Ask ten restaurant owners what their point of sale system does and most will say the same thing: it prints the bill.
That is a little like saying a kitchen is where the cooker is. A good restaurant POS is the centre of the whole operation. It is where an order begins, and everything else, from the kitchen ticket to the stock count to the day's profit, should follow from it.
If you are choosing one for the first time, or wondering whether the one you have is good enough, here is what we would look at.
Start with how orders move
Before any feature list, watch a single order travel through your restaurant.
A waiter takes it. How does the kitchen find out? If the answer involves walking, shouting or a handwritten docket, that is where plates get delayed and items get forgotten.
A proper system sends each item to the place it is prepared. Food goes to the kitchen, drinks go to the bar, and the notes go with them: no onions, extra spicy, table by the window. The waiter stays on the floor with the guests.
This single change does more for service than almost anything else.
Payments your guests actually use
In Kenya that means M-Pesa first, then cash and card.
Look closely at how M-Pesa is handled. In many restaurants the guest pays, shows their phone, and the cashier types in a code or simply takes their word for it. At the end of the night someone compares the M-Pesa statement with the sales, line by line.
A system with real M-Pesa integration confirms the payment itself and attaches it to the bill. It should also handle the situations that happen every evening:
- A table that wants to split the bill four ways
- One guest paying part in cash and part by M-Pesa
- A discount or complimentary item that needs a manager's approval
- A bill that has to be reopened because someone ordered one more drink
Stock that follows the menu
This is where most basic systems stop and good ones begin.
Every dish on your menu is made of ingredients. When the system knows the recipe, selling a plate of chicken and chips takes the chicken, the potatoes and the oil off your stock without anyone touching a spreadsheet.
That gives you three things you cannot get any other way.
- You know what to reorder before you run out in the middle of service.
- You can see what each dish really costs to make, and therefore what it earns you.
- When stock goes missing, you can see it, because the count no longer matches what was sold.
A restaurant can be full every night and still lose money on its most popular dish. You only find that out when sales and stock live in the same place.
Reports you will actually open
Be wary of a system that boasts about having a hundred reports. You need a handful, and you need them to be clear.
- What did we sell today, and how was it paid for?
- Which dishes sell best, and which should come off the menu?
- How does this week compare with last week?
- What did each waiter and cashier handle?
- Does the cash in the drawer match what the system expects?
You should be able to check these from your phone, wherever you are. The point of a system is that you no longer have to be in the building to know how the business is doing.
Questions to ask before you buy
- What happens when the internet goes down? Can we keep taking orders?
- Does it issue electronic tax invoices, or is that a separate step? We covered why that matters in our guide to eTIMS.
- Can it handle more than one outlet, and can I compare them?
- Who trains my staff, and who do I call on a Saturday night when something goes wrong?
- Can it be adjusted to how my kitchen works, or do I have to change to suit it?
- What will it cost me in a year, including support, not only on day one?
That last pair matters more than any feature. Software that forces your team to work around it will be quietly abandoned within months.
The best system is the one your waiters still use on your busiest night.
What we build
Our restaurant management system covers orders, kitchen and bar tickets, billing, recipes and stock, and accounts, and we set it up around the way your restaurant already runs.
But whichever system you choose, judge it the same way: follow one order from the table to the bank and count how many times a person has to write something down. The right answer is once.
If you would like to see how that looks in practice, get in touch.
