Now that you have some of your customers ordering via emails, faxes and phone, errors are nearly a thing of the past. Sure, you will always have businesses and customers calling in their orders. The thing is, you haven’t completely eliminated the opportunity for more miscommunications to happen: you’ve still got to get that order into your POS System, and your staff need to know what they’re supposed to be preparing. This is why having the right POS System, a Point of Sale System designed with hospitality in mind, is crucial.
If your POS System doesn’t support item station specific printing of production dockets for orders, you might find yourself having to shout orders out to the kitchen. Then you’re only one step away from “Rare burger, seeded bun and hold the cheese!” becoming “There’s a burglar, I need a gun and call the police!” This is to say nothing of the troubles you’ll run into where you’re still writing orders out by hand. Someone puts a little extra loop at the top of their “4” and the next thing you know people are coughing and choking from your 9-Extra Hot Chilli.
Communication breakdowns don’t just happen between customers and you, or your front-end and kitchen staff, either. There are all sorts of ways in which having a hospitality focused POS System facilitates the flow of information. Maybe the person who’s supposed to keep an eye on your inventory of ingredients isn’t the same person who orders them. There are a couple of possible points of failure here, starting with the fact that you’ve got a person whose responsibility is to proactively check the fridge and store room and see if you’ve got everything you need. Then they’ve got to get the information to the manager. How much do you order? Has any gone to waste? How quickly do we normally go through this?
A POSmate Point of Sale System, superior with advanced features like inventory, can do all this for you. By entering your menu in as a recipe, the POS System can track the consumption of each individual ingredient every time a dish is ordered. Everytime you throw something away, you can record it as waste. By looking at the wastage reports and sales reports, your purchaser gets a pretty good idea on exactly how much of any ingredient you need (hint: more prosciutto, less sun-dried tomato). The more automated you become, the more you are in control, and less prone to human error!
POSmate, the home of best-in-class POS software, including cloud based Point of Sale Software designed for both hospitality venues and retail stores, and capable of all the things mentioned in this news blog (including direct 3rd party integrations). Lots of businesses rely on POSmate Point of Sale Systems to ring up sales, track inventory, connect with customers, and generally make their lives easier!