Seeing consumers flocking to your restaurant gives every restaurant owner feelings of pride and joy. Watching your business generate a profit is a dream come true. Naturally, after establishing a brand in one location, many owners may wish to replicate success in another location, maybe even expanding the vision to eateries in every state.
However, while this may be many restaurateurs’ dreams, each location opened adds a layer of complexity to the overall operation. One tool you can use to ease the management of multiple branches and improve your chances of becoming a household name countrywide is your POS system. You may already have a point-of-sale (POS) system, but here’s how it can facilitate your next level of growth.
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Put Your POS in the Cloud
The traditional stand-alone POS terminal will have its data and apps stored in a server’s central database. Only a fixed number of devices were configured to access this server through a dedicated local area network (LAN). Usually, these devices would be a specially configured cash register that recorded sales and a handful of desktop computers from which reports were spooled.
The data from a cloud-based POS system is stored in the cloud and can be accessed via the Internet from any device, be it a workstation or a mobile device. This makes for more efficient service as servers don’t have to walk to a POS workstation to key in orders or extract a bill. They can do so anywhere using a tablet, for instance.
The benefits of cloud-based POS systems will be even more tangible to you if you have outlets in more than one location. Nothing is more critical for multi-locale restaurants than ensuring their brand remains intact wherever customers go for a meal. A POS operating from the cloud will significantly help you standardize operations across your branches.
Operational and staff training procedures stored on the cloud can be accessed and used by restaurants in different locations. Besides ensuring that your standards are maintained, this will help you make significant savings on your training budget. Customer loyalty data stored in your cloud database can be accessed from any outlet, ensuring your loyal customers can access their rewards wherever they choose to dine. This convenience will go a long way toward reinforcing their allegiance to your brand.
Manage Inventory
With your POS in the cloud, you can be better able to keep track of your inventory. You will be able to monitor, in real-time, the stock levels of each store and see, based on actual sales data, if reordering needs to be done. This helps you minimize wastage as you will curb the ordering of excess ingredients where demand is low.
Having more accurate inventory management will help reduce customers’ chances of finding their favorite meals unavailable when they visit. Not having to endure such disappointments will lead to greater brand loyalty.
Oversight over the sales data and inventory of every store in your chain will give you all the information you need to optimize each outlet’s performance.
Manage Performance
A cloud-based POS will help you get the data you need to make the decisions that will boost your different locations’ performance whenever you need it. To gauge the effectiveness of promotional campaigns, you can gather stats on the number of customers taking advantage of discounts in different locations at the tap of a button on your smartphone.
Optimizing your enterprise restaurant POS software in the cloud will enable you to get synchronized reports daily, weekly, or monthly to review your restaurant’s overall performance. And this from the device of your choice—your desktop or mobile device. Data that would have taken ages to collate and analyze is available instantly; helping you take advantage of customer preferences changes, for instance, is a good time.
Optimize Sales
Just like your cloud POS can help you keep tabs of your inventory in real-time over multiple locations, it can help you stay abreast of the sales from all your outlets. This data can help you respond to demand changes proactively and allows you to make recommendations or sell add-ons that customers are likely to react positively to.
A cloud POS that allows customers to place orders remotely can increase sales significantly. This is an excellent option to offer during this coronavirus pandemic when many still prefer to have food delivered to minimize infection risk.
Many locations, One Voice
The beauty of having a POS system that connects all your locations to a central location is that you can ensure all of them adhere to the same standards. You can enforce set operational procedures that minimize wastage and offer efficient customer service. Nothing can be better for your brand’s health than customers getting the same positive experience wherever they go.