If you’re reading this article, we’re guessing you’re a restaurant owner or manager or maybe a writer looking for material on Restaurant POS Management Software. Whatever the reason, you’re at the right place to get helpful information. In this restaurant POS system guide, we won’t go into the technicalities of how the system works, but we will tell you what it is and what it can do. So if you’re still interested, keep reading.
What is a POS?
Believe it or not, POS or Point of Sale is not a new term, and it basically means the place where you pay for the products, services, or food you have purchased. Initially, it was staffed by a person holding a ledger and or receipt book. As technology advanced, you would see a person sitting with a cash register in front of them. Nowadays, you see a person with a computer or similar setup taking cash or processing your card or even allowing trade-ins, in return giving you an itemized bill or invoice. The points we have mentioned should provide you with an idea of what we are talking about, so let us move forward and get specific with the restaurant POS.
About The Restaurant POS
The restaurant POS is like any other sale counter in history until the computer was introduced. After introducing the PC to the POS, specialized software became available, allowing the restaurant owner to do a lot more than just manage transactions, billing, and invoicing. They could manage their inventory for the first time and keep track of and store the order details that they had served or delivered throughout the business day. The latest tech currently in use at the best restaurants is cloud-based POS systems like SalesPush. They don’t require specific hardware and can be run on any device with a browser and an Internet connection; it is in all respects a game-changer. And in this restaurant POS system guide, we will discuss point of sale solutions like SalesPush in detail.
What Can the Modern Day Restaurant POS Management Software do?
Having discussed that the cloud-based POS is a game-changer, we need to mention what it can do, and no, it cannot serve coffee yet. On a serious note, a point of sale software like SalesPush lets users control multiple aspects of their restaurant operations. We have listed the most critical functions below and will elaborate on them.
Order taking and Kitchen Display
There was a time when you went for fine dining; a waiter would walk up to your table, hand you the menu and take your order using a pen and paper. After taking your order, they would go back to the counter and tell the order. The staff at the counter would send the order details to the chef and cooks in the kitchen who would start preparing it. Quite a long process, right? Not to worry, with the new modern-day POS systems, the waiter does give you a menu but saves on ink and trees by going paperless. They will hold a tablet in their hands, and that tablet will be connected to the cloud-based POS, and the waiter will process your order on it. The system is connected to a Kitchen Display where your order is visible to the chefs, and they start preparing it immediately. Not only do you get your food more quickly, but the whole process is relatively smooth.
Billing and Invoicing
The most basic and most important aspect of any POS is its ability to carry out transactions and provide itemized billing and invoices, including details of all relevant taxes and charges. The next step is offering these services for online transactions as well as for walk-in customers. The cloud-based version can also manage orders placed through a website while keeping the walk-in ones separate. However, it offers the user convenience of handling it all from the same tool.
Inventory Management
Another critical function that SalesPush, the modern-day point-of-sale system takes care of is Inventory management. That includes all the food items, cutlery, and other vital items that you need to run your restaurant. Scan in items as they are brought in, and the system adds them. When you sell a particular dish or cuisine, the system automatically deducts the inventory used to make that order. Or, if you want, you can manually remove the items from the system or even scan them out.
Allow Easy Accessibility
We previously mentioned that the staff and owner could log into and access the cloud-based POS system from any device with a browser and Internet connection. Elaborating on that, if your restaurant is part of a chain or franchise of restaurants, you can log into any location’s system from your site. This interoperability allows the management and the owner to view details of a specific restaurant in their network without having to travel over there.
Third-Party Integrations
We mentioned that you could take orders from your website, and that’s all thanks to integration options available in the POS system. To further explain that if you integrate the POS with Woocommerce on the website, you can take and process orders directly received on it. Furthermore, increasing communication with your existing customers is accessible too. You can inform them about discounts through MailChimp integration to send out bulk emails from the system
Generating Reports
Although mentioned as the last functionality in our article, it is one of the essential features. The ability to generate reports showing sales, inventory usage, taxes, and a host of other details is invaluable to the growth of your restaurant business. Suppose the owner or management cannot ascertain where the restaurant is headed in terms of profitability. In that case, they cannot make informed decisions regarding changes to the dishes or expanding their menu or franchising their restaurant. That is why this is one of the most powerful functionalities within the modern-day POS.