Today's cafe customers expect prompt efficient service and to do this you need an effective touchscreen cafe system

What touchscreen hardware should I use with my touch screen POS system?

For a cafe I recommend a touchscreen terminal which as the touch screen and the PC as one unit. These terminals are usually fanless, quiet and are resistant to spills

How many touchscreen do I need?

This depends on the volume of your cafe and how you want to manage your preparation areas. First if you have a high volume even if this is just over the lunch period then you may require 2 or more touch screen terminals.

The next questions is how you want to manage your orders.

The order docket approach
With this approach when an order is placed you have various thermal printer located at your preparation aras which print out the order. Your staff place these dockets in order and go about fulfilling the orders. This model has been in use well before touchscreen hardware and touch screen POS systems have been around and people manually wrote orders on a docket or pad.

The order screen approach
Rather than print out a order no a thermal print the orders are shown on a screen in your preparation araas and you store view this and fulfil the order. The benefit of this second approach is that the system can provide alert based on the time the order was placed, it can flash if the order has been waiting for certain perid of time, eveyone including the manager can see what is taking place. Basically this approach although it requires more touchscreen units can make you cafe process more efficient.

If you are a store that gets a rush of morning coffee orders and lunch orders then you need systems to ensure your staff have as much support to ensure they are efficient in their order preparation and management. Customers who have to wait will go down the road or around he corner. SO again the cost may be higher but the benefits may result in happy customers and a happy business owner who is making more money.

So lets exaplin the setup in more details to make you cafe more efficient with a touchscreen.

On the front counter you wil lhave 2 touchscreen terminals with your touch screen POS system.
At your coffee preparation areas you will have another touchscreen where you staff will prepare the orders
At your food preparation areas (1 or mroe loations) you will have another touchscreen.

As the orders are placed they will appear on these other touch screen with informaton on when the order was placed and the priority. YOur staff will be directed by the touch screen system on where to focus their energy. It is the intelligence of the system to direct you staff that will make your cafe more efficient.

For more information on running a cafe and touchscreen POS system stay tuned.

Profits are about managing your margins and the way you do this is via your POS system

To be profitable it is all about selling your goods for more than you paid for them. This tasks as simple as it may sound is not so easy. The reason for this is that the standard retailer can have 500 to many thousands of product lines and it is a difficult task to price all these items and manage your margins.

Lets look as a standard retail scenario. You have a store full or stock and this stock cost you money to hold because you finance your stock or have to pay your suppliers bill via your bank overdraft or you hve to pay interest to your suppliers if you cannot sell the stock within their 30 or 60 day terms. So what this means is that you need access to information on what stock is moving and what stock is not moving. You then need to use this information to determine your pricing. Stock that is not moving you need to find ways to move it, as it is costing you to have it sit on the shelf. To do this you need to know what it cost you and how much you can discount the stock. Sometimes it is of benefit to sell the stock under costs because of the cost of holding the stock.

ON the other side with the stock that is moving you need to maximise your profits by charging your customers as much as you can while mairtaining as much volume as you can. Now different businesses have different models, some are high turnover low margin and others are low turnover but high margins and then everyone else is some where in between.

Ok so how do I use my POS to manage this process.

Well a good POS system will provide you with reports on what stock is moving and what stock is not. You then need to be able to view the stock that is not movng and be able ot quickly view the current price, the average price and last cost price and then be able to adjust the stock levels. Unfortunatelty many POS systems makes this hard as they force you to drill in to a sinple product at a time to alter it price. One of the benefits of the PBSA POS system is the abiility to view in one screen all the products in a particular category including the sotck level, the cost for the stock, the current price and the eGP and EGP%. Then on this same screen you can adjust the price for multiple items and see the changes to the eGP. This is a very powerful feature fo the PBSA POS system that saves you the business owner many, many hours of hard work.

Managing your pricing levels and margins is a daily process and one that is vital to your success. To do this you need to ensure your POS gives you access to the right reports and the gives you tools to use this information to make adjustments quickly and easily.

I loko forward to providing more detaisl on tricks to managing your margins in future articles on POS and POS systems

How does a point of sale system compare with a cash register

Many different stores across the world have cash registers. If you are one of them why should you consider upgrading to a point of sale system?

Benefits of a cash register

1. Cash registers are less expensive than a point of sale system
2. Cash registers are simple to use because all you have to do is ring up the price on the price label

While to some extent the above two statements are correct there is still another side to consider.

1. While a cash register may be less expensive up front, what are the real costs versus a point of sale?

A cash register cannot track your stock levels and most important your margins. Retail store operation is all about knowing what stock is moving and maintaining your margins on this stock. It sounds simlpe that to be profitable all you need to do is sell the majority of your stock for more than you paid for it. This task however is not so easy to implement. You need access to information that tells you what stock is selling, what stock is not selling and what margin you have on this stock. 10 of the same items on the shelf could have a different cost price depending on when and from where they were purchased.

This need for information is where a cash register fails miserably. All a cash register can do is record how much you sold an item for not what it costs you. The cash register cannot tell you anything about the stock movement or the margins. This is where a point of sale system which may have cost you more money at the   start saves you thousands and thousands of dollars. What a point of sale system provides the business owner is instant access to information which they can use to make business decisions.

What about the cost of labelling products. WIth a cash register you need to label each product with the price. This means that if you want to run a special you need to go and label all the items with the changed price. Then when the sale is over you have to go and re-lable them again.

One of the key benefits used by many retails stores using a point of sale is that they now use shelf labels rather than product price labels. This means when you run a sale all you need to do is change the one shelf label and you are done. In addition the point of sale system supports barcode scanning speeds the checkout process and ensure greater control of stock.

What about simplicity of use?

