If you’re running a hospitality business - at least if it’s anything upwards of a lemonade stall - you’ll have some form of point of sale system. Whether it’s an electronic cash register, or more sophisticated hardware and software, you probably can’t run your business without a system that helps you with the basics. You’ll rely on your POS to take customers’ orders, look up the price, take payments and record and report on sales.
The limitations of POS
POS systems do a great job - but a limited job. Vital though those tasks are, your hospitality business is about so much more than taking orders and keeping track of cash.
So what is the next step if you want to manage more than orders, pricing and cash? What do you do when you want to keep a closer eye on other aspects of your business?
Perhaps you’ve already got to that stage and started using other systems to manage, say, your inventory, or your Uber Eats orders. But if they’re not integrated with your POS, they might create as much work as they save, with you double handling information in an effort to join the dots between different parts of your business.
If either of those scenarios sounds like you, then you’re ready to evolve. Evolve, that is, to a Hospitality IT Platform.
What is a Hospitality IT Platform?
A Hospitality IT platform differs from a POS in that it provides a complete management system for just about every aspect of your business - back and front of house, internal and customer facing, local and head office.
A POS core and more
It has POS at its core, because you always need those essential tasks, but it also offers other functions that combine to help you run every aspect of your business, including:
- Inventory management - for costing, identifying low selling items, managing shrinkage, maintaining optimum stock levels, automated re-ordering and supplier invoicing.
- Kitchen management - sending orders directly to the kitchen, balancing workloads and queue management
- Recipe management - ensuring consistency of ingredients, providing allergy information
- Loyalty/membership - capturing members’ data, understanding purchasing patterns, managing points and building tailored offers
- Promotions - rapid communication of special offers via customer facing terminal screens, digital signage in store or your branded app.
- Branded apps - helping customers to find stores, check prices, place orders and manage their loyalty points and gift cards
- Online ordering - managing online orders from your branded app, or aggregators such as Uber Eats or Deliveroo.
- Payroll - managing staff hours, automatic calculation of pay rates, allowances, deductions, and creation of payslips
- Dashboard - high level view of all the key metrics you need to check that your business is on track, with detailed drill down for any problem areas
- Multi-site management - consolidating data from multiple sites, allowing you to manage your business network from a single system
Integration
The other defining characteristic of a Hospitality IT platform is that all these elements are integrated. Each element communicates with the POS and with each other, to give you a complete top to tail view of your business. Online orders will flow through to update the inventory system; Pricing is managed centrally to be used by the store and your branded app; Loyalty information can feed into building promotional offers.
Your business is not a series of unrelated functions, it is an integrated whole, and a Hospitality IT platform allows you to manage it as one.
What are the benefits of a Hospitality IT platform?
By managing your business as a whole, a Hospitality IT platform offers so much more than technology - it truly becomes a platform for growth, giving you:
- Visibility - for more informed decision making
- Efficiency - with no double handling or manually joining up disparate sources of information
- Customer engagement - the ability to understand and communicate with your customers and drive genuine customer satisfaction and loyalty
Are you ready?
If you’ve outgrown your simple POS, or are frustrated by trying to manage multiple systems, then you’re ready to evolve - to a Hospitality IT platform.
To talk more about evolving to a Hospitality IT platform, have a chat with one of the experts at Redcat.
