Every guest in your restaurant wants to be served quickly. They will be disappointed if the waitress lingers in serving them. They want the menu they order to be made and cooked quickly. If they order a new menu again, they don’t like the long wait. It is not strange if we have seen a guest from a restaurant who finally canceled the menu he ordered, because he had waited too long.
Your kitchen staff, from the chef, cook helper, pantry, or bar, are also required to prepare and cook food quickly, according to orders from guests. Coordination between the waitress, cashier and the kitchen must run fast, starting from the menu order input to delivering the finished menu.
The problem is, if the intensity of an operation runs faster, the possibility of human-errors will also be higher. Especially if your restaurant is in a crowded situation, where every guest scream asking to be served. The chances of mistakes such as cooking wrong, sending wrong menus, miscalculating bills, and so on, will be even greater.
That is one reason why a restaurant should use POS software, so that in addition to making operations run fast, it also reduces human-errors. Here are some examples of human-errors that can be prevented by using restaurant software:
1. Delivering menus to the wrong table.
Often I see in a crowded restaurant, where the waitress is confused because she doesn’t know (or forgets) which table she should take the menu she is holding. Of course, this slows down operations.
By using POS , this doesn’t need to be the case. When the menu ordered (for example) table A1 is printed on the kitchen section, the printout is included with the table number that ordered it. So, when the menu has finished cooking, the kitchen can tell the waitress the table number who ordered the menu.
2. Miscalculated the total price.
In a situation that demands speed, it is very possible that the cashier will miscalculate the total price ordered. Not to mention if the cashier forgets to enter one of the menus that are also ordered, which of course can harm the restaurant. Or vice versa, the cashier can enter the price twice, so that for guests it will be more expensive.
If using restaurant POS systems, the system will automatically calculate the total price of each bill once the menu is inputted. The cashier no longer needs to bother calculating with a calculator, because it is done automatically by the system.
3. Give normal price, even though it is on discount.
It could be that a guest came to your restaurant interested in the promo “50% discount on all sea food, from 3 – 5 pm”. If you use a manual system, it could be that your waitress forgets that the grilled fish ordered (one of the menus being discounted) by the guest is being discounted. When the bill is given, the guest may be surprised, because the price given is a normal price, not a discount.
By using point of sale software, you can make initial settings (or in the Back Office module) regarding the parameters of the discount you want to give. Cashiers and waitresses do not need to memorize every day what menus are being discounted, because the system has stored them automatically. When the bill is printed, the price that appears is the price that has been immediately discounted (along with the information “discount”).
4. The table that was booked was occupied by other guests.
Your guests will certainly feel angry if the table they have booked in advance is occupied by other guests. However, this can be overcome easily if you use restaurant software.
When a guest calls for a reservation, just fill in the guest data in the “reservation” button that is already available at the Point Of Sale. Fill in the guest name, number of guests, date and time of reservation, and table number booked.
After that, the booked table will display an “R” (which means “reserved”) sign in the table layout in the POS front view. This sign or symbol informs the cashier and waitress that the table has been booked for that particular hour and day. So, when the reservation time is almost up, the waitress can tell the other guests that the table has been reserved.
