Toast Point of Sale – Is it worth making the switch?

Toast is a point of sale platform that is robust enough to manage all your restaurant operations. The Toast point of sale offers a combination of powerful cloud-based software, payment processing, and robust hardware whose design is good looking for your store’s display.

No matter the size of your kitchen or restaurant, your business will benefit from switching to automated operations by use of Toast point of sale. Manual management processes are tedious and time-consuming.

The restaurant business is continually growing, with more people getting into the industry to run their restaurants. On the same note, competition in the industry is getting higher than in the previous past. Running a restaurant is very engaging and takes hard work to run the company successfully. Automated software solutions come in handy to help business owners to leverage themselves against competition and to enable them to have time to manage other important issues regarding the business.

Technological solutions for any firm cannot go overstressed. Toast point of sale comes in handy to automate your processing of orders, making reservations, managing inventories, tracking your payments, among other services.

Understanding Toast Point of Sale

Toast POS is an all-round restaurant management system that helps manage all your restaurant operations. The POS design majors on US-based clientele, and it focuses on giving both the restaurant staff and the customers a great experience.

The customers can use handheld mobile devices to pay, sign, and give tips on their own without leaving their seats. It gives room to the restaurant staff to concentrate on more vital business concerns, such as creating the best customer experience for the guests and ensuring that everyone is satisfied with their service.

Toast POS offers an end-to-end operations platform enabling the business owners to access a wide range of restaurant operations. It allows the entrepreneur to manage the clientele database from anywhere in the world.

Benefits of Toast Point of Sale

Billing and Order Processing:

 If you subscribe to monthly billing, you will need Toast to bill you for the monthly charge plus any other credit card discrepancies.

For the billing to work out, Toast will send you a monthly billing statement and settle your account each month. You will, therefore, need to authorize at least one account for Toast to access and send both debit and credit transactions and the funds owed to the service provider. When you access your bank statements, you will tell any Toast billing transactions as they will have the “ACH Toast, INC” description.

Toast will also notify the business contacts of any hardware or other costs that the customer incurs that need immediate settlement. There is a Finance section at the back-end of the Credit Card activity report under the Analytics and Reporting Header.

The billing functionality that Toast provides makes it easy for the business to keep its financial books in order and to be aware of funds moving in and out of the firm.

Sales Monitoring and Reporting:

Whether you are having a good or a bad day at work, you will always need to check your business sales report. You do not want to go through the manual procedure of updating the Excel sheet and struggling through the cells of numbers hours unending. It is an uphill task you do not want to spend your time on when you have other vital business matters that need your attention.

Toast POS makes it easy and fun to monitor your restaurant sales by integrating the functionality in the system. You, therefore, rest from tracking your restaurant data manually. Toast facilitates the business managers to access the information in real-time, in the cloud, and on other devices. Such convenience is priceless.

If you take the more advanced features of the POS, the software will allow you to prioritize and customize the restaurant reports depending on your business metrics. You can use that functionality to determine who views what kind of data, for example, the owner, CEO, and the managers.

The reports will help the business management to monitor the trend and therefore make informed decisions.

Restaurant Sales Reports: The core of any business is its sales. Toast point of sale offers you a sales report dashboard where you view all the transactions completed within a specified period.

The sales report will include the net sales, tips, the number of guests you received, and the table turn-around time. It will show you all the service categories of that period, and the payment methods.

The report will show you an overview of the business performance metrics, which are essential to you, at a high level. It is also possible to narrow down to view specific categories of the sales report, for example, the individual items sold, tips collection, the types of credit cards, and many more. You can also access the sales under each server. Such observations enable you to determine how to optimize your menu and manage business resources.

Sales Exceptions Reports: Some businesses refer to the exception reports as Margin reports while some others term them as Bad margin reports. The data displays the products sold whose profit margins fall outside a specified margin. It calculates the gross profit for each product on your list.

When your team gives an empty Exception report, then you know that your business is running well. A blank one is an expression that your organization is calling every lead, entering quality data, and observing excellence in all activities.

The report will show you correctly who has done anything incorrectly and the details of the error. The record is a robust tool for sales managers. It gives you a clear picture of the kind of work the sales team is doing and their achievements. From the data collection, you will enforce the best sales practices in your organization to achieve maximum revenue.

