Running a restaurant business is a tough ordeal. You feel like a conductor of a symphony orchestra, meticulously orchestrating the entire performance and communicating his/her vision of how a musical piece should sound like to all the musicians; thereby creating a symphony. Running a successful restaurant business requires flawless coordination between a team of professionals who understand and believe in the vision of the restaurant.
Imagine you are the chef-owner of a restaurant that you launched over a year ago. After garnering some initial impressive traction, the restaurant’s sales have started to plateau, much to your dismay. You are still trying to figure out what you’re doing wrong. You have checked all the right boxes that are typically required for running a successful restaurant, be it ensuring consistent quality, effective guest management, balanced resource management, or keeping a tab on expenses.
Imagine if you could handle all these operations on a single platform and that too remotely. That would be the key to unlocking the maximum productivity of your restaurant—an advanced POS system.
POS—The Secret Sauce
An advanced Point Of Sale (POS) system is an absolute necessity for running your restaurant more efficiently and thereby increasing your revenue. The Entrepreneur Magazine defines POS system as “a computerized network operated by a main computer and linked to several checkout terminals.”
Here’s what an advanced POS system can do for your restaurant:
- It offers a secure and convenient mode of order payments and transactions.
- It helps in inventory analysis and budget management.
- It helps in reducing wastage, thereby cutting down your expenses.
- Helps manage the time and payroll management of your staff.
- Streamlines the accounting process and generates a detailed business report
- Allows customization of menus.
- Helps offers a personalized customer experience, thereby enhancing the customer loyalty quotient.
- Acts as a communication link between the frontend (seating area) and the backend (production zone) of your restaurant.
- Cloud-based POS systems offer increased data security, remote access, centralized infrastructure in case you have multiple restaurants.
- It also offers increased mobility by allowing the addition of multiple mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to your POS system.
According to Hospitality Technology’s 2018 POS Software Trends Report, 61 percent of merchants said they want their next POS system to be cloud-based. In order to further streamline your restaurant operation, you can integrate your POS system with all the other restaurant management tools. POS integration reinforces your current POS system and makes it more versatile and efficient, much like a Swiss army knife of restaurant management.
POS Is The Real Boss
David Henkes is a senior principal at foodservice industry analyst firm Technomic. He told Washington Post that “for a number of years, the rate of restaurant growth has exceeded population growth. Too many restaurants are chasing too few consumer dollars.”
The restaurant industry is an industry that is constantly changing, extremely crowded, and offers razor-thin profit margins. In order to stay relevant in this industry, you can’t afford to be complacent. You need to keep updating and honing your restaurant management tools, especially your POS system.
