Restaurant Management
With technology advancing in the restaurant industry, a single integrated solution is required to let you control all of your restaurant’s operations from a single location. This is where a clever POS (Point of Sale) system for restaurants comes into play of smart restaurant management system.
More than merely a billing system, the restaurant point of sale system. An all-inclusive restaurant POS might be a full-fledged restaurant management system, that covers all your needs. The POS can automate and optimize every stage, from invoicing and customer administration to kitchen operations.
It is impossible to overstate the advantages of a restaurant POS. Make sure you choose the correct POS for your restaurant business by using our checklist for restaurant POS. How a restaurant point-of-sale system gives you total command over your daily operations. Your restaurant administration issues can be resolved in one place with a POS system for restaurants.
Ordering food
In a restaurant, taking orders and billing are two of the most important jobs. A quick and effective order taking procedure can improve both your table turnaround time and revenue.
Depending on the kind of restaurant you are running, the order-taking procedure varies. For instance, at a QSR, orders are taken at the Cash counter, and most of the time, the bill is paid right away. In this situation, the billing must happen quickly. Waiters or servers in fine dining establishments accept orders from the tablea.
Let’s examine the various ordering procedures and billing systems used in restaurants.
Order-taking app (i)
You can offer waitstaff and waiters with a smart order-taking app that sends orders to the POS. The App is a scaled-down POS that interfaces with CRM and displays the whole menu.
The servers can upsell things depending on the App’s top-selling and most popular items and consumers’ ordering behaviors.
The Order taking app’s ability to speed up the order placement process is its strongest feature. Customers won’t have to wait for the order to be entered into the POS, transmitted to the kitchen, and then displayed on the kitchen display system, which will reduce the overall turnaround time for tables.
Learn here how the order-taking app may enhance your customer service and speed up table turnover.
Ordering through tablet (ii)
The way that orders are taken is evolving thanks to the tablet ordering system. Tablets that let customers put their own orders are quickly taking the place of the conventional printed copy menus. The tablets have a complete menu display and let you highlight the best-selling, most lucrative products to encourage upselling.
This reduces the time it takes to prepare your order because the order is directly entered into the POS and is immediately reflected in the kitchen display system.
Here are some examples of how tablet ordering streamlines the food ordering process and improves customer satisfaction.
Split billing (iii)
Customers frequently request separate checks for food and drink while dining in large groups or when they want to split the bill among several people. Split billing is one of the advantages of a restaurant point-of-sale system, and one can simply generate with only a few clicks.
Here you may read about how to split billing is altering how people pay for their meals.
Online Payments (iv)
The emergence of mobile or virtual wallets has significantly improved the billing system. These mobile wallets are a type of mobile payment system that allows customers to make mobile payments without giving their credit card information to the retailer. delivering increased security as a result.
With the advent of mobile bill creation and payment, customers can settle their accounts as soon as they are done eating, hastening the bill settlement process. A POS system will make it simple for you to take online payments and will hasten the billing procedure.
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Table Bookings
Fine dining establishments are frequently associated with table reservations, although this is no longer the case. Many casual dining establishments today allow their customers to book a table. This has made it easier for restaurant owners to get ready for the influx of customers and enabled them to improve the customer experience.
You and your clients can easily make a table reservation by utilizing a POS system. It may also predict how long it will take to seat clients during peak times based on the current availability and inform them of the anticipated wait time.
You can allow guests to place food orders in advance using the table reservation system. This makes it easier to serve customers quickly after they are seated. With the help of this technology, you can also SMS your clients to confirm their reservations.
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Accepting orders from online
With the aid of a smart restaurant point-of-sale system, you can easily accept online orders and streamline the delivery procedure.
Taking Orders from Online Food Aggregators (i)
Online meal ordering is on the rise as a result of the Food Tech revolution. The key players in this market are online food aggregators like Swiggy, Zomato, Foodpanda, and Ubereats, and restaurants receive a flood of orders from these platforms.
Orders from various such platforms are frequently placed at the same restaurant, making it difficult to manually update the orders in the POS from each platform. You may take orders from all of these food ordering channels using a smart restaurant POS, which enables you to manage them all easily.
Accepting Orders via the Website or Mobile App of Your Own Restaurant(ii)
Although online ordering through food aggregators is highly popular right now, the margins on these platforms are rather high, which ultimately eats into the revenues of the eateries.
Your restaurant should have a website or mobile app for online meal ordering. The website or mobile app can be readily customized to reflect your restaurant’s theme. It’s also integrated with your restaurant’s CRM, so you can gather customer contact details, prior orders, and behavior.
