Top 5 Wonderful Benefits of Building POS System for Restaurants

It is believed that where there is a need, there is invention. When the F&B (Food & Beverage) industry witnessed a downturn, it looked for ways to rise above the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the innovative concepts like Contactless Dining, DIY Meal Kits, Cloud Kitchen etc. are enabling F&B players to sustain their business and recover losses. In tough times, businesses realized the importance of continuing to digitize and use modern technologies. Offline F&B businesses such as restaurants adopted digital platforms to serve their customers and automate their operations.

If you run a restaurant or a chain of restaurants, end-to-end management of the restaurant cannot be performed digitally without a Smart Point of Sale (POS) system. In this article, we will discuss the benefits of a restaurant POS and how to build it for your business.

Restaurant Point of Sale (POS)

A restaurant POS (Point of Sale) is a software application that processes transactions that take place in a restaurant. In a traditional POS system, restaurants were only able to process bills and generate receipts. However, with the advent of modern technologies and the expansion of restaurants on a large scale, POS is modernized to do more than just processing payments.

The POS became a restaurant management system and helped with stock and inventory management, customer relationship management, smart reporting and analytics, and more. The automation brought to restaurants by POS reduced manual labor and simplified the operation cycle. Moreover, with third party integration, POS can perform various customer-centric functions such as table reservation, online ordering, adding e-wallets for payments, loyalty programs etc. This is a quick look at what potential a restaurant POS has. Let us now try to understand its benefits in detail.

• Stock & Inventory Management

For a restaurant kitchen to function uninterrupted, it is important to maintain inventory and its stock. A restaurant POS ensures that the inventory is not overloaded nor is it out-of-stock. When developing a custom point of sale system for your restaurant, make it a point to see if it allows you to manage inventory.

A smart POS, which includes an inventory management system, is the first to send alerts whenever an item needs to be reordered. It tracks when an item in the kitchen should never go out of stock, which serves to protect a restaurant from inadvertently various inventory management mistakes. For example, when humans are aligned to manage a restaurant inventory, there is a potential for error in tracking down essentials, which can ultimately cost the restaurant a bad reputation or a diner’s dissatisfaction.

Such tracking helps in avoiding wastage of raw material and food items on a daily basis. Since the numbers are there to inform restaurants of availability or lack of stock, it is possible to limit the stock of items that are least used (per ordered dishes) or increase those items that are more in demand. . In fact, if there are multiple outlets but a single base kitchen, a POS allows managing the movement of both semi-processed goods and raw materials through a central kitchen module.

• Better Customer Relationship Management

For any business to grow, it is very important to maintain a strong relationship with a customer. A smart restaurant POS will help you stay connected and build relationships with your customers in a variety of ways. For example, a restaurant POS is a place where you can centrally manage the customer database. It gives you information about your customers based on geography, ordering behaviour, age etc. So that you can think of offers, discounts, custom menus to serve them better. This customer database can be used to run loyalty programs, marketing emails and messages to inform them about new time launches, deals of the day, opening and closing updates, etc. in menus.

• Better Billing Operations

Billing is considered one of the key components of a POS. With Smart POS, there is an option to improve the billing process. For example, if there is a contactless dining experience, multiple payment gateways can be incorporated into an app to ensure a seamless payment experience to customers.Then, you can choose to include the option to split the bills, if it is demanded by the diners.

• Restaurant Chain Management

There are many ways in which a restaurant can expand its business. Maybe they used to work offline and now have started taking orders online (in situations like COVID pandemic). Or perhaps, it became so popular that they opened new restaurants in different locations.

In a scenario like this, a restaurant POS can help. It helps in keeping all restaurants in sync, enables owners to check sales accounts of all outlets, get real-time reports of all outlets, etc. In addition, orders coming from the delivery platform can be directly added to the POS. This eliminates the need to manually sync online and offline orders.

• Internal Theft Protection System

With POS, every piece of information is co-existed with the data. There is data for stock availability, number of bills or sales generated etc. This gives business owners a bird’s eye view of what’s going on in the restaurant, reducing the chances of internal theft by employees.

Create or Buy a Restaurant Point of Sale (POS)

Now that you are well aware of the above benefits of a restaurant POS, the next step would be to get started with it for the experience. There are two options for having a POS for your restaurant- either build it or buy it. There is a simple rule for selecting a POS system- if you have specific requirements and cannot compromise with usability and feature set, go for a custom restaurant POS. Conversely, purchasing from a third party is a convenient decision.

We have this article for you which discusses some of the scenarios like when you want to build a software solution for a business and make them buy it. You may find this helpful. Check if you should build or buy a software solution. If you’re in doubt about what to do and how, expert support is available to you. Our free consultation service is designed to guide you through the development and selection of a feature set for your restaurant POS.