Your Point of Sale system (POS) is the key to a smooth running operation. Not only does it help to keep the orders flowing and the cash coming in, but it can also boost your bottom line. While there isn’t a magic formula for restaurant profitability, these lesser-known features are guaranteed to make your life easier. Get ready to impact and increase your profit.
Marketing
Connect with customers, boost repeat visits and increase ticket averages. How? By marketing smarter, not harder. By tying your POS to your marketing program, get to know your customers better by building a database.
From top customers, to ordering history, to birthdays, allergies and more, your database can be customized and automated. To maximize profit potential, once you know who you want to market to, your POS makes it easy to communicate with customers.
Set up a rewards program for repeat customers, implement satisfaction surveys, or simply output your customer list to mailing labels or e-mail. With your POS on top of the details and organization, you can spend time getting creative.
Inventory
Gone are the days of endless lists made on dusty clipboards that seem to go missing just when you need them. Inventory is an inescapable part of the industry, and although your POS can’t do the actual counting for you, it can streamline the process and limit the hours you’ll spend bogged down with paperwork.
Track purchase orders, receipts, invoices, set up inventory and food controls, and make your purchasing process that much easier. For real-time reporting on ingredient quantities and accurate cost tracking, use your POS to generate inventory reports—so you can make all the right decisions regarding managing inventory costs.
Labor
Let’s be honest, restaurants can be a revolving door for employment. With a high-turnover rate, paperwork and tracking employee data can be disastrous. Your standard restaurant POS system will automatically give you timekeeping functions to feed your payroll system. Take it to the next level with enhanced management tools. With graphical daily and weekly schedule builders, use your POS to build your schedule or forecast a labor budget based on an hourly breakdown of projected sales and delivery count. Projected overtime can be set to alert managers and owners of potential conflicts. Graphs, alerts or on-the-spot reports, can also track if your labor costs are meeting your goals.
Don’t be afraid to demand more from your POS. Modern systems are full of amazing features. Get more out of your investment, make your life easier and increase profits by using your POS for more than just the basics.