You may use this information to construct innovative restaurant marketing efforts, as we explain below.
Managing the Food Delivery (iii)
If you are unhappy with the online food aggregators’ delivery services, you can alternatively decide to deliver the meal yourself with the use of a built-in delivery app. You can distribute the orders to your delivery executives based on their availability and proximity. Also can keep tabs on their whereabouts and how long it takes for them to bring the food. And instantly SMS your customers about their order status using the delivery app.
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Improving The Process of Order Preparation
There is a chance that orders will be delayed or even missed during peak hour. It’s possible that the KOT won’t arrive in the kitchen on time or that it will go lost. The useful Kitchen Display System is one of the advantages of a restaurant POS.
To increase restaurant productivity, the kitchen backend uses a display for an ordering and information system called the Kitchen Display Systems (KDS). Basically, it is a digital KOT system. The KDS in the kitchen receives the order as soon as it is entered into the POS. Any particular requests made by the customer are also made known to the kitchen staff, preventing any potential confusion on the part of the server.
The KDS shows the order status as well as the amount of time needed to prepare the item. This will enable you to evaluate the preparation time for a specific item and take further action to optimize it.
Learn more about the advantages of kitchen display systems for preparing restaurant orders.
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Inventory Control
How to manage your stock operations with a restaurant POS
Inventory management at restaurants is crucial, but tragically, it’s also one of the least-optimized aspects of the industry.
Keeping track of inventory requires a lot of manual labor, so we recommend a POS-integrated inventory management system.
Managing your inventory with POS software can help you gain consumer insights and streamline restaurant management.
Here are some advantages of an inventory management tool in a restaurant point-of-sale system for your business.
Controlling Stock(i)
The POS-integrated inventory management system provides you with the Stock-in and Stock-out report based on the daily stock usage at your restaurant. You may also establish Re-order levels for each stock item through the POS, which will notify you in real time once the level is reached or the item is close to running out.
Here are seven crucial inventory management pointers that you must use for efficient stock operations.
Food Costing (ii)
If you utilise a restaurant POS with the inventory management module, keeping track of your food prices and calculating them becomes quite simple. You can find out how much money you’re spending on the stock thanks to the POS’s detailed food cost reporting. The cost of meals should range between 28 and 30 percent on average, but it may vary depending on the type of restaurant and the cuisine.
Read here for the best ways to control your food expenses.
(iii) Forecasting the menu
The exact supply requirements during a specific time period can be determined by forecasting your menu and sales, which is an essential component of inventory management. The restaurant POS creates thorough statistics that outline how much stock you ought to order based on the consumption trend.
Additionally, it provides you with information on how well each menu item is selling so you can tell whether a certain item is underperforming or is frequently unpopular with clients. You can use this knowledge to modify the menu item or think about getting rid of it entirely.
Here are the key menu planning strategies you need to use in your restaurant enterprise. Once you start using the advantages of your restaurant POS,
(iv) Management of Yield
It is crucial to keep track of the stock items’ yield since it will enable you to calculate the precise amount of raw materials used to make a given menu item. In this manner, you save waste by only ordering stock that is actually needed.
Learn more about how Yield Management can help you control your food expenditures.
Click here to learn more about the benefits of an inventory management system for restaurant management.
6. Customer Relationship Management
Your restaurant’s CRM is a treasure trove of helpful data that should be correctly exploited to interact with your customers, forge stronger bonds, and learn how to provide better service. CRM also contributes to increased consumer engagement.
Here’s how you can accomplish that:
Compiling Customer Information(i)
When you interact with your consumers and start collecting their information, you have completed the first stage of efficient customer relationship management. The name, email, and phone number are no longer the only customer information available. The restaurant CRM tracks your customers’ ordering patterns, including when they place their orders, what they order, whether they order appetisers or main courses, and how much they spend on average. You can launch marketing campaigns using this data, and it also aids in consumer trend analysis. These information can be used to modify your menu or service to better meet customer needs.
Central CRM (ii)
In addition, a cloud-based restaurant POS gives you the flexibility to retain all of your data online through a centralised CRM if you have numerous locations. The consumer of one outlet becomes a customer of all outlets in this way, sparing them from having to continuously submit their information.
Because waiters can analyze ordering patterns and guest behavior in the restaurant POS CRM, upselling is easy.
Read on to learn how an integrated restaurant CRM may improve client retention.
7. Marketing for Restaurants
Restaurant POS makes clever restaurant marketing efforts possible.
