POS DATA BANK: Gathering information to fatten your bottom line

Your POS is far more than just an order taking cash machine. Of course you take payments, and provide product exchanges, but how would you feel if I told you your POS system would help increase your bottom line?
Owning a restaurant is a large scale operation where all the different parts need to work together efficiently for success. From gathering your ingredients, to food prep, to the time it takes from order to delivery and collecting payments all leaves a long trail of data that you need to record to know how your business can reap the most profit.
Below are three helpful ways a POS can effectively help use data to increase revenues.
INVENTORY
This is the most obvious data you can pull from your POS. The running of a restaurant means big revenue, but that’s countered by big expenses. The cost of food is one of the main factors that can determine if your restaurant will be profitable. The average restaurant aims for roughly 25% of the business to be food costs. One of the problems we face is that the food supplier industry’s data is tied up in paper receipts, which makes the tracking of your ingredients pricing a huge annoyance. So initially it takes a bit of admin from your end, but once everything is loaded the right POS (with the right software integrations) will automatically calculate your usage for each dish considering time and ingredients and allowing you to pull your profit margin from that dish. Constantly review menu items and see whats selling, and whats not.
Remember the tracking your food costs is imperative to the success of your business to increase profits. Checking on your food costs and making sure they stay within some reasonable threshold of 25% +/- 2% can save you thousands of dollars a year.
REPEAT OFFENDERS
Whenever your customers make a purchase, you can use this to collect valuable information. From names, addresses, phone numbers, as well as past purchases and even viewing their full history. You can collect customer email addresses via paperless receipts at checkout and even sign them up for your newsletter. A solid POS system can house all this data and help you construct useful reports.
You can use this info to create profiles of your customers, and how to target them when sending promotions. If you know what they like to order, send them a discount for exactly what they like to eat. Remember your current customer base is the best way to make more revenue. You’ve already satisfied them, so keep them coming back for more.
EMPLOYEE DATA
Using restaurant POS enables you to track your sales history, as well as what your wait staff are selling and who your top sellers are.  A POS system will give you the data of who sells the most food at your restaurant, who gets the highest tips, who does the most up-sells, and who is costing you money with voids. So with this info you can monitor your employees data by identifying the best sellers, whose hitting it out of the park, and whose lagging behind and use all that to your benefit to increase your bottom line.
Now that you know some of the common data points that your POS is collecting, it’s time to use it to your advantage.
Like our stories or want to hear more? Drop us a line @ Blogpointos@gmail.com.
See you next week!
Your devoted hostess,
Brittany
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