Studying The Science of Retail Since 1979

Running a restaurant involves juggling numerous operational aspects, from managing orders to tracking inventory and ensuring customer satisfaction. A robust Point of Sale (POS) system is not just a tool but a mission critical partner in this dynamic environment. Here’s a comprehensive look at what makes a POS system the best choice for restaurants and the key features and benefits you should consider. 1. Intuitive User Interface Let’s face it, if you’re the owner or manager of a busy restaurant, you know that staff turnover is a thing. On Monday you can be training an employee that you’ll be replacing by Friday. (Honestly, it’s hard to keep the names straight.) The restaurant POS system needs to be easy enough for staff to navigate without a lot of training, and yet, strike the right balance of complexity and ease of use so that the POS still does everything you need it to do – specifically, manage orders accurately and efficiently while preventing errors, theft, and shrinkage. The majority of tasks should only be two or three button presses away, and screens should be colourful with intelligent design elements that help make functions self-explanatory to prevent people from getting completely lost and never lead people to irreversible errors. Key Feature: An easy-to-navigate interface that minimizes the learning curve for staff. Benefits: Simplifies onboarding for new employees, reducing training time and costs. 2. Comprehensive Menu Management Experienced restaurant managers running efficient food and beverage services understand that good menu management is incredibly important. A well-designed menu can either improve the effectiveness of a restaurant POS system while a poorly or lazily done menu can hinder accuracy, cause errors, shrinkage and cause the restaurant to unnecessarily leave money on the table. Updating the prices on today’s feature items, or updating the seasonal menu should not be a heavy lift. Items should be quick and easy to search for – even when you’re not completely sure what it’s called. You should be able to remove items from the menu without much trouble, either to reuse them again at a later date, or remove them from the list completely without much effort. Sizes, timing, context, discounts, descriptions, permissions, modifiers, pictures, and up-selling should all be accessible from no more than a couple of screens. Finally, you should only have to manage one menu for all your selling channels – bar POS, table service POS, self-service POS Kiosk, mobile POS app, and online ordering should all be updated from a single list, so that you can focus on managing the restaurant, not managing multiple POS systems. Key Feature: Flexible menu customization, including modifications for different times of the day or special events. Benefits: Better menus increase speed, reduce errors in order taking by ensuring clear, up-to-date screens, with better accessibility and fewer touches. 3. Mobile and Tableside Ordering This restaurant POS feature is more polarizing than any other – restaurant owners and managers are either 100% in favour of mobile ordering or dead set against it. But we regularly see it increase order accuracy, reduce labour cost, and increase table turns so dramatically in operations that when the benefit is properly calculated, it’s hard to refuse the feature.  For decades, service staff took the order twice: Once at the table, usually on a small pad of paper; then again after they walked back to the POS station. Mobile handheld POS empowers waitstaff to order food and beverage for any customer and any table from anywhere they are – whether they are tableside, line-busting, or answering the restaurant phone from the kitchen. The result is potentially a restaurant that can serve double the number of customers with the same number of staff, enabling the restaurant manager to reallocate labour to other tasks key to better service – kitchen staff, food runners, etc. Pro Tip: As the customer service improves and output increases, tips increase, making it easier to attract and retain staff. Key Feature: Take orders directly at the table or anywhere around the restaurant. Benefits: Speeds up order-taking and reduces errors, leading to quicker service and higher customer satisfaction. 4. Robust Reporting and Analytics To begin by saying that restaurant point of sale systems need to provide reports is cliché – they all do that. It’s true of course – the data is important. But, few restaurant managers ask the key question – “Specifically, what data is essential, and precisely what will be done with it when I have it?” Looking at multitudes of random reports in abstract is a waste of time without a use case. Data you won’t use because you don’t know how to use it is useless anyway. This of course is where your advisors, reputable POS dealer support, and good training often comes in. When assessing data availability in a restaurant POS system, the important thing is data integrity, availability, and uniformity of data across platforms. How quickly and easily can the restaurant run a report? Do I understand how to run a report intuitively or do I need a degree in data science? What happens when the POS terminal is offline? What happens when the restaurant is offline? If you can’t count on the data being available and accurate when you need it, the reporting system is irrelevant. Ensure that the reports in the back office are the same as the POS reporting – there’s no point in having a cloud system that enables you to run reports from HQ or your home office only to have problems reconciling the data between the staff at the restaurant and at the office. Lastly, ensure that the data is available to an API (Application Programing Interface) that will allow access to your data, and ensure that API isn’t out of reach – if you can’t afford the API it’s not very useful to you. 3rd party tool integrations such as PMS (Property Management Systems), labour scheduling, inventory management systems, and accounting interfaces can move data for you to the systems that need… Read More