10 Features Hospitality POS Systems Require to Expand Your Restaurant

As the hospitality industry anticipates its post-COVID return to business as usual, many hotels are looking to enhance their restaurants and the other food and beverage services they offer. 

Now is a great time to upgrade your hotel restaurant’s features starting with the hospitality POS system you’re using. When thinking about if, or even how, you could replace your POS solution, review these 10 features your hospitality POS system shouldn’t do without.

1. Order Processing

Your restaurant’s first chance to make a good impression with customers is when you’re taking their order. Your hotel restaurant POS system has to communicate orders to the kitchen and bar quickly and accurately, including any modifications. The ordering system has to be easy for servers to learn and use, and it must include a kitchen display system (KDS) that presents orders clearly to the kitchen staff.

2. Inventory Management

The key to accurate and efficient inventory management for a restaurant is automation. Hospitality POS systems must include real-time inventory tracking that’s linked to online and in-house orders. It needs to support unit tracking and variable pricing so stock prices can be tracked by their servable form before they’re sold. Your restaurant’s inventory has to be managed as one component that touches all the business’s operations, from product ordering to final sale.

3. Menu Management

Inventory tracking can help a restaurant plan changes to its menu by identifying not only the most popular dishes you offer but also the ones that generate the most profit. A hospitality POS system should make it easy for a restaurant to customize its menu to add daily specials and promotions. It should also offer seasonal dishes, alternatives for people with dietary restrictions, and combinations such as paired appetizers and entrees.

4. Customer Loyalty Programs

Looking at your restaurant the way your customers see it is the first step to understanding what makes people want to return to your business. Your restaurant’s POS system can help you identify what customers like and don’t like about interacting with your business, including support for their favorite payment options and giving them a singular dining experience whether they’re ordering in person or online. By tracking your regulars and most popular dishes or products, you can better market to and prepare for your best customers.

5. Employee Scheduling and Management

Your restaurant’s employees rely on your POS system not only to place customer orders and complete transactions but also to access their work schedules and record their sales and hours worked. Managers depend on the restaurant’s POS solution to determine which of their servers are generating the most revenue and which may require additional training. Employee management features required in a hospitality POS system include application tracking, time and attendance tracking, benefits management, employee performance metrics, and secure access to the information by employees and managers.

6. Recipe Costing

To run at peak efficiency, a restaurant needs to know how much each menu item costs to prepare. Recipe costing breaks down the expense of producing a specific dish by calculating the cost of individual ingredients, as well as the time and expense of preparing the item. Your hospitality POS system should provide the information you need to conduct both recipe costing and food costing, which determines the total cost of making and serving a menu item.

7. Mobility

There are two aspects to mobility for a hotel restaurant: making the eatery’s offerings accessible to a wider audience of diners and improving the dining experience for your business’s customers by providing them with more ordering and payment options. Even as in-person dining resumes, consumers will continue to take advantage of delivery and takeout. Your POS system has to be able to process more orders received online via the restaurant’s website and custom mobile app. It must also integrate online and in-person order tracking to ensure up-to-date inventory, sales, and employee performance numbers.

8. Sales Analysis

The more relevant information you have at your fingertips about your restaurant’s sales and other operations, the better your ability to ensure that it’s running smoothly and reaching its revenue and profit goals. The sales analysis features included in a hospitality POS system allow you to calculate several different sales metrics, including customer lifetime value, sales per unique customer, profit per transaction, the total value of the business, revenue growth, free cash flow, and return on investment capital.

9. Online Ordering and Digital Payments

Fast and accurate order processing is the best way to keep your restaurant’s patrons happy. This applies whether they’re dining in the establishment or placing orders online for pickup or delivery. Your POS system has to smoothly integrate online and in-house orders so you can manage all of your orders from a single screen. The system offers your customers a range of digital payment options, including e-wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. It also maintains a history of customers’ past purchases so they can be offered discounts and other promotions automatically based on their dining preferences.

10. Third-Party Integrations

There’s much more to running a restaurant than keeping the kitchen stocked and the dining room full. In addition to serving as the technology foundation for your eatery, your POS system needs to link easily with accounting software such as Xero, Sage, and Quickbooks, your payment acceptance system, and delivery apps like DoorDash, Grubhub, and other third-party services. The system must also work with a range of kitchen display systems, such as those from Epson and FreshKDS.

The past year has demonstrated that running a hospitality business is not for the faint of heart. Yet the hotel and restaurant industries anticipate better days ahead as travelers take to the road once again and diners flock back to their favorite eateries and night spots. Your hospitality POS system can be the foundation of your plans to capitalize on the coming boom by expanding the type and quality of the services you offer.

When you partner with talech for your hospitality POS system needs, we devote our time to identify your business challenges. We use this information to work with you to apply an innovative POS solution that levels the playing field. Reach out to us today to sign up for a demo and to learn more about how talech can be your valued POS partner.