An automated payment handling system is vital for your business in this day and age. Fewer people carry around cash with them. They opt to pay for things using cards, checks, or money transfer services. You thus need to be equipped to receive payment for your products in all its forms.
As a restaurateur, you need to invest in a POS system that does more than accept payments for food sold at your establishment. You need a system that helps in running the eatery and not only reduces workload but also enhances efficiency.
A POS system meant for use in a restaurant should be able to perform a lot of tasks. It needs to manage tables, track inventory, maintain a customer database, and even analyze business data to help you get ahead. There are many POS systems in the market. Toast POS, however, ranks highest and is, therefore, the more preferred.
Toast POS overview
Birthed in 2012, the Toast is a favorite POS system among restaurant owners. It is made exclusively for use in the restaurant and eatery sector. It, therefore, provides specific solutions to problems affecting businesses in the said sector. By using this system, you are not only able to handle payments but you can also perform back-of-house, front-of-house management duties. Front-of-house roles include taking customer’s food orders, feedback, tips, and processing payments. Back-of-house duties include taking stock, accounting, plus preparing staff shifts.
The system is also able to collect data and provide you with an analysis to help in planning and strategizing for future business growth. Thus, you will be in a place to know which among your products is fast-moving, who among your staff is most hardworking and who your regular customers are.
The Toast POS runs on an Android operating system (OS). Android OS is extremely secure. You are assured that no one can hack or tamper with your data. It is also easily customizable. This means that updates are easy to install. You can set the POS to automatically install updates whenever they are available for download.
With this system, you can provide an ordering platform that is online based to your clientele. You, therefore, avoid having to outsource the services of a third party. As such, you are set to make a ton of money, without having to share it with anyone.
Toast offers an all year-round customer service. Whenever you have a problem, you can call customer service any time of day or even night, and get your problem fixed.
How much does it cost?
The POS system is also extremely affordable. The software will cost $79 a month for each terminal you have at your establishment. As for payment processing, Toast charges a flat transparent fee that varies depending upon the customers you serve in a particular month. Therefore, if the business was slow in one month, Toast will charge you less. Learn more about Toast POS Pricing here.
Features
Ordering
With Toast, the entire concept of placing and managing orders is completely dismantled. Your wait staff will carry check pads no longer. Instead, they can take orders in two ways. Using a portable handheld Toast go device or counter-top terminal that can be turned to face a customer. With these two devices, the wait staff can take food orders, send them to the kitchen, receive payments from the same spot. What is crazier is the fact that all this information will be stored in your information database for you to analyze later and determine the success of business that day.
Menu creation
With Toast, you are in a position of having a different menu every week or so. By looking at sales data, you can quickly analyze and find out which meal is a hit and which is a failure. Using customer feedback, you can also find out how best to customize your meals to fit within your clientele’s preferences.
Report offering
This is the most awe-inspiring property of Toast POS. This system can receive data, analyze it, and give a report on how your business is doing. The reports range from sales, customer preferences, tips, and much more. With such information, you can analyze your business’s health, plug holes, and come up with ingenious ways of increasing profits.
Inventory management
Keeping track of inventory and stock taking is imperative in ensuring business success. You must have information about what you have in store and what needs to be added. Toast allows you to monitor your entire inventory. It tracks how many onions were used in a day, how much was used etc. With this feature, you will be able to keep on top of things. Nothing will suddenly run out, because you will be able to restock as the need arises.
Labour management
Toast allows you to virtually manage your restaurant staff. Using Toast, you can create work schedules, arrange shifts, and implement them. It is possible to discover hardworking employees via the sales reports generated by the system and determine who deserves a raise or a promotion.
You can also control to what extent a particular staff member has access to the system for example, managers can have access to business statistics, while servers can only receive orders, payments and tips.
Customer feedback
Customer feedback is crucial to achieving success in your business. Toast avails this opportunity to get in touch with all your customers, find out what part of your restaurant they liked and what part they loathed. With such information, you are well placed to making changes and ensuring that your customers are always satisfied.
Online services
Imagine being able to provide an online platform from which your customers can order from. With Toast, this is possible. Better still, you do not need to outsource the services of a 3rd party site. You are thus empowered to manage online orders yourself, without having to pay exorbitant prices for such services.
Conclusion
Toast POS is a good decision to make for a food & beverage business. Its makers, created a product that would solve specific problems in the sector. By investing in Toast, you will be able to perform all management duties without burning out. With it, you provide your restaurant with lots of tools that can help it succeed.