So you chose to purchase your restaurant POS Software Point of Sale (POS) scheme. Congratulations! A healthy POS scheme is at the core of any successful restaurant as the key location where you manage customer service, activities and transactions. Choosing the right point of sale system is one of the most major decisions you will make for your company but one that will affect your procedures and product in the coming years. But can you choose with so many choices on the market?
Here are seven key questions that you need to ask to ensure that you choose the right Restaurant POS Software and back office system for your restaurant, cafe or food service business.
1. What features do I need?
Point of Sale schemes have gone a long way from being merely money registers processing transactions and recording payments. Today, the Point of Sale is a necessary tool for speeding up operations, streamlining labor, increasing loyalty, inventory management, and defining customer experience. Therefore, it is not surprising that the average modern POS system offers many features. Time clock for employees, fingerprint login, mobile POS, client databases, internet ordering, recipes and ingredients management … all of these sound like nice characteristics to have, right? And yet, not all of them may be as useful to every business–after all, a full-service restaurant has very different needs from a café or pizzeria chain. Stop and ask yourself: what features do I really need before you go and pick the POS that does it all? Which features would support my company? Choose a scheme that suits your present needs and map your demands. You will save money and effort three times: during the development phase, during staff training and daily, as too many options at the POS may end up interfering with the routine tasks of your staff.
2. Is this POS Specially Designed for Restaurants?
Sales point systems aren’t “one size fits all.” Although some features prevalent in retail may adapt to the restaurant sector, there are usually very distinct requirements for shops and food service venues. Make sure you choose a Restaurant POS Software specifically created for your sector. A restaurant-built solution allows you to manage important daily duties readily, such as adding / removing ingredients from a dish, selling meal deals and combos (such as coffee and cake offers), dividing the bill, sending orders directly to the kitchen, and handling tables–and more. Don’t settle for a system you might manage with, but don’t succeed.
3. Is this Fast and Reliable?
The restaurant sector has everything to do with quality and velocity. If there is one thing you want to prevent during the rush on Saturday night, a slow or unresponsive point of sale scheme will delay the service and create a queue of grumpy clients. Ask when researching software alternatives:
- Is the interface intuitive and can it be tailored to the role of each employee member?
- Can it accept various types of payments, split bills, bills moving from bar to table, etc. easily?
- What characteristics does the service have to accelerate?
- What is the average transaction time?
- What if the link to the internet goes down?
- Can I still take orders and process sales-or am I going to end up having to take orders on paper sheets?
4. What is this investment?
A current POS system is a major undertaking, but this can pay off many times over. Ensure you investigate the Return on Investment (ROI) you could achieve before choosing the option with the lowest upfront investment. Even before analyzing its impact on your bottom line of the new technology, remember to consider several factors, including:
Time spent in Personnel Training: if you experience elevated staff turnover like the remainder of the restaurant sector, adopting an intuitive point-of-sale system that makes training fresh recruits fast and simple can bring excellent savings.
Reduced waste: are inventory management tools included in the new system? By ordering the correct amount of food and using what you have effectively, you can save a lot of cash.
Reduced waste: are inventory management tools included in the new system? By ordering the correct amount of food and using what you have effectively, you can save a lot of cash.
Time wasted aligning information: if you use one sales management scheme, another for stock, a third for personnel rosters, a fourth for your suppliers – and so on, you’ll end up spending a lot of time comparing distinct outputs and attempting to create sense of your figures. A process that integrates so many processes into a single end-to-end platform – and a single source of data! You can gain more understanding from your information and streamline your accounting, saving you many hours (and headaches!) in the process.
Related Blog: 6 SECRET TECHNIQUES TO IMPROVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE OF RESTAURANTS POS SOFTWARE
5. Can I communicate with one of your present clients?
When you read the marketing brochure, you get the feeling that everything can be done by all point of sales schemes. They are all flexible, agile, rich in features – and of course easy to use! Do not just take the word of the vendor for it: it is a good idea to ask for references during the selection phase. You will be given a list of current customers by the best software providers. Get their views, ask questions, and see first-hand how the Restaurant POS Software works–and if it fits your bill. Can’t decide yet? Drop us a line: our retail software experts in restaurant technology will gladly help you find the right solution for your needs.
