National

Pizza & Pasta Show, Aug. 23-25, Rosemont, Illinois the industry is now moving from general-purpose clouds for online services to purpose-built clouds attuned to the needs of specific industries, including the restaurant industry.

“Aggregating everything they need—including credit card processing, point of sale, online ordering, mobile ordering, delivery, supply chain management and third-party integration—helps restaurants better compete by allowing them to bring all of these services in-house in an easy-to-use and affordable cloud-driven package,” Vergidis says. “Cloud services are provided on demand, so clients can buy what they need when they need it and focus on the things that make the biggest difference to them. For example, inventory management, as well as recipe handling features, help avoid over-ordering from suppliers, which decreases food costs, over-portioning and waste.”

Ciabarra adds that not all POS systems offer solid inventory control, so do your research. “Make sure it does ingredients and helps you with forecasting after you have entered your ingredients,” he suggests. “Also find out how it performs the forecasting. Not every POS allows you to choose which way to forecast after all of the data is in the system.”

On-the-Fly Reporting

Live, granular and automatic reporting on food sales, costs and especially waste goes a long way in the fight against high costs and inflation, Arnold believes, and these reports should be generated at the same time of the week and day to maintain consistency. You can then analyze menu items’ sales performance to determine if it’s time to adjust the menu.

“A Countdown/86 feature (in which the POS system alerts staff when an item is out of stock) can help restaurants keep fresh ingredients that spoil at low inventory levels while keeping the POS users constantly informed with live data,” Arnold notes. “Smaller, more frequent orders will not only reduce waste but deliver the freshest possible dishes to your customers. Furthermore, online ordering and digital menu displays are also great tools that allow you to adjust menu prices on the fly. When the price of a menu item changes, it should be automatically updated on the online ordering website.” Finally, Arnold advises, food costs should be reviewed with every order, since smaller, more frequent price changes are often more easily accepted by customers than large increases.

Ciabarra agrees that inventory control must have several key features to help you forecast what you need to order in the future. “Inventory systems must allow for ingredient control in your items—otherwise, forecasting is not accurate,” he says. “Each item you sell is made up of ingredients. If you enter all of the information into your inventory system, it should be able to tell you how much of each ingredient you will need for the week based on how much you sold last week or the same week last year. This way, you can forecast every item according to past sales.”

Vergidis believes that the most important POS feature to look for and use in inventory control is recipe management— i.e., having the ability to track the recipe of each item in enough detail so that every time an item is sold, the system is able to report what the ideal inventory cost of that sale is.

Next, look for supply line integration, which means that actual inventory costs can be automatically imported into the POS. “Once you have actual and ideal costs, then you have product variance, which is the difference between how much product the operation should be using versus how much product is actually being used,” Vergidis explains. “That’s the holy grail of inventory control for restaurants and pizzerias.”

Of course, the best inventory controls will do nothing if they’re not used, so Vergidis stresses that convenience plays

Pos Pointers

Bob Vergidis, chief visionary officer for Cincinnatibased pointofsale.cloud, shares three tips for choosing and using a POS system: a big role. “Inventory is a chore at the best of times, but using new mobile technologies available in some newer POS systems allows team members to do inventory using their phones, allowing for inventory counts to be more accurate and easier to do,” he says. “It’s important to always think about reducing friction in operations, and inventory is one of those areas where if you do things correctly, you will see the impact very clearly on the bottom line.”

1. Take the time to build proper recipes into the POS system. That’s the biggest thing you can do to link the inventory to the POS. It all starts there.

2. Look for more than point of sale. An electronic cash register will not really change your business, so look for a POS that can do more—either to help you increase your sales or to reduce your costs.

3. Think about omnichannel. That’s a fancy word, but it basically means to service your guests using any method they prefer: online, mobile, on-premise, pickup, delivery and dine-in. Your POS should help you elevate your service—not just collect money and print a receipt.

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