen technology, decreases ordering time by 50% and increases ordering accuracy.
Because the goal of increasing profit, many retail point of sale vendors have developed new systems that can produce excellent results like the POS systems that enables you to integrate your accounting software such as QuickBooks and Peachtree. With a POS software like these, you can rest assured that all your financial data will always be up-to-date and accurate, you can even print sales report on any POS terminal just with the touch of a button!
Improving inventory management is really difficult. Manual handling and updating of your inventory sure is a lot of hassle, it’s both time consuming and costly. By installing a POS software that can help you manage your inventory, you will see and increase in efficiency with its advance management tools, you can associate any information with the items as well, such as purchase date or date of expiry, you will never have to back to manual again.
Difficulties with ordering system. Placing an order should have the right timing, ordering too late can cause you to run out of an available item, order too soon can cause a risk of the item going bad. Installing automated inventory management enables you to increase the efficiency of your products orders, set a special alert to notify you and your employees when you’re about to run out of products and the ones that needs immediate re-ordering, as well as set notification when expiration dates are nearing. So if your restaurant still doesn’t have a inventory management installed as part of your POS system the time is NOW to do so.
Fighting Leakage With The Help Of Good Restaurant POS Solutions!
Decrease shrinkage up to 10% by having a good restaurant POS solution to back back up your business. And because every data is being digitally recorded, you can have a full report on who processed a transaction and if the transaction made is accurate. By this, you are assured when it comes to the safety of your profit and can easily investigate profit loss.
The information I gave you is just the beginning of what a restaurant POS system is and the importance of having a POS software for your business. Get advice and do your research online before making your final decision on any POS system since it making the WRONG decision can cost you in the long run. You can also check retail systems verdons online and request for a free POS system quote before buying one from your local supplier. By this, you can get competitive price lists and avoid buying expensive restaurant POS equipment that doesn’t work for your business.
For more information or to have a local POS professional serving the restaurant industry in your area help you go to POS-For-Restaurants.com
Restaurant POS Solutions: Will credit cards soon be obsolete?
Will Credit Cards Go Obsolete With This New Payment Method?
A leading provider of advanced, open-standard contactless chip technologies, Contactless and a global leader in electronic commerce and payment processing services, First Data, have announced that they made a three-year agreement into developing contactless payment stickers that will be marketed by First Data as GO-Tag products. On the agreement, INSIDE is to supply the MicroPass payment sticker prelams only to First Data-qualified card manufacturers for production.
The agreement leverages the core technology from INSIDE Contactless and the issuing and transaction processing power of First Data. First Data will be marketing and distributing GO-Tag products to financial institutions, major U.S. merchants, and other distribution channels in a variety of form factors.
The general manager of Mobile Commerce and Point of Sale Solutions for First Data, Barry McCarthy, said that “First Data’s GO-Tag Solution represents an important step in the evolution from today’s plastic cards and fobs, offering a bridge to the future of mobile payments”. “Our partnership with INSIDE Contactless enables us to offer consumers an opportunity to turn just about any personal item, from a mobile phone to an employee ID badge, into a payment device.”
According to Charles Walton, executive vice president of payments for INSIDE Contactless, the agreement highlighted the versatility of the MicroPass platform to support a variety of contactless payment applications and form factors, also stickers.
Since Contactless credit card technology becomes more common in the marketplace, it would be a good idea to update your restaurant POS system with them in the near future. And we all know that customer service is all about the speed and fast transaction to a restaurant point of sale terminal, the better the service is the better your customer experience will reflect on the value of your services.
The author of this article is the VP of Customer Relations at POS-For-Restaurants.com with over 20 years experience helping restaurants nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits using restaurant POS systems.
You may visit POS-For-Restaurants.com for more information on how our national network of restaurant point of sale experts can help your business achieve greater success in these difficult economic times.
How to increase your bottom line by proper inventory controlling
One major aspect to running a profitable restaurant is managing the controllable costs, such as food, labor and supplies. With these, you’ll probably experience more difficulties controlling food.
To handle food costs effectively, an operator needs to simultaneously monitor portion sizes, prevent theft, watch waste and order efficiently.
An inventory software will be able to help you identify precisely when your food costs are out of line. Using inventory control software will typically save you 1 to 2 percent of sales, and may perhaps save you much more. And it is savings that drops straight to your bottom line as profit.
A POS-based inventory control system operators can spot and solve food cost problems that might not become noticeable by simply focusing on portion control. When your staff knows that the system is keeping track, it discourages both waste and theft.
A single restaurateur will be able to realize this lesson, when it comes to food cost problems, probably a week of using inventory control software.
Inside his restaurant, he’s portion controlling, yield testing and conducting physical inventory, but it wasn’t until he uses an inventory software where he finds out his inventory was out by exactly 20 pounds of pasta each week; coincidentally, the exact weight of a box. Upon knowing, it was relatively that easy to specify the source of the problem: a prep cook who was helping himself to a box of shrimp every Saturday evening.
Boosting your bottom line
In a typical restaurant point of sale inventory control program, the operator sets up the software by first entering their recipes and product costs. The system then tracks the ideal usage based on those recipes and the restaurant’s actual sales.
This software is also able to track product usage in situations where some orders is not in line with the standard recipe. The operator then can do a physical inventory and generate reports comparing that inventory with the calculated ideal usage in order to spot variances. The operator can even set the software to track as many items as he wants.
Mostly in restaurants, their top 10 items 80 percent of their food cost problem. And you can schedule nightly counts of key items and weekly or even monthly counts of some other items.
Even an ounce of over-portioning 1 item per order can mean hundreds of dollars in a month for restaurants. If you eliminate over-portioning on 100 orders per day for 30 days on a .67 per pound of an item, may well add up to more than 0.00 in savings or 00.00 in a year!
Better tracking and controls also can help an operator reduce the amount of stock they keep on hand, reducing waste and freeing up cash for other things. Losses due to carrying too much excess inventory can add up to a loss of between 2 percent and 5 percent on an average operator’s profit-and-loss statement.
We’ve assisted a client before who’s menu is fairly extensive and had lots of work for setting up, but after helping them program their system as it should be, we were able to drop their food cost by 2 to 4 percent – all of which went to their bottom-line profits.
So if you have a restaurant POS system or are considering a purchase make sure you know how to and understand the additional profits that you can obtain by learning and using the inventory module of the system correctly.
The author of this article writes for POS-For-Restaurants.com, with over 20 years experience in restaurant point of sale systems, helping restaurant owners nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits..
To learn on how our national POS network of restaurant point of sale specialists can help your business achieve greater success in these difficult economic times, visit POS-For-Restaurants.com.