How Many Restaurant POS Stations Should I Buy?

• Considering peak customer volume
  You must plan the number of stations based on peak business. If you don’t you won’t be able to sufficiently handle the flow of customers during these periods.
• The number of staff taking orders
  In a table service environment we suggest 1 station per 3-5 servers. High volume areas such as bars and cashier stations may need to have a dedicated station for that purpose. Switching from an ordinary cash register to a POS system, many people make the mistake of forgetting that their POS system will not only be used for cashing people out, but will now be used for order entry as well.
• Managing restaurant layout wisely
  If you have a bar you can bet the bartender will need his or her own station. Other stations should be located where servers can easily get at them.
• Assigning stations effectively where customers pay for their meals
  Having proper locations where customers can pay for their meals is also important, you don’t want to keep them waiting do you? For paying at the front, you should have one or two dedicated cashier stations faster transactions.

Which style of POS computer is best?

• Desktop: the standard desktop type.
  • Least expensive computer option
  • Has onsite warranty for 3 years
  • Can easily be kept hidden under a counter, so it will not cause delay for any transactions
  • Has greater flexibility for addition of extra ports
  • Latest CPU speeds and memory
  • Screen and computer are separate; in case of technical difficulties problems are isolated.
• Small form factor (SFF): smaller than desktops.
  • Compared to the standard computer, SFF is more stylish
  • Has 3 years standard onsite warranty
  • More Space Saving
  • Fewer options for expandability
  • Latest CPU speeds and memory
  • Screen and computer are separate; so you can easily isolate which ones has technical problems.
• All-in-ones: the combination of computer with touchscreen technology.
  • Most stylish option with fewer wires and least space required
  • 1–2 Year Manufacturers Warranty (Not onsite)
  • Comes standard with sufficient ports for almost any operation
  • CPU speed is generally slower than the other two options but sufficient for the Point of Sale needs.
  • Screen and computer are combined

How many cash is ideal for my retail business?

• This is probably fairly self-evident, but unless your servers carry their own cash bank you should have a cash drawer at every station you want to use to end transactions.

Should I consider having integrated debit cards?

• Using your POS systems to process credit card transactions allows you to keep records of every transaction you process in one convenient location.
• You can reduce 3-4 seconds per transaction using with the advance of high speed internet.
• In case you do not have high speed internet, a standalone terminal can be used for processing.

How many printers should I have?

• Having one printer for your kitchen would be enough for your restaurant, not unless you have different sections serving different dishes inside your kitchen then it would be better if you place printers on all sections.
• As an example, you can have all your starters print on one printer and all your main dish printed on another.
• For kitchens and bars, it is highly recommended that you use impact printers instead of thermal printers. Because their loud printing alerts cooks and bartenders of an incoming order, and since tickets printed on thermal printers becomes unreadable when exposed to heat.

Is it essential to have more than 1 receipt printer?

• Having a receipt printer at every station would be better than just having one.

Do I need a back office computer?

• Having a back office computer allows managers to access POS systems for checking inventory levels, changing a menu, and even adjusting employee clock times.
• It’s not quite necessary to have a back office computer for your restaurant, if you have less than 4 stations.. However, it’s a good idea to host the database on a back office computer if you do have 4 or more stations so none of your stations will suffer the extra load of running your database.

 

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More information is available at POS-For-Restaurants.com

The author of this article is the Vice-President of Customer Relations at POS-For-Restaurants with over 20 years of experience serving restaurants of all types and sizes throughout the U.S.

Less purchases can have as dramatic an effect on your retail or hospitality business as a point of sale (POS) system. Let our Point Of Sale experts teach you how you can take control of your business, be more efficient and increase your profits without having to spend a great amount of money on POS systems.

Taking Control of Your Business

The right POS system will give you a new level of control over your operations, increasing efficiency, boosting profits, and helping you fine-tune your business model. A wrong system can be a waste of money and a source of ongoing frustration.

In a sense, your POS system is a glorified cash register! The basic POS system you see in any establishment in the food industry, that consists of a computer, cash drawer, receipt printer, keyboard and/or a scanner. In addition to being more efficient than a regular cash register, POS systems are able to create detailed reports which can help you in making decisions.

A POS system saves money, provide productivity gains, and can lessens the amount of time you spend away from the primary focus of your business.

Saving more money, getting more control over your business, and being more productive; sounds like an excellent combination for your business, right? Well here are some of the best ways a modern point of sale (POS) system can help you out.

