It is needless to mention how inevitable the presence of a restaurant management software has become, for a restaurant. A lot of restaurateurs believe that a restaurant POS not only makes their work easier but also helps them expand their business. This is most certainly true as most of the restaurant chains can’t even think of operating and expanding without their dear restaurant POS.
Since a restaurant POS helps you create multiple reports for you, standardizes your operations, analyze your staff’s performances, optimizes your order preparation time to get a number of orders at the same time and whatnot, it definitely aids in growing your business.
Let’s look at each of the small ways that your POS is helping you in, which eventually make a huge impact on your business.
Growing Your Restaurant Operations Through Your POS
Having said that, we would also like to mention that not all the restaurant management software provides you with everything that you’re looking for. You must have an eagle’s eye to look for the kind of features you’re hunting for. We have elaborated a few features that should be on the top of your list, that directly impact acing up your business.
i) Multiple Outlet Management
The first and foremost is for the restaurant chain owners. We know how dreading it could be to manage even more than one outlet, and a restaurant chain at that. You must choose a restaurant POS that makes it easy for you to manage all your outlets from the same place. An ideal restaurant POS brings information about all your different outlets all on one screen.
Secondly, a restaurant POS also helps in adding a particular outlet in no time since it has all standardized everything earlier. A restaurant POS standardizes everything from how your recipes look, the processes at your restaurant and so on. This standardization helps to keep the process easier and quicker as you only have to add a replica of your other outlets now.
ii) Streamlined Supply Chain Operations
A restaurant POS helps to streamline operations majorly by managing the restaurant supply chain operations. Managing everything from the stock and inventory to vendors to purchase chain and everything that revolves around helps in running a restaurant smoothly. This mostly holds true for restaurant chains and franchises where you are dealing with multiple vendors and multiple outlets at that.
Let’s say you get your raw material from a couple of vendors for one of your outlets. You need to have a separate list of these vendors, the raw materials you need to get from them, the quantity, price, and everything in one database so that there is no confusion thereafter. A restaurant POS helps you achieve exactly that with the least possibility of human error.
You could also manage the quantity of raw material that is used in your particular outlet. These are the cases where one of your outlets might be selling more of a single dish as compared to the others. Having a clean database of what’s being sold where directly helps in maintaining your raw material purchases.
iii) Franchise Management
Getting a franchise restaurant is one of the easiest ways of stepping into the restaurant space. For someone who’s just starting to get insights into the restaurant industry, a franchise would be able to give him/her the complete idea of how a restaurant works with the least possible risks.
The incorporation of a restaurant POS helps you to grow your franchise business like no other. As a franchise owner, you get a set of rules and instructions on how to operate your particular outlet. However, you still need to have a business plan and a good POS system to able to cope up with the brand sales.
Also, since you’re just starting with your restaurant franchise business, you need to look into a couple of features in your restaurant POS. An ideal POS helps you calculate royalty automatically, contract management, serves with a good platform for billing and transaction. One important thing to take care of while running a franchise outlet is the basic norms, recipes and instructions to be followed. This is achieved through restaurant POS as everything is standardized.
iv) Reporting
The most important aspect of even thinking of expanding your restaurant business or any business at that is to look at your past reports. Analyzing your sales reports make it possible for you to see the growth curve clearly, and identify the loopholes of your business model if any.
The use of technology helps you get a hundred reports including the total footfall of your restaurant, total sales, the turnover time of your restaurant and the peak hours. Some reports that you need to follow religiously while thinking of expanding your business is the sales reports, expenses reports, and your inventory reports.
You would be in a position to make a better decision if you had read all the previous reports and made sure that there are no backlogs or errors in your current business model.
Features You Must Look For In Your Restaurant POS
After establishing the need for a restaurant POS in scaling up your restaurant business, you should now understand how to look for an ideal restaurant POS. The better the technology you invest in at your restaurant, the more efficient it is for your restaurant business in the long run. Let’s look at each of these features and why you need them individually.
i) Flexibility
Different customers tend to use different mediums while paying for their bills. It is observed that with the increased dependency on virtual money and online wallets, only 10% of customers like to pay their bills through cash. This is why your restaurant POS should be able to give you a platform where your customers can pay using their cards, online wallets, mobile applications, contactless payments and so on.
An ideal restaurant POS must give you the flexibility to be able to work with different options, especially with transactions and orders. Many restaurants and bars also let their customers order through a tablet to ensure that there are absolute transparency and precision.
ii) User-friendly
Along with being flexible, an ideal restaurant POS is the one that isn’t too complicated to run. It shouldn’t be a complex software that your first line staff has difficulties to work with it. Since your first line of the staff is generally not that tech-savvy, your restaurant POS should be easy enough for them to operate it well.
iii) Multiple Outlet Management
While scaling your business, you tend to think of adding more outlets to your restaurant chain. As a restaurant chain owner, you should be able to manage all your outlets from a single place. You should be able to see what’s going on at each of your outlets even while you’re not present at any one of them.
This could be accomplished through a real-time report analysis features present in many restaurant POS software. Along with that, you would be able to see which outlet is performing better than the other and could use that database to figure out why.
iv) Quick To Be Implemented
A traditional POS tacks a couple of days to be fully implemented and running. Although with the advancement of technology, you are now able to work in a cloud-based POS software. A cloud-based POS takes only a couple of hours for implementation and setting up, ensuring minimum wastage of time, even if someone is migrating to a new POS.
v) Additional Features That You Require According To Your Restaurant
Other additional features that you should be looking for in your restaurant POS could revolve around the type of restaurant you own. For example, a bar would require the feature of anti-theft in your POS to ensure there is the least possible liquor theft at the bar. A casual dining restaurant would require a consistent report, so a real-time report analysis would work wonders for them.
Fine dining, on the other hand, thrives on table reservations, so your POS should be able to reserve tables at your restaurant in the most efficient possible way.
All in all, using the right restaurant POS could help you escalate your business to another level if used properly. You must think about all the features that you’re looking for in your ideal restaurant POS before investing in one.
SmartBiz Restaurant Management Software is able to provide you with all the above mentioned points and more.