Managing a restaurant is not easy, especially with all the things you need to do to make your business successful. A restaurant owner needs to make sure that he or she keeps a close eye on all aspects of the business, from tracking sales, inventory, loyalty, customers, managing bookkeeping, and monitoring other essential business processes that are the lifeblood of a restaurant.
Doing all the above things by hand will be difficult to do, let alone sap your time and productivity. Using a restaurant POS billing software, will make a restaurant owner’s life much easier, especially if they use a cloud-based Android-based restaurant POS software and billing app.
Below are a list of features that a food and beverage (F&B) or restaurant POS billing software should contain.
Faster Ordering
It is essential to have fast billing or ordering in the restaurant POS, since most restaurants do have busy times in the day that are filled with orders, particularly during lunch and dinner. Having fast and easy table billing features enables the restaurant to serve more customers, without taking much of the customer or waiter’s time. Also having the ability to print and or send digital receipts if the customer requests one via WhatsApp, email or SMS, plus the ability to edit a bill if changes are needed, makes for a good restaurant POS billing software or app.
Inventory Management
When it comes to running a restaurant, inventory management is one of the most important things to keep an eye on. You need an easy and effective way to keep track of your inventory at all times. A good restaurant POS software or app not only keeps track of your inventory, but should send you an alert when your inventory gets below a predetermined level, so you can order more. Also, you can better manage your stock in and stock out of every outlet every day, as well as keep you up-to-date with what inventory was sold on a particular day.
Kitchen Display System
Kitchen Display System (KDS) is essentially a digital menu board for the kitchen staff, which includes kitchen staff such as waiters and chefs. While an advanced Kitchen Display System (KDS) may cost a lot, you need a fast, and easy-to-use KDS feature that will help with your front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house operations.
Some of the functionality you should expect in a Kitchen Display System (KDS) in your restaurant POS billing software, include:
- No mixup in the customer orders.
- Dishes should be served in order and on time.
- Having a smooth workflow in the kitchen.
- Helps in improving better communication in between front and back of the house departments.
- Organized and quick service is essential.
- Handle takeaway orders professionally
Kitchen Order Tickets (KOT)
In restaurant POS software, The Kitchen Order Ticket (KOT) is a very important aspect of the restaurant ordering system, even though many may overlook its importance. With new technological innovations in restaurant management software, there is no reason why a restaurant is not using this feature, which will enable their restaurant to be more efficient and run smoother.
In a nutshell, KOT is an abbreviation for Kitchen Order Tickets. It is a note which is forwarded to the kitchen, billing division, and one copy is retained in the system for future reference. The KOT software application mainly contains details related to the table number, items ordered, and their quantity.
Having an easy-to-use and automated restaurant KOT, helps reduce manual mistakes, saves time, and helps you to have real-time reporting of all the orders at your restaurant, hence reducing monetary discrepancies.
Reporting and Analytics
Good reporting and analytics is a must for a good restaurant POS software. It is essential that a restaurant owner can see in-depth reports and analysis of daily, weekly and monthly sales, and be able to see his top selling menu items and products. Additionally, using a cloud-based restaurant POS software ensures that the restaurant owner or manager can access real-time data from anywhere at any time, without needing a report from the staff at the restaurant location. By doing so, the restaurant owner is better able to manage and grow their business.
Staff Management
An Android-based restaurant POS software app with staff management capabilities, helps you track and manage your restaurant staff, by displaying all daily shift hours of the employees, plus all the money transactions that have been conducted during their shift. Other statistics you can track include average check by employee, the day of the week, time of day and one can give different permission roles, such as manager, super admin, admin and other custom roles to your staff.
Customer Management
Customer management or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality is also essential to help grow your business. You don’t want to manage your entire customers on pen and paper, since that will be very inefficient and time consuming. A good restaurant POS billing software, lets you record every customer, their food or product presences, how many times they visit your restaurant, plus the average order value from that customer, as well as the overall amount spent in your restaurant.
With this kind of restaurant POS software feature, you will be able to know your best customers and their preferences, and you can create a loyalty program that encourages your best customers to keep coming back, as well as the ability to upsell higher margin food and beverage items to those customers. By analyzing customer order preferences, you will be able to see which menu items are popular and which are not, and be better able to maximize your inventory and minimize waste, which is a big problem in the restaurant business and can lead to lower profits.
Online Ordering
Online ordering has grown significantly, and you want a restaurant POS software that can easily capture your online orders into its system. You need a POS billing software with seamless integration with popular online ordering platforms such as Zomato, Swiggy, Grubhub, Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Foodpanda and more. By doing this, you will be able to accept online orders on the fly.