Eliminate shrinkage

A computerized POS system can drastically cut down on shrinkage, due to theft, waste and misuse of your staff. And since your employees will know that inventory is being tracked, internal shrinkage will diminish.

Improves accuracy

When it comes to pricing, you have to make sure that you’ve place the right price on every item you sold, a POS system can help ensure this. Your staff will no longer have to guess the price of an item, and prices can easily be change with a single tweak in the computer.

Get better margins

Detailed sales reports can help you focus on higher-margin items. By moving items within a retail location, or promoting poor-performing meals in a restaurant, you can help boost sales of high-profit items.

Know where you stand

You can easily know which of your products have been sold today, yesterday, last week or months ago, with the help of a POS systems. It can even tell how much money is in the cash drawer as well as how much of that money is profit.

Better inventory management

Detailed sales reports make it much easier for you to keep the right stock on hand. Track your remaining inventory, spot sales trends, and use historical data to better forecast your needs. The software can alert you to reorder when stocks run low. Many store owners who think they know exactly what trends affect them find a couple of surprises once they have this data.

Building a customer list

Collect the names and addresses of your regular customers as part of standard transactions. Then use this list for targeted advertising or incentive programs.

Reduce paperwork

POS systems can dramatically reduce the time you have to spend doing inventory, sales figures, and other repetitive but important paperwork. The savings here: time and peace of mind.

Efficiency in transactions

For retail, checkouts can be made quicker if you use a barcode scanner and other POS features to aid you. Restaurants will find their order process greatly streamlined as orders are relayed automatically to the kitchen from the dining room. In both cases, you’ll be delivereing a faster and more accurate service to your customers.

Keep in mind that realizing these benefits requires you to commit using your POS systems’ capabilities to their fullest. Without proper training and analysis, even the most sophisticated POS system will be nothing more than a regular cash register.

Retail vs. Hospitality Needs

Since there are two segments when it comes to the POS market, they require different needs: retail operations and hospitality businesses like restaurants, bars, and hotels.

Retail

Of these two segments, retails are the ones who uses simpler POS. They process transaction all at once and use less variation in the items they sell. Some POS features retailers may specifically want include the ability to support kits (3 for deals), support for digital scales and returns/exchanges. Your POS system will have to support matrixes if you sell items that come in a variety of styles, like clothing or shoes. For example, matrixes let you create one inventory and price entry for a particular sweater, but still track sales according to size and color.

Hospitality

Restaurants and other hospitality businesses differ in requirements.

Efficiency is the key focus for casual restaurants. For retail-style restaurants like sandwich shops, POS systems that relay inputted orders cut down on time-per-transaction and reduce the errors that can happen when hastily-scrawled orders are passed back to the kitchen. And for quick-service style restaurants, a POS system would be required in order to live up to their name: a customers’ order is entered on the terminal at the front which sends the order and displays them on a monitor at the food preparation area where the order is assembled and delivered to the appropriate customer.

For table-service restaurants and fine dining, POS requirements are somewhat different. They need to know which staff is responsible for which table, and being able to create and store open checks. With better management, comes better gains from improved efficiency. If your restaurant has 20 tables and has an average check of , it can increase turnover by one party per table, that is an extra 0 on a busy night.

Return of Investment (ROI)

Switching from your old system to a POS system can be difficult. There are several factors that needs to be considered and pitfalls to avoid. However the return on investment and benefits to your business can really make it worth your time and effort.

 

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Need more information or an online resource?

Go to POS-For-Restaurants.com

The author of this article is the Vice-President of Customer Relations at POS-For-Restaurants with over 20 years of experience serving restaurants of all types throughout the U.S.

 

A Restaurant POS (or Point of Service) could be any POS terminal, hardware and software combined like an electronic cash register, that is used to process a transaction. A restaurant includes several factors that makes a business function as it is supposed to. A restaurant POS terminal is used in order to accelerate a transaction as well as your customers payment. Point of Sale means the transaction point, any location within a retail establishment where transaction occurs.

For a restaurant, there are lots of moving parts that’s involved for it’s performance. Having a restaurant Point of Sale system for managing staff attendance and performance, the inventory system, accounting and customers’ details, can help any retail business owner improve his business’ performance. How is that? With features that provides powerful tools to help manage employee and customer data, a restaurant POS system increases both efficiency and profits.

Customer Satisfaction Increases Profit

Customer satisfaction is a very important factor for any retail business, meeting your customers’ expectations can increase customer return, giving you a higher chance to increase your profit. The more customer returns you get, the higher your profit is! So your job, as the owner, is to make sure your employees are properly and accurately giving orders, provide assistance to customers and make an overall great performance all the time. By using a POS software you can decrease 50% on ordering time and increase ordering accuracy.

