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Restaurant POS Solution

5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Getting a Restaurant POS Vendor  

Have you decided to get a new Retail POS Solution for your business already? Congratulations, you can now experience the seamless services that will positively impact your business. It ensures smooth services, transactions, and operations.   With the right technology at hand, you can see tremendous changes in your business processing. If you decide to have a cloud Retail POS Solution like the one LS Retail offers, you can get real-time stock visibility and availability, get real-time generated reports, product information, and much more. If running a restaurant, you can access the best meal deals you can suggest to your clients, tell them about current offers or redeem their coupons. Your staff can take orders from one table and bill another table from the same device.  However, be cautious when you decide to get a POS for your business. In the market where every vendor seems to be better than the other, you have to pick the most suitable one carefully, as it will impact your next 5-6 years.  The first step is to answer the following questions before moving ahead:   Q1- What are Your Functionality Requirements?  These days POS systems are more than just billing software. They have transformed into something greater. They cover a whole range of operations in your business. However, sometimes having to choose between so many functionalities can become an overwhelming task. Retail POS Solution can ensure employee time clock, biometrics login, customer database, online ordering, table tracking, mobile POS as well as recipe and ingredient management.  They all seem good to have for your restaurant, don’t they? But is this the case? Having too many features can hamper your staff efficiency. They might get confused, overwhelmed, and perform tasks slowly.  You must map your business requirements and segment them into must-haves, nice to haves, and extras. An ideal Retail POS Solution will be one that checks all your urgent requirements. Furthermore, having a system that responds to all your needs will save you a fortune as well as effort during its implementation phase.  Q2- Is the POS Designed for Your Restaurant?   Point of Sales does not follow “one size fits all” restaurants have requirements when it comes to selecting a Retail POS Solution. Sure, a retail system might cover some functionalities such as employee scheduling or customer loyalty. However, a POS system has diverse needs, from the front office to the back, it has different needs.   A Restaurant POS Solution is specifically designed for a restaurant will help the user manage their daily tasks such as tracking ingredient use, managing recipes, adding, or removing an ingredient, sending orders straight to the kitchen, keeping tabs on the available inventory and required inventory, selling deals, and combos, and a lot more.  Do not settle for just any POS that comes your way. Put your time and effort into conducting research and then go for the one that checks all your required boxes.   Q3- What are its Methods to Consistently Deliver Quick Services?  Make sure the Retail POS Solution you choose follows a straightforward algorithm that ensures quick and consistent deliveries. Saturday nights are already hard, imagine adding a slow POS system to it. Ask yourself these questions before proceeding any further:   Is the POS interface intuitive? Can it segment your employees according to their job roles at that time? Or show the functionalities that are currently relevant?  Does it accept different payment methods? Or does it support split billing?  Can it run on handheld devices like tablets or mobile phones?   Can it still manage to perform if the internet connection goes down?   Q4- What will be the ROI (Return on Investment) of this Retail POS Solution?   It is a big commitment to have a Retail POS Solution, and having the right one will pay in the long run. Compare all the POS and check which offers the highest ROI. We suggest you ignore the upfront investment cost and consider how each of them is going to hit your bottom line.   Make sure the POS you are looking forward could perform the following tasks:   Spending less time training employees: In the industry with high employee turnover, you need technology that does not eat too much time training recruits. You can save a lot of money and time with an intuitive POS solution.   Helps reduce waste: Make sure your POS system helps manage inventory while tracking ingredient use. It must help you order the right amount of food and help reduce waste.   Manage Loyalty: Your system must segment and target your loyal customers. It must use technology to track each customer and identify the loyal customers. It should support loyalty programs.   Align data: Having different systems for different segments while collecting and comparing data demands a lot of time and effort. Having an end-to-end POS solution integrates different segments and brings all the data under the same platform.     Q5- Is your Vendor Trustworthy?  The market is full of vendors posing to be authentic and the best. However, do not fall into the trap. You do not want to select and install a random POS from a startup just because it is cheap. Make sure you opt for an authentic vendor, such as LS Retail.   You may regret having a random POS even more when you run into problems and find out that your vendor does not provide any support. Always take references and see their previous record, this way you can find out if the POS is even worth or just a waste of money.  It is important to wisely pick your POS system as it will impact your business for the next few years. Make sure you go through at least 5 references after checking their customers’ testimonies. LS Retail is one of the best Restaurant POS Software Vendors with an impactful record of accomplishment. If you are looking for an LS Retail implementation partner, contact us. 

