Point of Sale Systems: Taking Control Of Your Business

Aug. 28, 2009 - PRLog -- Point of Sale Systems: Taking Control Of Your Business

Restaurant Point of Sale (POS) Systems has many factors to consider in order to run a successful business. Let our POS experts teach you how you can take control of your business, be more efficient and increase your profits without having to suffer from costly mistakes.

Taking Control of Your Business

Having the right POS system will provide a new level of control over your operations, it helps fine-tune your business model, boost your profits, as well as your efficiency. A wrong system is just wasting time and money, and giving yourself a huge frustration.

In a sense, your POS system is a glorified cash register! The basic POS system you'll see in any quick service restaurants, which consists of a computer, cash drawer, receipt printer, and an input device like a keyboard or scanner. In addition to being more efficient than a regular cash register, POS systems are able to create detailed reports which can help you plan for better solutions for your business.

POS systems can save you a great amount of money, increase your profits, and lessens the amount of time you spend from one business plan to the next.

Save more money, have more control over your business, and be more productive; sounds like an excellent combination for your business, right? Well here are some of the best ways a modern point of sale (POS) system can help you out.

Eliminate shrinkage

A computerized point of sale system can drastically cut down on shrinkage, the inventory missing from your store or restaurant due to theft, waste and employee misuse. And since your employees will know that inventory is carefully tracked, internal shrinkage will dwindle.

Improve accuracy

With a POS system, you are assured of selling the correct price on any item in your store or on your menu. Your staff will no longer have to guess the price of an item, and prices can easily be change with a single click of the mouse.

Get better margins

Having a detailed sales report, you can focus more on the higher-margin items. By moving items within a retail location, or promoting poor-performing dishes in a restaurant, you can help boost sales of well performing items.

Know where you stand

Any you wish to, your POS system can instantly tell you how many of a particular product have you sold today (or last week, or last month), how much money you have in your cash drawer, and how much of that money is profit.

Manage inventory better

Detailed sales reports make it much easier for you to keep the right stock on hand. Track your remaining inventory, spot sales trends, and use historical data to better forecast your needs. Your POS software can be set to alert you when when stocks run low so you can reorder for them. There are many store owners who are caught by surprises when they have this data, because they think that they know exactly what trends affect them.

Building a customer list

Gather names and address of your regular customers, you might never know when they'll come in handy! You can use it for targeted advertising or incentive programs.

Reduce paperwork

Spending time doing inventory, sales figures, and other repetitive but important paperworks can be lessen by using a POS system. It can provide you both time and peace of mind.

Efficiency in transactions

In a retail settings, checkouts can be made quicker if you use a barcode scanner and other POS features to aid you. And since processes are greatly streamlined, all orders from the dining room is quick and accurately delivered to the kitchen. In both cases, your customers get faster, more accurate service.

You have to keep in mind that these benefits requires a commitment to utilizing the POS system capabilities to their fullest. Without appropriate training and ongoing analysis, even the most sophisticated POS system will be no more useful than a basic cash register.

Retail vs. Hospitality Needs

Since there are two segments when it comes to the POS market, they require different needs: restaurants, bars, and hotels and other retail operations and hospitality businesses.

Retail

Of these two segments, retails are the ones who uses simpler POS. Because they use less variation in the types of products they sell and process transactions all at once. Because there are some POS features retailers that specifically want to include the ability to support kits (e.g. 3 for $2 deals), support for digital scales and returns/exchanges. Your POS system will have to support matrixes if you sell items that come in a variety of styles, like clothing or shoes. For example, matrixes let you create one inventory and price entry for a particular sweater, but still track sales according to size and color.

Hospitality

Depending on the type of establishment, restaurants and other hospitality businesses have different requirements from POS systems.

Efficiency is the key focus for casual restaurants. For retail-style restaurants like sub shops, POS systems that relay inputted orders cut down on time-per-transaction and reduce the errors that can happen when hastily-scrawled orders are passed back to the kitchen. For quick-service restaurants, a POS system would be required to meet success: orders taken on terminals in the front are automatically displayed on monitors of the kitchen, ready to be quickly assembled and delivered to the customer.

For table-service restaurants and fine dining, POS requirements are somewhat different. Their needs includes the ability to create and store open checks, as parties order more over time, and to determine which waiter is handling which table. The efficiency gains from better management can be impressive. If a restaurant with 20 tables and an average check of $45 can increase turnover by one party per table, that is an extra $900 on a busy night.

Return of Investment (ROI)

Migrating from your old system to a computers POS system isn't that easy. There are several factors you need to consider and pitfalls to avoid. But the return of investment (ROI) can really make it worth the time and effort.

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The author of this article is the Vice-President of Customer Relations at http://www.pos-for-restaurants.com with over 20 years of experience serving restaurants of all types throughout the U.S.

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