9 things to look for when choosing a new POS for your restaurant
Published May 27, 2021
If you’re a restaurant owner or operator we don’t have to tell you: running a restaurant is not an easy task! But having technology that’ll help your operations run smoother and enables your staff to be efficient so they can focus on delivering a memorable experience can help. When researching a new restaurant point-of-sale system, it’s important to keep key features in mind to ensure your operation is set up for success.
Here are nine things to look for when choosing a new POS for your restaurant.
Technology that…
1. Enables you to add additional revenue streams into your restaurant beyond in-store. Gone are the days where the restaurant experience is primarily in-store dining. Now consumers are looking for digital ordering and delivery too. The flexibility to add services such as takeout, mobile ordering, loyalty and 3rd party partners is important to ensure your restaurant is supported to expand your business. This can help you increase same-store sales right out of the box.
2. Supports mobile POS for tableside ordering or line busting. You want tech that eliminates the steps between the table and kitchen, helping speed up service so you can take several more orders each day.
3. Makes training and implementation easy for you and your staff. Having a system that’s easy-to-learn and adopt can help improve staff and management productivity levels. You want tech that your staff can easily manage, but that can also maintain even the most complex operations.
4. Supports conversational ordering. This ensures your servers and cashiers capture all aspects of the order, including sides, modifiers, etc., maintaining accuracy. For takeout and catering, you want the ability to capture future orders and keep track of customer information including order history.
5. Provides payment flexibility and security to help reduce liability from potential chargebacks. You want to be able to securely accept the variety of payment types that your customer wants to use, including mobile wallets and pay-at-table.
6. Has a cloud-based centralized system configuration and management. This allows operators to push out menu changes such as new items, discontinuations and price changes, automatically from a central location. This provides operators flexibility to make changes anywhere, anytime.
7. Keeps your technology up-to-date with the ever-evolving market. You want your tech to stay current with continuous updates of the latest versions and patches for both software and hardware.
8. Has redundancy and durability in the event of a failover. Things can happen, whether it’s losing your internet connection or your devices fail. You want technology that has terminal failover redundancy so that you never lose a transaction.
9. Gives access to real-time data so you have a constant pulse on your business. Having immediate visibility into how your restaurant is performing is important as an operator. You’ll want technology that delivers you real-time alerts and instant access to sales data from your mobile device.
You have enough on your plate, get a POS that runs the store end-to-end!
As a restaurant owner or operator, you’re looking for opportunities to improve the customer experience and differentiate your dining experience. You likely want to give customers choice, speed and accuracy while freeing up staff so they can spend more time with guests. Having a restaurant POS system that helps you offer that will set you up to better run your restaurant—so you can focus on what matters most.
