A hospitality Point Of Sale (POS) system can be a valuable tool for small businesses, such as a single pub, restaurant, or cafe. Despite marketing efforts that may suggest otherwise, a good hospitality POS system can have as many great features for a small business as a large multi-site group, and the fees can easily be justified by the time they can save and revenue uplift they can bring.
The hardware includes terminals, card readers, receipt printers, and barcode scanners, while the software includes payment processing, inventory management, and employee performance. A key feature of hospitality POS software is speed of service and ease of use, with clear, simple steps to complete tasks in the shortest time possible.
The benefits of this are slick service, reduced waiting times, and more customers served. These benefits alone can justify the price tag of many systems.
An industry-focused POS will offer reports that are important to hospitality operators, such as sales comparison reports that adjust the prior year period to align to the same days of the week as the current period. This gives a like-for-like comparison, and staff wages are one of the biggest costs for a hospitality business. They need reports on staff costs and how these compare to sales to ensure a profitable business.
It offers many other reports that are important to the hospitality sector, such as stock and wastage, cash variances, tips and service charge, discounts and promotions, and food and drink service times.
Making a good margin on the food and drink sold is vital to being profitable, and a good hospitality POS system should show the gross profit made on each item when setting sales and cost prices. For items with recipes, the cost can be automatically calculated from the ingredients, and sales reports will then show the gross profit that should have been made for any period based on sales and cost prices.
Running stock takes on the system will show the gross profit made after any wastage or stock loss, and all of this is available without needing to fork out for an external stock taker – a cost that can be a struggle for a small business. A good stock procedure in place means the system can use current stock levels and recent sales history to automatically generate orders that can be sent to suppliers, thus saving time and reducing the possibility of errors.
Loyalty schemes aren’t just for big businesses, but the complexity of setting them up can be a real challenge for small businesses. An effective loyalty scheme needs to make it easy for customers to sign up, and then to scan their loyalty pass to receive their points or benefits.
The information stored on a POS system for loyalty points can then be used for email marketing campaigns or personalised offers. Many small businesses now use a booking system to keep track of bookings and enable customers to book online, but managing bookings can be time-consuming for a small business. A good hospitality POS system with a built-in booking can make this easier, with bookings feeding straight into the POS system and no need to log in to a separate system to view bookings.
Bookings can be viewed directly on the POS system, with arrival and departure times overlaid on the table plan, and alerts can be triggered on the POS system for new bookings, requests, or cancellations. Whilst built-in features can often be more beneficial to a small business than trying to integrate multiple systems, an area where an integration can be very beneficial is accounting, such as outsourcing costs for small businesses.
Most good hospitality POS systems have integrations with popular small business accounting packages. Sales and payments, and any petty cash expenses can be posted to accounts every day without any manual work for the business or a bookkeeper. With some other widely available tools to automatically create bills from invoices & receipts, a large part of bookkeeping can be automated.
Every small business is different, and not all the above features will be relevant to all businesses, but small businesses in hospitality can get at least as much from a good POS system as their large counterparts. Some features can even provide more benefit to a small business, where time is precious, juggling multiple tasks is a reality, and simplicity is key.
According to the filing, small businesses in hospitality should look for a POS system that meets their specific needs, and key features to consider are speed of service, itemised reporting, staff cost management, gross profit tracking, stock management, loyalty schemes, and accounting integrations, including tools for managing late payments.
It is essential for them to find a system that aligns with their business goals and provides the necessary tools to succeed in the industry, considering the future of business plans.
