Double Sales Using Your Restaurant POS

For such a long time, most retail business owners thought of their POS system as a fancy cash register. Since technology has become more advance and slowly becoming a necessity in the retail systems, most innovations have become a standard feature within the retail POS industry. Here are a few more:

1. Scheduling Your Staff. Many restaurant POS packages include some level of "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 nice little feature allows easy schedule access, unlimited shifts and multiple job positions for each employee. You can also tie in any number of security functions to multiple job position. Some packages allows you to post schedules to a website and even sends out a copy of the schedule to each staff. Focus more on lowering labor cost and increasing employee performance by efficiently and effectively managing your time & attendance information.

Next-generation Point Of Sale cash register system using iPad and iPod touch : DigInfo

2. Software Upgrade Assurance or SUA. SUA can give a bit different kind of advantage when you purchase a POS system. You are able to help stretch your investment and prolong the life of your restaurant point of sale system. Customers who are on an 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 and most current POS system available with the newest and 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 take full advantage of the power the POS software offers.

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's a drastically lesser cost for upgrading it.

The way these programs typically work is you pay a small fee per year for all these benefits. Ma customers are satisfied receiving the huge benefits of this program which helps your business reap the full return on their POS investment.

3. Restaurant Tip Handling. Some of the POS software products has a builtin tip tracking feature in 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 clocking out. Servers and waiters who ring sales will have their total sales tracked. Tips collected through credit card sales are tracked and shown on the server closeout report. Prior to clock out, the servers or waiters will be shown their total sales, the charge tips collected collected and then asked to declare their cash tips. This functionality will help you enforce tip regulations and manage the tracking declared tips, charge tips and hours worked for every tipped employee.

4. Customer Loyalty Programs! As the business owner you would like your POS system to provide accurate information on your customer's number and 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.

Some POS packages come standard with a frequent diner or customer loyalty package that does all these things and more. By accurately tracking down your customers and their buying habits, you can prevent retail loss. Establish a database of guest's information with an account number. It can be their phone numbers or whatever number system you desire to use. However, the most popular and most secure method is through 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 and preventing the server or 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. Establishing restaurant reward programs takes your staff out of the game and place you in charge of everything.

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 of your valuable time and money on unreliable POS systems and focus more on what restaurant technology best suit your needs.