It is true the process of ready a price label and entering the price is as simple as you can get, athough from the point of sale system the scanning of a barcode is just as simple an efficient. What about if you make a mistake on the cash register, the process of removing the item from the sale takes more effort than in the point of sale where you have the ability to easily edit or remove lines items for the sale.

So why should I keep my cash register?
If oyou run a very simple operation that has minimal stock to control then I agree stick with your current cash register. Although I beleive in all cases the power of the informaton the point of sale system will provide makes the real cost of the  cash register to high.

There are many other benefits of a point of sale that you should consider. I will explain these in future articles. 

How do you manage your inventory

The amount and the number of product lines can vary greatly between difference business. Some businessses in a niche market may only have 5 or 10 products where other businesses can have thousands and thousands of product lines. Regardless of the number of lines the process to secure and manage inventtory is the same. The factor that size and volume creates is that if you have inefficient processes and systems the problems are compoounded.

At the basic level how do you manage inventory?

Step 1. Inventory is ordered.

To do this you need to work out what you need to order based on the customer demand. You never get your estimate of customer demand perfect but after a period of time you can get close.  So to confirm this step again you need to order the stock that you expect customers to purchase over the next week or month depending on the shelf life of your product and also the financial cost of holding that stock.

This sound pretty easy but in reality this is where so many businesses owners spend many many hours. It is this task of ordering that is one of the most painful. If you get it wrong it can cost you a lot of money.

So what tools does inventory management software need to provide to make this tasks more accurate and efficient?

A good system will include the ability to set minimum stock levels and stock re-order quantities. The software shoudl then be able to show the user what stock has hits its re-order level with tools to quickly add these items to a purchase order.

The other things that is also important is the ability to be able to see what stock is required for sales orders that you do not currently have in stock.

The above two capabilities are the most important tools you should look for in your inventory management software from a purchase order perspective

Step 2. Receive the stock

This step is the simple process of receiving the stock. However what you need here is systems of control to ensure each pallet, crate, and box is checked against the purchase ordered so that you ensure what you have ordered has been received. If there is something missing it needs to be noted in your system and either placed on back order or the purchase order changed.

Your system is only as good as the data entered by you and your staff. if you are not disciplined then you will lose control of your inventory.

Step 3. Sale and dispatch of your orders

This is where sotck leaves your control through sales. Items thorugh the sales prcoess should be scanned to ensure accurate movement of the stock. If you are not giving the product diretly to the customer then you need dispatch procedures to manage the outgoing orders and to ensure all the stock in the order is dispatched accurately and the data recorded in the system.

Step 3. Customer returns and supplier returns

If you stock is faultly then you need to receive the stock back from the customer and then track the process of returning this to the supplier and getting a credit note. So many businesses are laxy in this area and do not have a good inventory managment software system that helps ensure they not only return the stock but get a replacement or a credit note/refund. Do not burn your money here, ensure your systems gives you the abiliyty to track on follow through on supplier returns.

Step 4. Stock adjustments and stock take

Stock will get damaged, lost and sometimes stolen so you need the ability to adjust stock levels to ensure your inventory management system is accurate. This is completed through stock adjustments and then on a larger scale a full stock take. For the stock take process you need to be able to print out your current stock list and then go through the process of counting and recording the stock levels so that the system is accurate.

Note: A good system allows you do complete partial stock takes so that you do not have to do the stock take at the one time or you can do a rolling stock take.

Step 5. Product pricing and stock reports

It is vital that you can quickly get reports on what stock is moving, what stock is not selling and what you are making money on so that you can manage your stock levels and most importantly your margins.

A couple of very important features that you find in PBSA POS is the ability to change prices via the incoming goods screen so that as you see how much you are paying for stock you can adjust the price to maintain your margin levels.

The other feature unique to PBSA POS is the ability to see an entire category of products including the stock levels, the average cost price, the last cost price and your margins with the ability to make bulk changes and individiau changes on the one screen. This re-pricing tools is so valuable and save hours upon hours not to mention boosting profits.

So in summary good inventory management software provides the tools you need to manage the above steps. PBSA POS is one inventory management software system that has additional tools that are designed to save you countless hours each week and to ensure you control your stock levels and expenses in addition to your margin levels.

Have you ever walked into a cafe or fast food store and gone up the counter to place your order and seen the kaos that was happening?

We all remember the times when our order has been lost and after waiting half an hour we have to wait another 30 minutes.

How can you manage your sales and your preparation areas better

The key to a more efficient sales and preparation process is systems. When I talk about systems I am not just referring to computer systems alone but also preparation systems.

So often you see stores where the sale is done on an old cash register, then after the sale the order has to be written down and past through to the kitchen. The order then has to be passed around the various preparation areas. This creates confusion and increase the potential of lost orders and poor customer service.

So what is an ideal simple approach

1. Get yourself a touch screen computer with good touchscreen point of sale software

The reason is that sofwtare provides greater control over the sales process and also provides tools for workflow management. If you can control all the buttons on the touch screen POS and also have orders printed in multiple locations subject to what is in the order then you are positioned to improve your customer service dramtiaclly

The benefit of the touch screen is that  you do not have a mouse and keyboard cluttering the desk and getting ruined by sticky fingers. In additoin a nice touch screen with large buttons makes the sales process so easy and simple.

Additional things to look for in the work flow process is support for phone orders and deliveries. The key aspects you need is a touch screen pos that allows you to track the preparation, the dispatch and the payment status of each order. If you have a high volume of phone orders you may need a dedicated touch screen for this process.

These are just some of the things to consider to improve your customer service. Stay tuned for more tips.

PBSA POS launches new blog. We plan on keepnig our customers and potential customers up to date on everything that is happening in the world of point of sale, pos systems, touch screen hardware and touchscreen systems.