Always on the latest version– no updates necessary.

Stop worrying about servers, data security, and regulations.

Agility: add new technology when and as you want.

Support remote workers.

Point of Sale systems have gone a long way from being simply cash registers that process transactions and record payments. Today, the Point of Sale is a necessary tool that can speed up operations, streamline labor, increase loyalty, manage inventory, and define the customer experience. It’s therefore unsurprising that the average modern POS system offers a large number of features. Employee time clock, fingerprint login, mobile POS, customer databases, online ordering, management of recipes and ingredients… these all sound like good features to have, don’t they? And yet, they may not all be as useful to every business – after all, a full-service restaurant has very different needs from a chain of cafés or pizzerias. Before you go and pick the POS that does it all, stop and ask yourself: what features do I really need? Which functionality would support my business? Map your requirements, and pick a system that fits with your current needs. You will save money and effort threefold: in the development phase, during staff training and daily, as too many options at the POS might end up getting in the way of your staff managing its routine tasks.

A new POS system is a big commitment, but one that can pay off many times over. Before choosing the option with the lowest upfront investment, make sure you investigate the Return on Investment (ROI) you could achieve. When analyzing the impact of the new technology on your bottom line, remember to consider multiple factors, including:

• Time spent in staff training: if, like the rest of the restaurant industry, you experience high staff turnover, adopting an intuitive Point of Sale system that makes training of new recruits quick and easy can bring about great savings.
• Reduced waste: does the new system include inventory management tools? You can save a lot of money by ordering the right amounts of food, and using what you have efficiently.
• Loyalty: a system that supports the implementation of loyalty programs and enables you to send registered customers targeted offers and campaigns can help you increase repeat visits.
• Time wasted aligning data: if you use one system to manage sales, another one for inventory, a third one for staff rosters, a forth one for your vendors – and so on, you will end up spending a lot of your time comparing different outputs and trying to make sense of your numbers. A system that integrates all of these functions into one end-to-end platform – and a single data source! – enables you to get more insight from your data as well as simplify your accounting, saving you a lot of hours (and headaches!) in the process.

It’s every restaurant owner’s dream to grow the business: increase the number of customers, add a patio, run multiple locations, build a chain – perhaps an international one. When selecting a new system, make sure that you can easily add new POS terminals, and even open new locations with limited effort. The right system will also enable you to grow by easily integrating to other software solutions. A rigid system, that doesn’t allow you to make changes or integrate to other solutions, may be cheaper to start with – but it will have to be replaced once you grow, causing you problems (and high costs) in the long run. When considering an investment in new technology, remember that a POS will be with you for many years – choose a platform that can scale with you and support you not just today, but also tomorrow.