Every business owner must not only please existing customers, but generate new business to sustain for the long-term.

To do so, one must anticipate the needs of emerging customer bases and appeal to those new customers in a manner that is familiar and enticing. With the emergence of the Millennial Generation, or Generation Y, businesses are presented with a new set of challenges to court this market. Generally considered to be defined as anyone born between 1980 and 2000, or roughly 18-34-year-olds, depending on the source. 60 Minutes suggests that there may be as many as 80 million Millennial consumers now, a broad customer base to tap into if ever there was one. We’ll first look at the habits of these potential customers, then discuss the various tools you may employ to bring their dollars to your business.

Continue reading Minding the Millennials: Tailoring Your Business to the Latest Generation

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In a recent survey from www.restaurantowner.com, respondents were asked about their satisfaction with their POS systems. One of the surprising numbers in the survey was related to reporting, where out of over 1,300 respondents, more than half said that they did at least some of their reporting on spreadsheets rather than use their POS system.

Why is this, when the average restaurant owner, based on the same survey, spends between $12,500 and $15,000 on their POS system?

Continue reading Breaking It Down: How Reporting Is Critical To Your POS Purchase

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The service industries are often the hardest hit during times of economic hardship. With the growing demands on the services and goods providers and the shrinking margins in profits, business owners must use all the tools at their disposal to remain competitive and defend their share of the market.

Let’s look at two ways you can receive direct and indirect feedback from your customers and find ways to grow your business while your competitors flounder.

Continue reading Identifying Sales Trends: How To Read Your Customers’ Minds

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Of all the tasks related to your POS system programming, none is more important than the maintenance and programming of your menu.

Whether you will be doing the programming or you’ll be delegating that to your POS provider, there is no substitute for the information you gather to inform important decisions about your menu construction.
Continue reading What’s On the Menu? : Effective Organization Strategies for Menu Programming

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Aside from the day to day management of your business, one of the primary concerns of your POS system integration must be managing the access to information and utilities within the system.

Whether it’s front-of-house users or shift managers completing end-of-day paperwork, you want to be able to identify high-risk behaviors in your restaurant and limit access to those abilities which could lead to theft. Every POS system will have its own methods of administering controls, and, as usual, we will be using POSitouch as our real-world example.
Continue reading Securing the Store: How Your POS System Can Make Your Data Safer!

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While we’ve previously discussed front of the house (FOH) operations, your POS system’s usefulness is not confined to the terminals.

When choosing a new POS system, or simply taking the time to make the most out of your current system, one must first define how the kitchen operates. Only by understanding the way the kitchen staff currently operates may one adapt the POS system to your needs.
Continue reading Check Printing and Food Prep: Your POS System and BOH Functionality

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In previous articles, we’ve touched on the common uses of your POS system with regard to basic operation. Ultimately, the entire raison d’être of your business is to bring in revenue! So, how does one collect the money taken in by the cashiers and servers?

With a POS system and a little management, this process can be fast and easy, getting your employees out of the building efficiently to further save you on labor dollars that can be better spent elsewhere.

In the old days of mechanical cash registers, settling an employee’s cash owed was done either through a manual count of the drawer with no reference to an expected deposit, or through the use of a printed tape, often referred to as a “Z tape” or “Z report,” which showed the sales taken by that drawer. One would check the totals against the actual money in the drawer, and that represented the greatest accuracy one could achieve. With modern POS systems, there is no reason to limit the manner in which you account for your deposit simply by location.
Continue reading Resolving Your Deposit, or Where’s My Money?!

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While previous articles have focused on operational functions of a POS system, it’s equally important to utilize your POS tools to manage cost, expenditures and purchases.

Enter the inventory module of your system. As per usual, we will be using POSitouch as our basis of comparison, but all POS systems should offer some form of the inventory module.
Continue reading Counting the Money: Inventory and Your POS

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In a previous article, we covered the benefits of front of house (FOH) operations when using a point of sale (POS) system within a fast service environment.

Read the previous article here.

But as any of us who have ever gone out to eat know, dining experiences are not limited to ordering a meal from a cashier. Table service dining has been a staple as long as there has been a server to put pen to pad and a cook to prepare the food. Unlike fast food, where the goal of the POS system is to move customers through an order line as quickly as possible, table service has an entirely different philosophy, where the dining experience of the customer is as important as the food prepared.
Continue reading Table Service and Your Point-of-Sale System

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Among the most critical decisions one can make in managing a restaurant is choosing the point-of-sale (POS) system.  While some may see the POS system as simply the machines that deliver prep tickets to the kitchen, or allow employees to clock in, the decision to incorporate a POS system in restaurant is of far greater importance.  While any given POS system does do the things mentioned above, it also supplies an infrastructure to your business.  Together, we will look at various elements to consider when choosing your point-of-sale system and address common pitfalls in the decision-making process.
 
Continue reading Fast Food and Your Point of Sale System

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Imagine your staff spending less time at the order station and more time upselling and serving your customers. Imagine your servers being completely mobile and able to open and close tickets directly from the floor to maxmize table turns and average check size. Well dream no more, WaveSoft for Dinerware is here and it is revolutionizing the way restaurants are doing business.
Continue reading Mobile POS Revolutionizing Restaurant Productivity and Profits

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