5 Benefits of POS Systems for Restaurants (This is How a POS Helps Make Your Restaurant Profitable)
November 2, 2018
Point of sale (POS) systems have a number of advantages for restaurant management that make them all but essential. When you put them together, they result in one critical benefit: Your restaurant will be more profitable. Here’s the breakdown of 5 advantages to using a restaurant POS.
#1. Restaurant POS Inventory Management
Food products – being perishable, easy to ruin, and susceptible to clandestine consumption – make restaurant inventory management notoriously difficult. The inventory management POS feature does the heavy lifting of inventory management by tracking inventory in real time.
As each order is closed, your POS system will automatically subtract product from your inventory. You can even set up notifications to alert you when inventory needs to be reordered or set up auto-orders for when inventory hits a certain level.
Inventory management also tracks the speed that inventory leaves your restaurant, giving you hard data on what menu items are selling and which aren’t. Use this data to make sure you’re always stocked on essential product while not overstocked on product that spoils or expires.
As you drill down, you can get data on recipe and plate costs giving facts on what’s really turning a profit.
You can also create inventory variance reports, which helps you get a handle on your actual inventory in light of overportioning, theft, or preparation mistakes.
When you’re effectively using your restaurant POS for inventory management, you can drastically reduce the product waste/loss that is the downfall of so many restaurants.
#2. Online Ordering Integration
As online ordering gets easier and more popular, restaurants need an efficient way to offer this service.
Most restaurants use third party vendors for online ordering, but this tends to be poorly streamlined for both customers and restaurants.
For customers, it means they get taken to another website to actually place their order. A lot of online orders get dropped because customers don’t want to deal with another website just to order a meal.
POS integrated features eliminate the need for third-party online ordering vendors. That means no fees. You also save time and effort on your employees’ and customers’ end by guaranteeing that orders will only have to be entered in once (instead of it having to re-enter the order into your POS). This makes the entire process faster and more accurate.
#3. Tableside and Kiosk Ordering
Tableside and kiosk ordering decreases wait times and increases security. This is a natural for the mobile nature of POS systems.
With the implementation of EMV chip cards, consumers are less willing to allow their card to leave their sight. Allowing customers to check out themselves not only decreases their risk of card theft, but also allows them to quickly review their bill, pay, and leave their table without delay, as opposed to waiting for their server to close out their check.
Kiosk ordering is also perfect for food trucks or other offsite events. Some counter service restaurants are using in-house kiosks to eliminate the need for cashier staff. All of this also fits into online ordering, allowing customers to order take-out ahead then pick up their order without delay.
#4. Staffing
Another profit drain for many restaurants is the problem of either over or understaffing. Too many people on the floor means you’re paying wages for unneeded workers, and too few can lead to disastrous service issues.
A restaurant POS system helps you understand how many employees you need on hand, helping you control labor costs. Through the reports and analytics available on your POS system, you’ll get hard data on high and low traffic periods, allowing you to plan hiring and schedules well in advance.
#5. Theft Reduction
Every restaurant eventually deals with the problem of employee theft. It may start with pilfering food, then go as far as register skimming, short ringing, or voids after closeouts. If you have a bar, the problem of alcohol theft alone can destroy profit margins.
POS software, with its ability to track every order and connect it to current inventories, makes employee theft far easier to detect. First, you’ll simply be able to match actual inventory to sales and see patterns that relate to certain employees being on the clock. When inventory fails to match sales volumes you’ll have data showing staff may be helping themselves.
Or, for example, you’ll be able to see if one person is voiding transactions frequently and if they’re doing it at odd hours. If you’re having a problem with the short ring (such as when a bartender takes an order for an expensive brandy and serves it but rings in a cheap brandy, pocketing the difference) you can use your POS to do a blind closeout, where the employee must reconcile the amount in the cash drawer without knowing what the POS tracked.
With a robust POS, you can inform employees that sales and inventory are being carefully tracked and tied to them individually. Just knowing that they’re more likely to get caught will prevent a lot of theft at your restaurant.
Wrap Up
The advantages of using POS for your restaurant can be summed up in two words. Data and reporting.
A point of sale system is a digitized method for processing transactions. That means that every action within the system is trackable and interconnected. It also means a great deal of automation. Sell a steak, and your steak inventory is automatically updated. Likewise, somebody steals a steak, and you have hard data on the discrepancy.
Add to this the mobile nature of being able to take payments on tablets, kiosks or online and you have the payment system of the modern restaurant.
Learn more about Marketing 360 Payments® and our POS and payment systems.
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