Restaurants POS
You may have heard of the term “restaurant POS” but what does that mean exactly? And how does a restaurant POS system work? Short for “point of sale”, a restaurant POS system is both the software and hardware restaurants use to take customers’ orders, accept payments, manage food inventory and ultimately manage the entire operation — from the front of house (FOH) to the back of house (BOH).
What is a restaurant POS system?
A point of sale, also known as a POS system or ePOS system, is the physical location where transactions are processed.
Many traditional table service restaurants have a physical cash register somewhere in the establishment (usually near the bar or entrance) — the area surrounding that cash register is the point of sale. Patrons can exchange physical cash or pay via credit card or smart wallet, and exchange money for your restaurant’s service.
But since the invention of cloud-based technology and mobile devices like phones or tablets, traditional points of sale like this are slowly but surely becoming a relic of the past.
What is a cloud-based restaurant point of sale system?
A restaurant POS system is the software and hardware that restaurant operators use to run their entire business: from taking orders to managing the floor plan, reservations, reporting on sales, doing inventory counts, scheduling staff and pricing their menu. More often than not, a restaurant’s point of sale system is a complete restaurant management system.
Most of the top restaurant POS systems on the market are cloud-based, meaning that the data it stores (your sales data, menu prices, inventory levels, reservations, etc) are all stored on a secure internet server.
What does that mean? It means you can access and manage your restaurant using any device that has an internet connection, whether that’s a computer, tablet or smartphone. For example, a fast food POS system could run on tablets in-store but you can check your analytics at home on your smartphone.
If your internet goes down, most restaurant POS systems have an offline mode, which allows you to keep working even when your internet is down. And when your internet is back online, your data is pushed and saved to the cloud.