Because the goal of increasing profit, many retail POS vendors have developed new systems that can produce excellent results like the POS systems that enables you to integrate your accounting software such as QuickBooks and Peachtree. With a POS software like these, you can rest assured that all your financial data will be up to date and accurate, you can even print sales report on any POS terminal just with the touch of a button!

Inventory management is a tough job. Manual handling and updating of your inventory can be a lot of hassle, it’s both time consuming and costly. By installing a POS software that can help you manage your inventory, you will see and increase in efficiency with its advance management features, you can enter any information with the items as well, such as purchase date or date of expiry, you will never have to back to manual again.

Proper ordering system. Placing an order should have the right timing, order too late  and you will run out of an item, and ordering too soon risks an item going bad. Installing automated inventory management enables you to increase the efficiency of your products orders, set a special alert to notify you and your employees when you’re about to run out of products and the ones that needs immediate re-ordering, as well as setting notifications when items are nearing their expiration dates. If your restaurant still doesn’t have point of sale software for inventory management you are potentially losing money every day.

Good Restaurant POS Solutions Fights Leakage

Having a realiable restaurant POS solution for your business can decrease shrinkage up to 10%. Since all data is digitally recorded, you can have a full report on who processed a transaction and if the transaction made is accurate. By this, you can also ensure an easier way to investigate profit loss.

The information I gave you is just the bits and pieces of what a restaurant POS systems is and what a good POS software can do for your retail business. I suggest getting advices and online support before purchasing any POS terminal, since it can really cost you a lot if you buy the wrong POS system. You may also request for a free POS system quote where suppliers serving your area can send you their competitive price lists.

 

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For more information or to have a local POS professional serving the restaurant industry in your area help you go to POS-For-Restaurants.com

 

Bar and Restaurant: Point of Sale (POS) software features

Bar owners shouldn’t have to to worry too much about product shrinkage or lack of inventory. With the right bar POS software, you can stop worrying about these and concentrate on running the business and growing profits.

It will be easy to handle any customer transaction using the right bar POS software. It can also display information like the average bar tab your bartender lists every night, the number of open tabs, returns or voids, as well as debit card processing details. This software provides reports that makes business management a lot easier, as well as provide excellent performance tracking of new products .

Useful Features of a bar POS software
The most important bar POS software feature is liquor inventory control. It can track all the liquor, wine, and beer in stock as well as inform you if it’s time to re-stock running low resources. It can even track how much liquor goes into each drink, so you could know how much money you can expect to make. With this feature, it helps keep your bartender honest when serving liquor – since supplies are strictly monitored, they’ll be less likely to give their friends free drinks.

The software also offers other great features to help you streamline your operations and track overall sales performance (you may want to request for a free POS system quote where a bar Point of Sale professional can tailor the right POS solution to meet your needs):

• Secured login– Requires authorized staff each time the software is used.
• Liquor control devices (LCDs) – This helps reduce shrinkage by tracking the exact amount of alcohol barternders pour on bottles or glasses.
• Recipe lookup – This provides bartenders a “cheat sheet” reference for looking up on indgredients when preparing mixed drinks.
• Data import and export – Downloads reports into your word processing or spreadsheet software for your personal bookkeeping efforts.
• Email list maintenance – Keeps customers informed on new product releases, and special events at your establishment. It can also build up customer loyalty thus it increase your profit.
• Gift card management – Adds gift card capabilities to your bar POS software that supports your brand and bring in repeat business.
• Schedule promotions – This bar POS software feature automatically manages price changes on liquor, wine and beer under limited time promotions like “happy hour.”
• Barcode readers – It can save time by quickly scanning barcodes on beer and malt beverage bottles the customer orders.
• Employee scheduling – This features helps determine the exact number of staff neeeded for certain shifts based on your sales history.
• Customer management tools – Help manage open bar tabs, check split requests, and gratuities.
• Food service integration – A very useful feature that lets your process both food and drink orders on the same screen.
• Menu management – Toggles between different liquors so you can accurately track the amount of liquor that goes into certain drinks.

 

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Need more information or an online resource?

Go to POS-For-Restaurants.com

The author of this article is the Vice-President on Customer Relations at POS-For-Restaurants with over 20 years of experience serving restaurants of all types throughout the U.S.