The report will point out leads your team needs to call to enforce prompt follow up to avoid losing potential clients. The report will show you the number of new leads that need follow up. If you realize that you have too many potential clients awaiting calls, check whether you need to employ more sales representatives. You can also use the report to reward the right sales behaviors from your team.

Always remember to thank your team for each empty exception report since it is a result of the day’s hard work.

Product Mix Reports and Menu Reports: Your business success centers around the food you make and sell. It is critical to monitor how the menu items are performing. The Toast point of sale offers automated reports for your view. You can check how each menu item is performing, and you can narrow down to see which items sell most at specific times. It will enable you to know what you need to stock for different seasons.

Labor and Payout Management:

It is critical to view how your workforce is translating into sales. The report shows you a summary of each employee and their output. You can also track the production of any staff that is leaving so that you monitor whether they are slacking off during the last few days and exactly what their impact on the sales business was when they lasted. You will be able to view payroll reports, pool tips, time entries for either of the employees you may want to observe.

Employee theft is high, and you, therefore, need to keep an eye on payouts. You will have an overview of any payouts at the end of every shift. Toast POS integrates the ability to compare the payouts with the labor reports helping you to determine the most productive employees.

Business Account Management:

You do not want to go through untold distress during the tax paying period. Toast point of sale enables you to keep track of all your assets, liabilities, revenue, and expenditure.

The general ledger report automates all the bookkeeping for the restaurant. Your accountant then has time to manage the tax returns. The POS saves both the business and the accountant time and money.

Loyalty Programs and Gift Cards:

Guest behavior Reports: Toast will automate reports that will give an overview of your guest behavior patterns. It will show you the guests that visited your restaurant most frequently and the ones that spent the most amount of cash. It is vital to prepare an email to thank such clients.

The guest behavior report will also show you individual customer patterns. You will identify the ones that have taken long since their last visit, the most favorite meals the guests choose each time they visit, and their spending behaviors as well.

The data you collect using the POS will enable you to customize a loyalty program for your clients. It will give you a rich customer care experience, and it will show in the increase in your revenue.

Considerations When Purchasing a POS

It is common for any business to gauge and see whether it needs to invest in anything that will cost the company.  You need to know the pros and cons of any product you put your finances into and whether it is worth the effort.

User Friendliness: Go for a point of sale that the user finds it easy to navigate. Ensure that your users will not need training for them to navigate through the interface to access your services successfully.

Go for software that is easy to set up and use because you will be the first user. You will need to train your workers on how to use the system, and you will, therefore, need to enjoy an easy to use interface. Such an interface will also save you time and energy.

When discussing the available options you have before you make your purchase, talk to your vendor, and ask questions focusing on the usability of the interface. Go for what will be most comfortable for you. Toast ensures that your interface is easy for you to use.

Take time to talk to the clients who have experienced the POS for you to get first-hand reviews.

Customer Care Support: The fact that you are getting the point of Sale software means that your shop will be operational 24/7. It is for this reason you need a software that comes with stellar customer care support. The customer service can be in the form of live chats, phone calls, or emails.

You need to be sure that whenever your customer needs help when interacting with your business, someone needs to be available to help them out. When such support is not available, you will end up losing a potential client, which is unfortunate for your firm. You will find that level of customer care with Toast.

Reports: Go for a point of sale that will offer you with automated business reports. The report automation will ease the management processes, accessibility to data, and it will make work easy for your workers.

Investing in a point of sale is a step that will cost your business, and you should, therefore, get the best value out of that decision. Consider purchasing POS, which allows you portable access to your reports o that you can monitor the same from wherever you are in the world.

Pricing of the Point of Sale: When making your POS purchase ensure that you are only paying for what you are receiving. Do not pick a point of sale that has additional costs. It is not worth the pain. Talk to your vendor for any other feature you may need in your POS and be aware of any extra charges that come with it. Toast point of sale makes the price breakdown easy to understand and as affordable as possible.

Integration: Consider a system that allows you to work from one interface by combining all the services you need in one place. Such a platform will facilitate your workers to multitask smoothly, and this will boost their efficiency. The functionality is available with Toast POS.

Conclusion

When you consider the value a point of sale introduces into your business, you realize that it is an investment your company should undertake to remain at the top in a competitive world. It is an investment that gives the firm, the managers, and the restaurant clients a priceless experience.