Learning What Restaurant Point of Sale System Can Do For Your Business

Sept. 4, 2009 - PRLog -- Take Control Of Your Business And Grow Your Profits!

Restaurant Point of Sale (POS) Systems has many factors you must 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

Using the right POS system can give you a new level of control over your operations, increasing efficiency, boosting profits, and helping you fine-tune your business model. The wrong system, however, is just wasting time and money, and giving yourself a huge frustration.

In a sense, your POS system is a glorified cash register! The most basic POS system consisting of a computer, a cash drawer, receipt printer, and an input device such as a keyboard or scanner. In addition to being more efficient than the traditional cash registers, POS systems can create detailed reports which gives you all the information you will need to study your growth and make future plans for your business' success.

A POS system saves money, provide productivity gains, and can cut down the amount of time you spend away from the primary focus of your business.

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

Eliminating shrinkage

A computerized point of sale system can drastically cut down on shrinkage, the inventory that disappears from your store or restaurant due to theft, waste and employee misuse. Because employees will know that you're carefully tracking inventory, internal shrinkage will dwindle.

Improved accuracy

When it comes to pricing, you have to make sure that have the right price on every item you sold, a POS system can help ensure this. Your staff will no longer have to guess the price of an item, and you can change prices with just one tweak in the computer.

Get better margins

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

Knowing your stats

You can easily know which of your products have been sold today, yesterday, last week last month, and so on, with the help of a POS systems. It can even tell how much money is in the cash drawer as well as 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 alert you to reorder when stocks run low. 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

Collecting names and address of your best customers may come in handy in the near future. You may use this list for targeted advertising or for announcing incentive programs.

Reducing paperwork

The time you spend on 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

For retail, you can make checkouts quicker by using a barcode scanner and other POS features. Restaurants will find their order process greatly streamlined as orders are relayed automatically to the kitchen from the dining room. In both cases, you'll be making your customers happier with a faster and 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 proper training and analysis, even the most sophisticated POS system will be nothing more than a regular cash register.

Retail and Hospitality needs

The POS market is divided into two segments with very different needs: restaurants, bars, and hotels and other retail operations and hospitality businesses.

> Retail

Of these two segments, retails are the ones who needs simpler POS. Their transactions are completed all at once, and there is often less variation in the types of products they sell. Because there are some POS features retailers that specifically want to include the ability to support kits (e.g. 3 for $2 deals), returns and exchanges, and support for digital scales. If you run a business that sells items in a variety of styles, a POS system that supports matrixes would best suit your needs. 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

Efficiency is the key focus for casual restaurants. For retail-style restaurants like sub shops, a POS system can greatly increase accuracy and cut down on time-per-transaction unlike with hastily-scrawled order tabs being passed to the kitchen. For quick-service restaurants, a POS system would be required in order to live up to their name: a customers' order is entered on the terminal at the front which sends the order and displays them on a monitor at the food preparation area where the order is assembled and delivered to the appropriate 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 responsible for 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 would be an extra $900 on one busy night.

Return of Investment (ROI)

Migrating from your old system to a computers POS system is not as simple as it looks. There are several factors you need to consider and pitfalls to avoid. However, the return of investment (ROI) can really make it worth all the effort you put into it.

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The author of this article writes for POS-For-Restaurants.com, with over 20  years experience in restaurant point of sale systems, helping restaurant owners nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits..

Visit http://www.pos-for-restaurants.com for more information on how our national network of restaurant point of sale professionals can help your business achieve greater success in these difficult economic times.

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