 

For such a long time, most people thought of their POS system as a fancy cash register. With technology moving forward at such a quick pace, most innovations have become standard features within the Point of Sale industry. So here are a few more tips to help you increase your profit:

1. Scheduling Your Employees. Most restaurant POS packages includes the feature “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 feature allows accessing staff schedule with ease, as well as shifts and multiple job positions. You are also able to tie in any number of security functions to a job position. Some packages has a feature that allows you to post schedules to a website and even sends out a copy of the schedule to each staff. Keep your labor costs in check and increase employee performance by efficiently and effectively managing your time & attendance information.

2. Software Upgrade Assurance or SUA. SUA is a software maintenance program that provides 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. Those who purchase a POS system along with a SUA plan will always have the latest version of their POS software. Basically it’s an advantage because it keeps their POS system new. Every time you receive a software upgrade it is as though they just bought the most current and advanced POS system available in the market with the newest, most up to date features for your restaurant. 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 hardware. If you need to replace hardware 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. Most customers are satisfied receiving the huge benefits of this program that helps your business reap the full return on your POS investment.

3. Proper Tip Handling. Some of the POS software products has a builtin tip tracking feature in their time in attendance module. Once you set an staff as a tipped employee, the system will require tip declaration prior to clocking out. Any server of waiter who ring sales will have their total sales tracked. Tips collected through credit card sales are also tracked and shown on the server closeout report. Prior to clock out, the servers or waiters will be shown their total sales, collected charge tips collected and then asked to declare their cash tips. By this, you will be able to track and manage all declared tips, charge tips and hours of work for every tipped employee.

4. Customer Loyalty Programs! As the restaurant owner you would like your POS 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.

Some of the restaurant POS packages come standard with a frequent diner or customer loyalty package that eases things within your business. By expertly 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 any number system you desire. In what ever strategy you use, the most popular and secure method is through magnetic cards with a logo of your business. These cards may act as a constant reminder of your restaurant by having your business logo in their wallet or purse. The software will secure the reward programs you set in place and preventing the server/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 reward programs takes your employees out of the game and place you in total control of everything.

As you can see, there are so many ways to run your restaurant more efficiently by using restaurant technology. Back to basics next month..

Michael Cummings is VP of Customer Relations at POS-for-Restaurants.com. With over 20 years of restaurant experience, POS-for-Restaurants.com helps you use your technology to be more efficient and more profitable.

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For such a long time, most people thought of their point of sale system as a fancy cash register. Since technology has become more advance and slowly becoming a necessity in the retail systems, many innovations have become standard features within the POS industry.

1. Wireless Hand Held Devices. The newest generation of wireless restaurant hand held POS devices allow your servers greater freedom to take orders as well as collect payment without leaving the customer. Your servers will be able to present daily specials to your customers on the spot, process credit cards from table to table, send a bread request for table 37 to the kitchen, and add walk-ins to the waiting list - all from the handheld device. Your servers are able to spend more time interacting and keeping your customers happy.

2. “Sticky” Paper Printers. One of the newest innovations are the printers that uses “sticky” paper. These printers use paper similar to a Post-It that allows you to reposition the receipt to different locations over and over again. You can print the paper to whatever length is needed, then stick to any surface where it will remain until it is removed and, even, placed elsewhere. With these kind of printers, the paper can stay with the order through the entire order process. The new paper is also liner-free which eliminates the need to manage non-recyclable waste and can be easily removed and restuck to a different surface - again and again, whenever you want. Use it for all orders, instant and special orders, as bag tags or any combination.

3. Digital Menu Board/Signage. Did you know you can deliver media rich content, using video, audio and pictures, right from the POS system? There are POS bundles have fully integrated and seamless digital menu board software that allows the creation of content using the same database. Menu titles, pages, menu items, and prices can all be interlaced with high-quality multimedia to give your restaurant menu board that can give both a dramatic and interactive display without having to buy addtional components.

With digital menu boards, content is sent to the displays from the store database in real-time, so the menu board continually updates throughout the day with menu changes, scheduled price changes, daily specials and so on.

4. Self-Service Kiosk. Have you ever thought about getting a customer self-service kiosk for your business’ restaurant POS solutions? A self-service kiosk or interactive kiosk, first came to prominence with the photo kiosk machines from Kodak — from wikipedia. Later adopted by consumers who mixed it with advanced technologies such as touch-screens monitors. This very useful piece of device, a self-service hardware combined with a self-service software, can be used to cut down on labor costs and speed up the ordering process. Aside from that, most POS packages can enhance the customer’s user experience even more, using sound and motion graphics, to engage your customer.

