For the longest time, most retail business owners thought of their point of sale system as a fancy cash register. Since technology has become more advance and slowly becoming an essential part in the retail systems, most innovations have become standard features within the retail POS industry. Below are more tips that can help you out:
1. Scheduling Your Staff. Some restaurant POS packages includes a “staff scheduling” feature. 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 smooth feature allows accessing staff schedule with ease, as well as shifts and multiple job positions. You can also tie in any number of security functions to multiple job position. In addition, some of the packages allow you to post schedules to a website and even automatically email the schedule out to your staff. Keep your labor costs in check and increase employee performance by efficiently and effectively managing your time & attendance information.
2. Software Upgrade Assurance (SUA). SUA is a software maintenance program that gives you a distinct advantage when buying a POS system. It enables you to prolong the life of your restaurant POS system and help stretch your investment. Customers who are on an SUA plan will always have the most current software version. This basically keeps their POS system new. Every time you receive a software upgrade it is as though they just bought the latest and most current POS system available in the market with the newest, most up to date features your restaurant can greatly benefit from. The most current feature set ensures that you have the best possible ROI by allowing you to have full advantage of what its POS software features offer.
Another 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’s a drastically lesser cost for upgrading it.
These programs typically works on a yearly small fee to acquire their benefits. Most customers agree that they receive huge benefits that help reap the full return on your POS investment.
3. Proper Tip Handling. Some point of sale software products have tip tracking built into their time in attendance module. Once you set one of your staff as a tipped employee, the POS system will require a tip declaration prior to clock out. Servers and waiters who ring sales will get their total sales tracked. Tips collected through credit card sales are also tracked and shown on the server closeout report. Before signing off, the server/waiter will be shown their total sales, tips collected collected and then asked to declare their cash tips. By this, you will be able to accurately track and manage smoothly all declared tips, charge tips and hours of work for every tipped staff.
4. Frequent Diner & Customer Loyalty Programs. As the business owner you would like your point of sale system to provide accurate information on your customer’s number of visits, frequency of visits, buying habits, entice repeat visits and purchases using 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 make a sale.
Some of the restaurant POS packages come standard with a frequent diner or customer loyalty package that eases things within your business. By accurately tracking down your guests and their buying habits, you can prevent retail loss. You establish a database of account numbers using your guests information.. This number can be their phone number or whatever number system you desire to use. However, the most popular and most secure method is through magnetic cards with your business logo on them. These cards can act as a simple reminder of your restaurant to your customers by having your logo in their wallet or purse. The POS software will secure the reward programs you put in place to prevent your server or waiter from giving away food. Typically, rewards are earned customers who frequently visits or purchases on the menu you highlighted. By establishing reward programs takes your employees out of the game and place you in total control of everything.
As you can see, your business can be run more efficiently by using proper restaurant technology. There are many ways, methods you can use, to help you in better management of your business so you will never have to waste more of your valuable time and money.
The author is the Vice President of Customer Relations at POS-for-Restaurants.com — helping business owners use technology to be more efficient and more profitable with its 20 years of restaurant experience.
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