As business owners look to technology to automate their businesses, point-of-sale (POS) systems have become a popular addition to most restaurants and F&B businesses in Malaysia.
Although POS systems were traditionally created to help retail stores with accepting payments and keeping stock of inventory, these days specialized F&B POS systems have given F&B business owners the option of not only streamlining payments and inventory management but also smoothen the order taking process.
In our last post, we reviewed all the hardware restaurant owners need to look for in a POS system. In this post, we will take a step back and take a broad look at all the features you’ll want in your POS system.
If you’re looking to upgrade your existing F&B business with a POS system, read on to find out exactly what you need to look out for!
Feature #1: Cashier
The cashier is a basic feature of any POS system. With a cashier integrated into your POS system, you’ll be able to easily accept payments from your customer based on their orders. With this, you can avoid mistakes like charging customers for the wrong orders.
Complimentary POS hardware:
- Cash drawer
- iPad
- Customer display system (CDS)
Feature #2: Order Management
Taking orders from customers and sending them to the kitchen to get them prepared is one of the most important processes of any F&B business. Traditionally, this process would involve a waiter writing down orders on pieces of paper before manually bringing them to the kitchen.
The problem with the paper order method is that mess-ups can happen, leading to mistakes when fulfilling the orders to customers.
An order management feature can help reduce mistakes like these by allowing your waiter to communicate directly to your kitchen staff.
Order information containing the order list and table taken at the customer’s table can be sent to the kitchen without delay. This way, your kitchen staff can start preparing for the meals of an ongoing order while your waiters attend to other customers.
For F&B businesses that handle a large number of orders every day, the order management feature is one you don’t want to go without!
Complimentary POS hardware:
- Android tablet
- Order kiosk (optional)
- Kitchen display monitor
- Kitchen printer (optional)
Feature #3: Inventory Management
Food costs are one of the largest expense for any F&B business and can make or break a business. As such, it is critical for F&B business owners to keep precise control of their food costs.
In a traditional setup, it can get challenging to keep track of your food costs on a weekly basis. With so much paperwork to do, it’s easy to end up miscalculating your costs.
This is why having an inventory management feature is a crucial part of an F&B business’ POS system. With inventory management, you’ll be able to accurately calculate your weekly food costs and optimize your ingredient purchases based on your recent sales trends and ingredient costs.
Complimentary POS hardware:
- iPad
Feature #4: Itemised Sales Reporting
Knowing what your customers are buying from your F&B outlet can help you optimize your product offerings to maximize profits. You can do this easily with any POS system that offers an itemized sales reporting feature.
Check your sales on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to discover trends in your customer interests, remove the guesswork and use real data to make changes to your menu items (for e.g. make bestsellers more prominent and remove unpopular items).
Feature #5: Staff management
For most F&B businesses, having a team of shift workers is common. POS systems which have staff management features will allow your workers to clock in based on their shifts times.
With staff management, you’ll be able to accurately track staff activities based on their shift, making it easy for you to trace back to the right person when issues occur.
Feature #6: Cloud-based
For business owners running several outlets and businesses at the same time, it can be difficult to go to each outlet to do a check-up every day. With a cloud-based POS system, you’ll be able to access your store information from anywhere you have an internet connection.
Cloud-based POS systems allow you to keep yourself on the pulse of all your F&B outlet’s activities at your convenience. Even if you are out of the country, you won’t be far from what’s happening in your F&B outlet.
Feature #7: Table Management
For F&B businesses which provide table seatings for customers, a table management feature will make creating a layout for your outlet simple. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to digitize your physical table layout and create an easy visual reference for it.
Feature #8: Multi-outlet Management
Finally, your F&B POS system should allow you to manage more than one outlet at once. Even if you only have one outlet at the moment, you’ll want a POS system that has the capability to grow with you when you expand beyond one outlet.
With multi-outlet management, you can monitor the activities on all your outlets conveniently through one dashboard.
Conclusion
Investing in the right POS system can help you to cut down on the hours you need to manage your F&B business. With an F&B specialized POS system specifically, you’ll not only be able to receive payments and manage your inventory, but you’ll also be able to automate parts of your order taking process.
Other than that, a cloud-based POS system will allow you to know exactly what is going on in your outlet no matter where you are. If you have more than one outlet, adding a multi-outlet management feature to your store can give you the added convenience of a one-stop management dashboard.
Slurp! Restaurant POS system checks all the boxes – give it a try (FREE Demo)
Slurp! Is a cloud-based iPad POS system that was designed for restaurant, bar and every kind of F&B business. Unlike conventional POS systems that only take care of your payments, Slurp! does all the thinking for you.
With Slurp, you’ll have:
✓ No more order mess-ups
✓ No need for waiters to waste time sending orders to the kitchen
✓ Precise food costing with inventory management
✓ Real-time sales reporting
✓ Convenient multi-store management and monitoring
…. and more!
