Benefits Of POS In Restaurant Business

Posted on Apr 28 2015 - 9:57am by Editorial Staff

Restaurant

If you are the owner of a restaurant, then you must be aware that apart from serving delicious food, there are hundreds of other little things that can make or break your restaurant.  At no point can you shy away from looking into the little intricacies that make your restaurant popular among its visitors and nothing, absolutely nothing, in the restaurant should take your focus away from your customers.  For all the routine tasks in the restaurant, you can always have a restaurant point of sale (POS) system installed. Is a POS system really beneficial? Well, read this post to know more.

What is a POS?

Traditionally, restaurants and other establishments would have cash registers that would help them keep the cash safe and help them account for their sales.  As people moved towards plastic money, electronics entered the cash register in the form of credit card readers. Accounting took a new form as computing power was attached to the cash register and from this the new Point of Sale (POS) system was born. In the modern context, say a fast food joint, the POS is where you can place your order, claim discounts using coupons and also pay your dues. But for a restaurant, it can do much more.

Work with your kitchen

A restaurant POS can work with your kitchen via a printer or display screen and allow your staff to start preparing on the dishes as they are ordered.  Your waiting staff need not make a special trip to the kitchen just to pass on the order. Rather, in an integrated system, your kitchen can also list special items available for your waiting staff to promote or even flag dishes that are not available to save them from embarrassment.

Generate reports

Since your ordering process can move online with a restaurant POS, at any given time, you can exactly know what is happening in your restaurant.  From knowing which dishes sold the most in the month to which supplies are running low this week, a POS can give you all the reports you need. Whether people like ordering combos or go the a la carte way or are some dishes ordered mostly during weekends is the kind of information you POS can generate and analyse for you.

Wait on Waiters

At the end of the day, it is your waiting staff that has exerted the most. Since they have no subordinates who can take their orders, a POS can remain on alert for orders from them. So, whether it is generating the check for a particular table or processing credit card transaction for bill payment, your restaurant POS can handle it all and handle it well. Additionally, it can work as the station for your waiting staff, who can sign in and out for their day on the POS itself and also generate your staff’s payrolls for you.

Futuristic POS

With mobile devices now available in everyone’s reach, restaurant POS systems are moving towards a mobile future. Companies now offer apps and entire restaurant management software on portable devices such as iPads that can help you run your business in a more modern way. What is even better that these new systems cost a fraction of what a digital POS system cost and therefore can be used by restaurants big or small.

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Editorial Staff at I2Mag is a team of subject experts.