A quality restaurant POS system can be utilized to help users better understand their business’ performance and improve upon vulnerabilities, by providing valuable insights, aiding in the overall managing of a restaurant.

Gain Valuable Insights Into Your Business Practices with a POS System

For restaurant owners, few things have the potential to cause as much stress as selecting a proper POS system. It’s a tedious task, one that requires a significant investment of time and energy in order to make the correct choice. Some variables that must be considered when choosing POS software are the needs of the business and its employees, functionality, cost, and its reporting options. If any of these aspects are unmet by the software, then it generally amounts to a stress-inducing waste of time, energy, and money, things any business can’t afford to waste.


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Aspects of a Valuable POS System

While the needs of your business and those of your staff come first in making the right choice regarding POS software, there are always other factors, such as economic components, that should also be considered.

One of the benefits of POS software is making transactions and credit card processing smoother, quicker, and more relaxed for both customers and staff. A quality restaurant POS system not only helps with efficiency and productivity but can also offer key insights into your business’ performance. These insights can be used to determine everything from staffing needs to stocking needs and anything in between.

Determine Peak Business Hours Using POS Software

One of the major insights that can be gained from the reporting function of a quality restaurant POS system is what times and days of the week your restaurant is busiest. This is, ultimately, a pretty easy thing to figure out, provided your POS system offers the reporting features necessary for this assessment, like Hubworks’ newest system, Plum POS, does.

To determine your business’ peak hours, your restaurant POS system should log a record of each transaction. All you would have to do next is retrieve that information and either, run a report that gives the data you’re looking for, or look at the raw data and figure it out for yourself. What you’re looking for from the report is the frequency of transactions on different days, and at different times each day, this will allow you to determine your peak hours.

For example, you may find you consistently have only a couple of transactions on Mondays, week after week. As such, you may wish to close the restaurant on Mondays to save time and money, since being open likely costs more than is made with a handful of transactions. The same is true if you notice that you almost never have customers during a certain mealtime, as you likely spend more on the appropriate supplies and staffing than is made back in revenue.


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Forecast Staffing Needs Using POS Software

Another insight provided by a quality restaurant POS system is directly linked to data about your business’ peak hours. Knowing your peak hours and most common dead hours as a business will allow you to determine if your staffing needs are being met, or if you’ve overstaffed those times.

Overstaffing is detrimental to any business, as the company will lose more money paying the employees than it will profit in sales. In contrast, understaffing is also detrimental to a business; however, this results from inadequately meeting the needs of your customers. The ability to determine the peak and slow hours of your business through sale point technology will greatly assist in the anticipation and planning of your staffing needs.

Forecast Stocking Needs Using POS Data

In addition to being better able to manage your staffing needs, efficient POS software should also able to determine when you should restock supplies and food. For example, if you look at the data and see that Friday nights are extremely busy, but you get shipments on Saturdays, then you may have an explanation as to why your restaurant always seems to run out of bread by the end of Friday afternoon. In this case, you may want to change your shipments to a day mid-week. That is, of course, just one example, and there are other scenarios in which this information could prove to be beneficial.

Another such scenario comes in the form of the POS software acting as a sort of fail-safe to ensure you aren’t ordering too much or too little. While the restaurant POS system data won’t be able to explicitly tell you how much you should be ordering, it will give you an idea of what and when your customers consume the most. Not only that, but it will allow you to also carefully plan the ordering of perishable foods to reduce excess food costs resulting from waste.

Ultimately, modern restaurant POS systems and restaurant management systems are far more diverse and useful than they have ever been before and offer far greater benefits as well. One revolutionary restaurant POS system is Plum POS by Hubworks; learn more about the product here

While you’re here, we invite you to have a look at another wonderful article discussing the importance of customer service on behalf of POS system providers.