5 Tips for Using Your Point-of-Sale System to Deliver Faster Service at Your Restaurant

Is your restaurant full to capacity, but you're still not getting enough sales? When you're trying to improve your restaurant's performance at busy times, speed is one of the first areas to look at. You can deliver faster service by making these easy tweaks to the way you use your point-of-sale system (POS).

1. Ensure that your POS equipment is in top condition

It's easy to get used to short delays that take half a minute or so and not even notice them, but all these wasted minutes add up. If your POS touch screen is taking too long to refresh or your cash drawer doesn't always open quickly, this will slow down your service. Go through your whole process with the intention of noticing where your POS is not as fast as it could be, then discuss your observations with your POS provider. More often than not, these small issues can be easily fixed.

2. Invest in mobile POS equipment

If waiters are equipped with iPads for taking orders, they can add the order to the system at the table. No time is spent walking to and from a central POS terminal, then copying the order from the order pad, and waiters don't need to wait for each other before they can put in their orders.

3. Use a separate network for your POS terminal

Free Wi-Fi for your customers should be kept on a separate network from your POS terminal. It will not only make your network more secure, but you'll ensure that at busy times you have enough bandwidth available to process transactions quickly.

4. Add shortcuts for frequently requested items to your POS screen

Through POS reports you can establish the menu items that your customers love. When you display shortcuts to these items on the home screen of your POS terminal, the staff will take less time to enter orders.

5. Monitor your sales per labour hour

To calculate the sales per labour hour, divide the total sales for the period you're interested in by the labour hours for the same period. Using your POS-generated reports, you can easily calculate sales per labour hour for the whole day or just for the busy times of the day, when you're trying to increase your speed.

Obviously, you need enough staff to ensure that all tables are served promptly and add-ons are offered. However, more staff is not always the answer. It's possible to have too many people working, so that they're in each other's way and slowing the service down.  By monitoring the sales per labour hour, you'll be able to establish the optimal staffing levels for your restaurant.