With the changing times and technology, POS Systems have become a necessity of every business out there. We know countless things need to be taken care of to ensure that a business or a store run properly. You have to administer, manage, and market your business. For the unversed, the place where customers pay for the services and products is called a point of sale system or POS system.
Now, coming to restaurant businesses, they are a little different from your regular neighbourhood retail store. While the customers wait for their orders, the hustle and bustle in the kitchen is super hectic. Every meal prepared uses a plethora of ingredients, whose inventory has to be kept in place. The customers’ orders have to be placed right. Marketing the right meals to the right set of people has to be done effectively to build a loyal customer base. All this sounds like a feat that’d be impossible to achieve manually. There’d always be a chance of errors in getting the orders right; it would be hard to keep track of customers’ preferences and track the inventory. And that’s why you should use a POS System in your restaurant.
Here are some major benefits of using a POS System in your restaurant:
– Customizing countless menu options: As someone who owns a restaurant, you surely know the importance of continually updating and customizing your menu. Who doesn’t want to go to a restaurant that offers post-work hours custom specials or weekend specials? This is a crucial practice to attract business and build a loyal customer base. You can update your current selections using a POS system. In fact, if you are running a restaurant across multiple locations, you can synchronize the menu for all your restaurants using a POS system.
– Tracking the inventory: As a restaurant owner, you know that your inventory is much more complex than other businesses. You need to track popular dishes as well as their ingredients. Restaurant POS systems help you in doing this. Keeping track of your inventory will help you ensure that your menu is always full. Using a POS system will ensure that your restaurant chefs have a steady supply of ingredients for all the dishes in your menu. A POS system also generates reports that will help you order the right amount of ingredients, which is a huge money saver.
– Floor management: Weekends, holidays, and sometimes the peak hours during weekdays can sometimes attract an overwhelming number of dine-in reservations, which can be quite a task to manage. Thanks to POS systems for restaurants, you don’t have to worry about managing any number of reservations. You can make a physical map of your dine-in restaurant, and people can make online reservations.
– Online orders’ integration: If your restaurant provides takeout service, there’s a chance you’re already using an online platform to accept orders. In this case, you must assimilate your online order platform into your restaurant’s POS system. This will be beneficial for your business as it will automate the process of accepting payments by integrating external ordering platforms. You can also have a credit card POS machine at your restaurant to ease your customers’ payment method.
– Track best-selling dishes: POS software helps you identify some of the most popular and in-demand items on your menu. This can help you keep their ingredients in stock and keep such items readily available when ordered.
– Changing and tracking orders in live mode: Sometimes, customers update or change their orders. The old POS systems used print tickets to place orders to the restaurant kitchen. Although a good enough communication method, you couldn’t update or change orders through it. It also didn’t allow you to track the preparation of a meal that’s been ordered. Using new POS systems, you can now make changes to the customer requests/orders directly from your POS system. This will save your staff time and energy, and they won’t have to head back to the kitchen every time a customer changes a request.
– Making accounting easy: Crunching numbers takes a lot of time and energy, and it’s a tedious and time-consuming process. Most businesses use integrated accounting software for this. To save more time, you should integrate your accounting software programs with your restaurant’s POS systems.
– Reducing human errors: Since there is a huge inventory to keep track of, there’s always a chance of human errors. There are also cases of employee theft which leads to inventory shrinkage. Using a POS system will store all the transactions on the computer. There won’t be any mistakes or calculation errors in your inventory. Everything from sales to refunds will be kept track of.
There are many point of sale machine companies out there that will provide you with the best POS service depending on the nature of your business. A POS swipe machine price ranges from Rs 2500 to Rs 84000. You can choose the one that fits your budget. There are also electronic POS applications that allow online customers to make digital payments through a mobile application.
These are some of the key benefits of using a POS system in your restaurant. As a modern and up-to-date POS system saves your staff’s time and energy, it can now be directed towards better customer service. This aids in building a meaningful relationship with the customer and building your business.
