Pizza POS Systems - "Must Have" Features For Pizza Delivery And Pizza Restaurants
It may not seem so at first but pizza restaurants can be the most complex of the restaurants to manage from the software perspective. Due to the popularity of pizza, and the wide expectancy that pizza does get delivered to homes and offices, the activity inside a pizza parlor can get quite chaotic at peak hours. A well designed software pizza POS systems, or point of sale systems, will go a long way towards allowing sanity to come back into a pizza shop or restaurant. We will present the most crucial features a pizza POS system should have. We will focus on two types of pizza restaurants: a small, take out only pizza shop, and a large, restaurant and a bar setting, with pizza delivery on the back end.
"Must have" features of a small pizza delivery shop point of sales system
Due to the dynamic nature of pizza delivery, and because the business could be concentrated in a few peak hours each day, even running a small pizza delivery shop requires a number of "must have" point of sale software and hardware features. These include:
- Prices of items and delivery charges for different parts of town are input in the system and consistent. This will make your customers happy as they won't be overcharged, and their cost won't fluctuate haphazardly, depending on which driver delivered the food.
- For in-store sales, all items must be input into the system as well, so the cashier won't forget to charge for them. Example: charging $0.25 for a glass of water.
- Tracking of food ingredients that go into each pizza. This may include the scales, and the point of sale terminal at the kitchen workstation. Over-portioning which is one big source of expense in pizza kitchens can be reduced that way.
- Forecasting the demand for drivers and cooks. This is a big one. Staff costs are one of the biggest expenses in a small pizza delivery. Why keep 4 staff on hand when the forecasting software predicted 2 will be enough for that part of the day.
- Delivery routing, tracking and cash collection system.
- Promotions and coupon marketing. A well designed pizza point of sale system can help you run a coupon promotion without investing huge amounts of money into newspaper ads. Instead of paying for ads, just collect the email addresses of your frequent customers and send them the coupons in the email. It barely costs you anything to send a thousand emails and your customers will be happy to hear from you.
"Must have" features of a pizza parlor POS system
If you are keeping the pizza delivery part of your business while also running the pizza restaurant, these features will be in addition to the "must have" features from the previous paragraph. The following features will enable smoother and more profitable running of the seating area. Also, since your revenues will rise, spending time on forecasting and analysis will have a bigger return on investment, so we added features of a POS system that will help you with forecasting as well.
- Kitchen inventory control is important for running your business as a lean mean machine. Financial accountability will help reduce shrinkage.
- Customer tracking by table must be implemented to simplify the work flow.
- Restaurant point of sale must enable waiting staff management, must include kitchen productivity features such as portioning and staff control.
- Reservation and waiting list feature manages the upcoming guests.
- A wireless guest, patrons, and manager paging helps streamline guest seating and seated guests upsells.
- Table service and fly-by service order entry, cashier financial accountability, and staff communications.
- Management features such as inventory and recipe tracking. Workforce and scheduling control. Extensive reporting of labor costs. Easily gain insight into store operations with detailed reporting.