5. Paging Cell Phones. Some restaurants are selecting to take the more modern approach by paging customers’ personal cell phones. The restaurant host or hostess simply takes your customer’s cell phone number and place it into the cell phone paging system keypad. And when their table is ready, the paging system calls the cell phone with an automated voice message to notify the guest to report to the front of the restaurant so they can be seated. This is a very convenient way for guests who want to roam around farther than ordinary pagers will allow and you will not fear of the customer walking away with your pager.

The tips I gave you above are just the tip of the iceberg when is comes to knowing what restaurant POS solutions is best for your business. Watch out for more…

The author Michael Tash is VP of Customer Relations of POS-for-Restaurants.com. With over 20 years of restaurant experience, POS-for-Restaurants.com helps business owners use their technology to be more efficient and more profitable.

Making Sure Your Point Of Sale Equipment Is Secured

While credit card commercials show lines of dancing shoppers merrily swiping their credit cards and praise how convenient it is to use, they don’t care to discuss the peril of identify theft when using credit cards.

Monica Chauhan, director of embedded solutions for Solidcore (www.solidcore.com), a leading provider of real-time change control software, cites Gartner Group statistics showing that four out of five data breaches occur at POS (point-of-sale) systems.

Lock Down Your POS

These Point of Sale systems, if not properly locked down, can be susceptible to attacks. In the past decades, these embedded devices consisted of specialized hardware running proprietary software, but in recent times, where Unified Point of Sale (UPoS) shifted the retail industry standards.

Chauhan have also observed that the standardization has enabled devices to become increasingly interconnected , allowing the use of off-the-shelf software on commoditized hardware running commercial or open operating systems (OS) like Windows XP Embedded, WEPOS (Windows Embedded for Point of Service), as well as Linux.

Chauhan also said, the security risks for POS equipment owners came from greater system flexibility and quicker development time of these equipments.

Vulnerable Systems

Robert J. McCullen, chairman and CEO of Trustwave (www.trustwave.com), a security firm that focuses on the security of information and compliance management solutions, agreed to Chauhan that many but not all POS systems are vulnerable to exploitation.

According to McCullen, a little dial-up swipe machine has a low risk, but computer-based and/or have Internet access (risk lies in those two prime factors) devices are more vulnerable.

If a POS system stores credit card track data, exploitation will occur, and swipe terminals can be tampered, according to McCullen.

In general, as McCullen explained, hardware swipe terminals have low exploit risk, instead a higher risk of tampering, and thus the tampering will allow hackers to read the cards, whether through a Bluetooth device used later to get the card data or other efforts in getting the information they want.

Chauhan points out other vulnerabilities. She claims that because today’s POS systems are similar to networked PCs, they require constant patching. Chauhan also said that embedded systems have also become vulnerable to changes that are unauthorized and inappropriate as they are handed off to others in the distribution channel. With these, equipments often results to malfunctions and/or can cause the equipment to no longer meet PCI DSS (PCI Data Security Standard) requirements.

PCI DSS Challenges

Both Chauhan and McCullen agreed that POS equipment is faced with unique challenges with its PCI DSS compliance.

Chauhan says that in the PCI DSS requirement 5, it states that an antivirus software must be used and regularly updated. Antivirus software can be a very high overhead expense for a low POS system, she notes; on the other hand, you can eliminate the need of an antivirus with the aid of change control software.

As an example, the NEC Infrontia installed a change control software on its POS offerings which prevented unauthorized code from breaking unpatched systems. With this software, it allowed NEC Infrontia to remove the antivirus software that was impacting the performance of their devices, Chauhan notes.

The the PCI DSS Requirement 6, develop and maintain secure systems and applications. It also presents unique challenges, Chauhan notes.

It’ll be a very challenging on the part of POS equipment providers to ensure their systems supplies the PCI compliance after shipping them to the dealer network and put into production at the retail location.

Though embedding Solidcore change control in its systems, StoreNext (www.storenext.com) - a large supplier of technology and POS systems for independent grocers and small chains - have solved their PCI DSS Requirement 6 patching difficulties.

By simply reducing its patch frequency to quarterly, StoreNext was able to reduce the amount of their time on monthly test and patch distribution cycles. Chauhan also claims that the PCI auditing requirement can be met through change control software.

Other challenging areas include data encryption and user-based access controls, McCullen states.

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Do You Have Any Questions?

If you would like to know more about this topic or have a question in mind, you may ask for advice with our Restaurant Point of Sale
professional serving your area.

The author of this article is the Vice President of Customer Relations at www.POS-For-Restaurants.com with over 20 years experience in the restaurant point of sale industry.