Running a restaurant is one of the most difficult and time consuming jobs there are. Restaurants have so many facets to manage on a day to day basis, from employees to accounting to inventory to the quality of service. Many of these tasks are often very repetitive and simple. It would be nice if there was a piece of software that would do more of this for the owner. This article is intended to be a wish list of sorts for the perfect restaurant software and point-of-sale system.
Accounting
This first and most important thing for a piece of restaurant software would be an accounting module, something that could take care of your accounts payable and accounts receivable. Managing payroll would be an important function. It would also be important to show revenue and profits on a weekly or even a daily level. This would help business owners fine tune their business.
Point of Sale
This software should handle all of the point of sale information, be able to accept coupons and gift cards along with credit cards, checks and cash. The POS software should track orders until they are paid and fulfilled. The restaurant POS software should be able to give reports on what dishes are the most popular for a given day, week, month or year
Inventory
A piece of restaurant software should also help control and manage inventory. It should be able to help you gauge how you are doing with your inventory as orders are taken. If things get low the software should notify the owner to so he or she can order new inventory, helping the restaurant provide uninterrupted service.
Information
The software should also be a repository of information for the restaurant, keeping track of information that is important to the restaurants. Examples of this are contact information for employee, hours to be used in payroll. Recipes would also be another important piece of information to keep in there.
Usability
The software should be usable and affordable. Training time for employees should be minimal. It should be intuitive yet powerful. It should also be affordable and have great support.
Does such software really exist? Probably. Most restaurant point of sale companies have a pretty good product that does most of these things. The trick is to look very carefully at your business and find the features that you need then find the software that works best for you and your business.
Justin Grover – ComCash sells modular restaurant pos software that can help your business grow.
