Restaurant ownership and management can be a lucrative, rewarding, and fun career — but it also comes with its share of headaches. Fortunately, there are many ways you can keep hassles to a minimum. For starters, follow these three essential restaurant management tips — a task that’s even easier if you leverage point of sale (POS) technology.
1. Set quality standards — and don’t deviate from them. Poor food quality and poor service are huge customer turnoffs, so formulate quality standards and take steps aimed at ensuring that you uphold each one. Steps can include clearly communicating the standards to employees at the front of the house and in the kitchen, as well as providing the training staff need to uphold these standards.
Of all essential restaurant management tips, this is one that can easily be supported using POS technology. For example, a mobile POS system allows servers to transmit customers’ orders directly to the kitchen as they’re taken. Food can then be prepared and delivered to patrons’ tables faster, enabling speedy, high-caliber service and ensuring that all menu items are received before their quality begins to deteriorate — i.e., hot foods are served hot and cold foods are served cold. Mobile POS also allows for pay-at-the-table and line-busting, minimizing service delays.
2. Control your inventory — and your inventory usage. Without the proper inventory in stock, you run the risk of disappointing customers — and losing loyal patrons — when you can’t offer their desired food or beverage because of an outage. And if you aren’t keeping tabs on your inventory in stock, you also take the chance of ordering excessive quantities of ingredients — at an unnecessary expense and with the potential for costly waste when perishables are involved.
However, when you follow our restaurant management tips by harnessing the inventory control module of your POS system, you can set minimum acceptable inventory levels for each ingredient and program your software to automatically generate reorders when these levels are reached — not a minute before, and not a minute after. With inventory data in hand, you’ll also be able to calculate profit margins and ensure that it isn’t costing you too much money to prepare and serve individual items and beverage.
What’s more, if your restaurant has a bar, your POS software allows you to monitor your operation and address problems like over pouring or employees serving free drinks to friends.
3. Ensure your kitchen and front of house are sufficiently staffed. Inadequate staffing leads to unhappy customers: You can’t provide the level of customer service exhibited by well-run, well-managed restaurants without the right staff.
You can harness labor management software to optimize your restaurant staffing levels. A component of many restaurant POS solutions, this technology allows you to create schedules based on parameters including employees’ availability and peak times for different days and dayparts. It also lets you change schedules on the fly. The end-result is enough coverage during busy times and just the right coverage, with no wasted wages, when things are slower.
Your restaurant’s POS system can be a valuable tool when it comes to managing your restaurant efficiently, profitably, and hassle-free. Leveraging all of the functionality of your POS system can help your restaurant operate smoothly and help you find time to focus on making your business a success.