Restaurant marketing involves much more than just making social media posts and handing out flyers and brochures. While they are useful for drawing clients and establishing a brand presence, you also need to launch clever efforts that concentrate on client retention. Retaining an existing customer is 6–8 times simpler than finding new ones. Additionally, repeat consumers often make larger purchases.
Customized SMS and email campaigns are(i)
Targeted SMS and email marketing that take into consideration purchase patterns and other client behaviors often result in more sales than generic mass advertising.
The POS Marketing Module may create SMS and email campaigns based on CRM data.
Loyalty Programs (ii)
When properly implemented, loyalty programs may be very effective in keeping customers. However, the success rate for the majority of loyalty programs is often low. The following are the main causes of most loyalty programs’ failure or poor performance:
Customers find the loyalty program to be uninteresting and generic.
It is crucial that the information obtained from the restaurant POS and CRM supports your loyalty programs in order to get over these problems. You can establish customer-friendly visit-based or point-based loyalty programs, depending on the kind of restaurant you operate.
It’s important to base loyalty program marketing on consumer behaviour. The likelihood that customers will return to the restaurant is increased by automatically notifying them via SMS that they have points that they can redeem or that they can receive a free item on their next visit.
Learn here how to design clever loyalty programs that genuinely encourage repeat business.
Outlet Level Marketing (iii)
Running campaigns for individual locations is perhaps the biggest problem in restaurant marketing for major businesses. One outlet’s formula might not apply to another. You can launch SMS and email campaigns for the clients of a particular outlet using a POS-integrated marketing module, which also retrieves information about the performance of individual outlets.
Find out here how to run effective restaurant marketing strategies.
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Management of Customer Feedback
For a long time, taking client feedback has been a common practice in the restaurant industry. The majority of the time, customers don’t actually provide feedback.
Smart digital feedback app forms are now taking the role of generic paper-based feedback forms. Based on the customer’s order, the FeedbacK App creates unique questions. Customers are more likely to reply to the survey as a result, and you gain insightful information about how well each service performs.
Additionally, the software informs you immediately when a review is unfavorable and provides you the chance to address the situation immediately and win over the consumer.
Read this article to learn how to properly use the Feedback App to collect client reviews.
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Taking Care of Several Outlets
You can easily manage several outlets with a smart restaurant POS.
Managing several stores and brands becomes a laborious chore as the organization grows. It can be quite difficult to manage and keep an eye on the activities of several outlets, even for well-known hospitality firms. A strong restaurant management system gives you the centralized control and real-time reporting you need to easily manage several locations.
(i) Enterprise Management of All Brands and Outlets
Large restaurant chains may run smoothly from a single location with no difficulties thanks to a cloud restaurant POS system with an all-inclusive Enterprise solution.
The Enterprise Module produces reports at the outlet level that provide performance updates for each outlet. At the Brand and outlet levels, you may also define user roles and permissions for your personnel to carry out duties like placing stock orders, updating invoices, etc.
You can also execute the restaurant marketing campaigns that we previously covered at the outlet level.
(ii) Basic Kitchen Administration
Controlling the flow of inventory between outlets is a crucial activity that requires a lot of manual labor. The Base Kitchen Management Module of the restaurant POS, however, may automate this process. You may transfer stock from the Central Kitchen to each individual outlet using the POS, which also lets you examine the stock usage and requirements of each outlet. The management of the outlet may issue Indents and Purchase Orders, which you may track from a central location.
Franchise Management (iii)
If your restaurant POS system has an integrated Franchise Management Module, you may manage all of your Franchise outlets from one location. From the central panel, you can see the stock needs of the franchise outlets and transfer the stock accordingly.
Additionally, you can use the Master Franchise Panel to manage the Royalty Fee and combine the Payouts and Commissions of each Franchise outlet.
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Monitoring Operations Using Reporting
A sophisticated restaurant POS system provides you with thorough company information.
If you want to increase restaurant revenues and scale your business, you cannot overstate the value of reporting and analytics. The restaurant POS system must provide extensive data to help you understand your business. You should track your restaurant’s daily and hourly sales, stock, bills, discounts, etc.
In this situation, real-time reports are useful since they let you run your restaurant from anywhere.
The top restaurant news items listed below should be on your daily radar if you want to run a successful restaurant operation.
The restaurant point-of-sale system is continually changing to meet consumer demands as technology progresses. The restaurant POS has developed from a billing application to an end-to-end management platform. A single integrated solution makes it easier for restaurants to make better use of the data and increase operational effectiveness.
