For such a long time, most retail business owners thought of their point of sale system as a fancy cash register. With technology becoming more advanced, most innovations have become standard features within the Point of Sale industry. Here are a few more:
1. Scheduling Your Staff. Many restaurant POS packages includes the feature “staff scheduling”. You can expect to increase efficiency and dramatically reduce overall labor costs by controlling time-ins and time-outs, utilizing forecasting tools and control staffing levels. This feature allows accessing staff schedule with ease, as well as shifts and multiple job positions. You can tie in any number of security functions to any job position. Some packages allows you to post schedules to a website and even sends out a copy of the schedule to each staff. Keep your labor costs in check and increase employee performance by efficiently and effectively managing your time & attendance information.
2. Software Upgrade Assurance or SUA. SUA is a software maintenance program that gives you a distinct advantage when you purchase a POS system. You are able to help stretch your investment and prolong the life of your Restaurant POS system. Those who purchase a POS system along with a SUA plan will always have the latest version of their POS software. This basically keeps their POS system new. Every time you receive a software upgrade it is as though they just bought the latest POS system available with the newest, most up to date features for your restaurant. The most current features of a POS system set ensures that you have the best possible ROI by allowing you to have full advantage of what its POS software features offer.
One other very important feature of SUA programs is that no software purchase is required if you upgrade or replace a hardware. When hardware needs to be replaced there is a drastically reduced cost to upgrade.
The way these programs typically work is you pay a small fee per year for all these benefits. Most customers agree that they receive huge benefits that help reap the full return on your POS investment.
3. Restaurant Tip Handling. Some of the point of sale software products has a builtin tip tracking feature in their time in attendance module. Once a staff is set as a tipped employee, your POS system will require a tip declation before clock out. Any server who ring sales will get their total sales tracked. Tips collected through credit card sales are tracked and shown on the server closeout report. Prior to clock out, server/waiter will be shown their total sales for the day, tips collected and then will be asked to declare their cash tips. By this, you will be able to accurately track and manage all declared tips, charge tips and hours of work for every tipped staff.
4. Frequent Diner & Customer Loyalty Programs. As the restaurant owner you would like your point of sale system to provide accurate information on your customer’s number of visits, frequency of visits, their buying habits, entice repeat visits and purchases through reward programs. You are able to do all this while managing the programs and preventing “sweet hearting” by employees. Sweet hearting happens when an employee promises a deal to a customer in order to close a sale.
Some POS packages come standard with a frequent diner or customer loyalty package that does all these things and more. By expertly tracking down your customers and their buying habits, you can prevent retail loss. You can establish a database of guest’s information with an account number. You can use their phone numbers or whatever number system you desire to use. However, the most popular and secured method is by using magnetic cards with your restaurant logo on them. These cards may act as a constant reminder of your restaurant by having your business logo in their wallet or purse. The POS software will secure the reward programs you set in place to prevent your server/waiter from giving away food. Rewards are given only when earned through purchases, frequent visits or for items on your menu that you wish to highlight. By establishing reward programs takes your staff out of the game and puts you in charge.
If you pay enough attention to your business needs, you will find that there are so many ways you can do to help run your restaurant more efficiently. So stop wasting more time and money relying on POS system that doesn’t work for you, instead focus more on what restaurant technology best suit your needs.
The author is the VP of Customer Relations for POS-for-Restaurants.com. With over 20 years of restaurant experience, POS-for-Restaurants.com helping business owners you their technology to be more efficient and more profitable.
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