Utilizing Your POS System to Management Meals Prices

• Business consultants level to the important thing POS options you should utilize to maintain your pizza restaurant’s meals prices in examine.
• Stock management may be tough to implement, so homeowners ought to search a POS resolution that handles all facets of stock fluidly.

Associated: Utilizing Your POS system to navigate the restaurant labor scarcity

By Tracy Morin

With inflation charges and gasoline costs hovering, everybody has been feeling the squeeze within the first half of 2022—making this an important time to maintain meals prices in examine, for each your sake and your prospects’. Fortunately, your POS system can show an necessary instrument for making certain profitability and counteracting rising costs. “Your meals prices and your labor prices are your greatest bills in the case of your restaurant,” notes Chris Ciabarra, proprietor of Athena Safety, primarily based in Austin, Texas, and former co-founder of Revel Methods. “Get them underneath management by utilizing a great stock system in your POS.”

However what makes a great stock system? We gathered skilled opinions on key POS options to hunt and make the most of in the case of preserving your stock in examine, from analyzing previous gross sales to enabling correct future forecasting.

“I like to recommend searching for methods that have already got the stock module refined. If the module is just too tough to arrange, or gradual in motion, homeowners and administration generally get annoyed and simply return to doing the whole lot manually.”
— Dave Arnold, e-Coast Methods

Choice and Setup

Stock management may be tough to implement, so homeowners ought to search a POS resolution that handles all facets of stock fluidly, in response to Dave Arnold, proprietor and founding father of e-Coast Methods, an IT firm primarily based in Charleston, South Carolina, that makes a speciality of working with bars and eating places. “Many POS methods require a third-party integration to do it properly, however the preliminary setup is essential—you actually get out what you set in,” Arnold explains. “So, when selecting a POS system for the pizza enterprise, I like to recommend searching for methods that have already got the stock module refined. If the module is just too tough to arrange, or gradual in motion, homeowners and administration generally get annoyed and simply return to doing the whole lot manually.”

Arnold has just a few function ideas: Are you able to enter gadgets, recipes, distributors, pars and meals prices into the system, together with their location (walk-in, rear chest freezer, and many others.)? Are you able to set notifications of low shares to assist set off orders, in order that buy orders (POs) are created and acquired proper within the system? “When buy orders are created from the system, customers simply want to verify meals prices are up to date and correct earlier than the PO is positioned to make sure reporting is correct in the case of profitability,” Arnold provides.

“[Your system] ought to have the ability to inform you how a lot of every ingredient you’ll need for the week primarily based on how a lot you offered final week or the identical week final yr.”
— Chris Ciabarra, Athena Safety

In the meantime, Bob Vergidis, chief visionary officer for pointofsale.cloud in Cincinnati, says homeowners ought to search an answer that permits them to take management of their know-how whereas streamlining the best way they handle all facets of their enterprise, from customer-facing transactions to back-of-the-house operations. He notes that the business is now shifting from general-purpose clouds for on-line companies to purpose-built clouds attuned to the wants of particular industries, together with the restaurant business.

Associated: How Oath Pizza overcomes provide chain issues

“Aggregating the whole lot they want—together with bank card processing, level of sale, on-line ordering, cellular ordering, supply, provide chain administration and third-party integration—helps eating places higher compete by permitting them to convey all of those companies in-house in an easy-to-use and inexpensive cloud-driven bundle,” Vergidis says. “Cloud companies are supplied on demand, so shoppers should purchase what they want once they want it and give attention to the issues that make the most important distinction to them. For instance, stock administration, in addition to recipe dealing with options, assist keep away from over-ordering from suppliers, which decreases meals prices, over-portioning and waste.”

Ciabarra provides that not all POS methods supply strong stock management, so do your analysis. “Be certain that it does substances and helps you with forecasting after you might have entered your substances,” he suggests. “Additionally discover out how it performs the forecasting. Not each POS lets you select which strategy to forecast after the entire information is within the system.”

On-the-Fly Reporting

Reside, granular and computerized reporting on meals gross sales, prices and particularly waste goes a good distance within the struggle in opposition to excessive prices and inflation, Arnold believes, and these experiences must be generated on the similar time of the week and day to take care of consistency. You may then analyze menu gadgets’ gross sales efficiency to find out if it’s time to regulate the menu.

“A Countdown/86 function (through which the POS system alerts employees when an merchandise is out of inventory) might help eating places hold recent substances that spoil at low stock ranges whereas preserving the POS customers consistently knowledgeable with reside information,” Arnold notes. “Smaller, extra frequent orders is not going to solely cut back waste however ship the freshest attainable dishes to your prospects. Moreover, on-line ordering and digital menu shows are additionally nice instruments that can help you modify menu costs on the fly. When the value of a menu merchandise modifications, it must be mechanically up to date on the web ordering web site.” Lastly, Arnold advises, meals prices must be reviewed with each order, since smaller, extra frequent value modifications are sometimes extra simply accepted by prospects than massive will increase.

Ciabarra agrees that stock management should have a number of key options that can assist you forecast what it’s essential order sooner or later. “Stock methods should permit for ingredient management in your gadgets—in any other case, forecasting shouldn’t be correct,” he says. “Every merchandise you promote is made up of substances. Should you enter the entire data into your stock system, it ought to have the ability to inform you how a lot of every ingredient you’ll need for the week primarily based on how a lot you offered final week or the identical week final yr. This fashion, you’ll be able to forecast each merchandise in response to previous gross sales.”

Vergidis believes that a very powerful POS function to search for and use in stock management is recipe administration—i.e., being able to trace the recipe of every merchandise in sufficient element so that each time an merchandise is offered, the system is ready to report what the perfect stock value of that sale is.

“It’s necessary to at all times take into consideration lowering friction in operations, and stock is a kind of areas the place in the event you do issues accurately, you will notice the influence very clearly on the underside line.”
— Bob Vergidis, pointofsale.cloud

Subsequent, search for provide line integration, which implies that precise stock prices may be mechanically imported into the POS. “After getting precise and ideally suited prices, then you might have product variance, which is the distinction between how a lot product the operation must be utilizing versus how a lot product is definitely getting used,” Vergidis explains. “That’s the holy grail of stock management for eating places and pizzerias.”

After all, the perfect stock controls will do nothing in the event that they’re not used, so Vergidis stresses that comfort performs an enormous function. “Stock is a chore at the perfect of occasions, however utilizing new cellular applied sciences obtainable in some newer POS methods permits workforce members to do stock utilizing their telephones, permitting for stock counts to be extra correct and simpler to do,” he says. “It’s necessary to at all times take into consideration lowering friction in operations, and stock is a kind of areas the place in the event you do issues accurately, you will notice the influence very clearly on the underside line.”

Sidebar: POS Pointers

Bob Vergidis, chief visionary officer for Cincinnati-based pointofsale.cloud, shares three suggestions for selecting and utilizing a POS system:

1. Take the time to construct correct recipes into the POS system. That’s the most important factor you are able to do to hyperlink the stock to the POS. All of it begins there.

2. Search for greater than level of sale. An digital money register is not going to actually change your corporation, so search for a POS that may do extra—both that can assist you enhance your gross sales or to cut back your prices.

3. Take into consideration omnichannel. That’s a elaborate phrase, however it principally means to service your friends utilizing any methodology they like: on-line, cellular, on-premise, pickup, supply and dine-in. Your POS ought to show you how to elevate your service—not simply gather cash and print a receipt.

Tracy Morin is PMQ’s senior copy editor and the editor of PizzaVegan.com.