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3 ways to lower food costs using your restaurant management system

In the low-margin restaurant industry, it is essential to consistently monitor food costs. As restaurants struggle with rising price of ingredients, bottlenecks in the food supply, and limited seating availability, it’s more important than ever for businesses to optimize ingredient buying and usage, and minimize waste. A good restaurant management system will help you keep track of raw ingredients, menu prices, and spillage and food waste, enabling you to determine where you can make improvements without decreasing quality. Here are three steps you can take. 1. Automate inventory monitoring In the food and beverage industry, food costs represent on average almost one third of total business expenses. A unified restaurant management system that connects sales, kitchen and inventory in real time within a single  platform will give you total visibility over usage of ingredients. And if it’s a truly unified platform like LS Central for restaurants, it will also enable you to link your purchasing to recipe management and to actual sales. Stock can then be automatically added to as new inventory is received from distributors, while preset amounts for each ingredient are automatically subtracted from the inventory count when dishes are prepared. Some software systems also enable you to adjust inventory on the fly, using mobile devices to remove from stock the jars that fell on the floor and broke, or the spoiled meat. All this data can then be organized and analyzed in your back office tools, giving you valuable insight into what might be affecting your bottom line and allowing you to take action. 2. Identify waste patterns and adjust The US restaurant industry alone wastes over $25 billion worth of food annually, according to a report by waste reduction group ReFED. This is a staggering amount of money being thrown into the garbage. The first step to managing food waste is to keep track of what you’re throwing away, in what quantities, and why. Use your restaurant management system to keep a regularly updated food waste log. Locate problem dishes, and establish achievable wastage goals for your staff. Your employees deal with food waste in both the dining room and the kitchen, so it is important that both kitchen and front-of-house staff are trained to minimize common mistakes and correctly report wastage. Implementing a culture of waste monitoring with your employees will encourage staff members to report more detailed waste data. It will also discourage employee theft by clarifying that all inventory, both raw and prepared, is regularly being accounted for. Once you track your food waste, it’s time to start looking for trends. Perhaps you’ve noticed a dish that consistently returns to the kitchen partially uneaten. Whether it’s the half-eaten pancake or the piles of untouched fries which you end up throwing out, your customers are telling you something about portion size. With a good restaurant management solution, you can easily adjust your recipes and optimize ingredients and quantities. If your dessert portions are too generous, you could consider getting twelve slices instead of ten from each cake, reducing the amount of whipped cream, or making your cupcakes slightly smaller. The difference might seem tiny at first, but by the end of the month those ounces will add up to savings. By keeping an eye on your waste and adjusting portions accordingly, you’ll produce profit-making dishes, and will have satisfied customers cleaning their plates.   3. Engineer your menu to perfection Menu engineering is the process of finding the perfect balance of popular low- and high-cost food items. It’s an ongoing practice that uses key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you make data-driven decisions that ensure meals are popular and profit-making. If you are using a restaurant management system that gives you real-time business information, you can keep track of your KPIs and see how well your business is performing relative to established targets at all times. Use the system to break down the data and see how many times a dish has been ordered, what it costs to produce, and what kind of profit it brings in. By tracking KPIs such as average contribution margins and food cost percentages, you can see how a dish compares to the average profit margin of similar menu items. Once you have this information, you need to decide which dishes should be kept in your menu, and which ones you should rather replace or discard. Do you have a menu item that is significantly below the average margin and sells poorly? That should probably go. Is there a popular dish that is slightly below the average margin? Check if it will stay popular even with slightly higher prices. Do you have a low-selling but high-profit dish? Promote it by giving it top center placement on the menu, and remind your servers to suggest it to guests when applicable. As you calibrate your menu for maximum profitability and customer satisfaction, you will also be adjusting your inventory. Why order bags of live clams when they require careful handling, have a short shelf life, and aren’t frequently ordered? Save yourself both time and money: remove them from your menu and your inventory.  Controlling food costs while providing consistently great meals is essential to your restaurant’s long-term profitability. While it used to require a time-consuming process of manual reporting and calculating, today technology can help you refine your processes and cut costs. Do you need more information on how a modern restaurant management solution can help you transform your business? Contact us

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