Restaurants today operate on see-through-thin margins in a hyper-competitive industry. And now that we are post-COVID, an efficient restaurant operation is even more critical, as 90% of restaurants report that food costs as a percentage of sales are higher than ever. 

The answer to more efficient restaurant operations for many players is adopting tech innovations like table service POS. Read on to learn more about the incredible upside when this technology is literally at your fingertips. 

Your Table Service POS Mission

Unlike the movie, automating your restaurant is mission possible because you can easily customize your table service point-of-sale to meet your restaurant, staff, kitchen, and customer needs while improving your bottom line.

Pick the Restaurant, Your POS Will Adapt

Whether you are planning to open a new restaurant or rebranding your current one, point-of-sale automation is no longer optional: it’s a necessity. But how you use it depends on your unique needs.

Table service POS customization means you can choose a system and add integrations to suit your restaurant type and customers. If you need seamless flow in your fine dining restaurant from front of house to your quirky chef, or a new mobile POS for curbside pick up at a quick service restaurant, you decide on additional POS features and integrations to smooth out operations.

With table service POS automation, no matter the restaurant type, it will reduce waste (paper, food, time) and improve efficiency (order management, inventory control, staff scheduling).  

Control POS Users and Their Access Levels

The beauty of POS tables  is that you control which restaurant employees have system access and their access level. Most POS systems have simple instructions to manage POS roles with different security levels so that the right people have access to the right information. This feature is critical: it allows you to make the best real-time decisions to ensure exceptional service while also ensuring efficient management.

Table Service POS Types to Choose From

Four table service point-of-sale types are discussed below to help you narrow down the right option for your restaurant.

Kitchen Display System (KDS)

Your KDS will help your chef and other kitchen staff automate food prep and delivery to improve productivity. The system can use color coding to track a customer’s order from entry to prep to the pass to service to their table in real time. All staff can be tracking, and chefs or managers can be continuously monitoring.

KDS will also reduce errors caused from incomplete orders or food dying on the pass, with built-in functions that send updates or warnings, such as a late order. 

Restaurant Management Platform

Table service restaurant POS means that all areas of restaurant management—table management, including reservations and seating; kitchen management, including cook times, food prep, recipes, and analytics; inventory management in real time; and labor management, including scheduling—are all contained in one system. 

A restaurant management platform allows all parts of the front and back of house to work with the same information, ensuring proper flow so that your customers enjoy an effortless dining experience.

Table Service POS Terminals and Tablets

The US restaurant POS terminals market is expected to grow with a CAGR of 6.85% from 2021 to 2030. The reason? Restaurants are reaping incredible benefits from POS terminals and tablets. 

Terminals are the hardware that hold the table service POS software that reads the credit cards’ magnetic strips. But they do much more such as order management, and with their data storage, assist with record keeping tasks, like inventory control. 

Mobile terminals are usually handheld POS tablets for tableside service, both ordering and taking payments, curbside pickup, or inventory. They are versatile, durable, and easy to use.

Key Peripherals & Hardware

Because your table service POS system can be customized, some peripherals are standard, like cash drawers, barcode scanners, magnetic stripe readers, and receipt printers. Additional features to add later include fingerprint scanning.

Hardware will depend on the type of restaurant and the services you offer. But, like peripherals, you can choose the type of terminal—a basic system that operates like a cash register or a mobile tablet—or credit card machines, tablets, printers, and barcode scanners.

Restaurant Tech White Paper

POS Features for Table Service

Table service POS features are easy to use and customize. These fourteen features will help ensure a successful mission of creating efficient and profitable restaurant operations.

Mobile POS and Tableside Ordering

Mobile POS will free up your wait staff so that they can stay with the customer by creating orders at the table, firing a drink or a full order, tracking the order, changing the order as needed, and allowing the customer to pay tableside. 

Secure Credit Card Processing

You can bet that your POS credit card reader and gateway will be secure and payment card industry (PCI) compliant, which are industry regulations.  

Secure Contactless Payment

With table service POS, the credit card never leaves the customer’s hand.  The transaction is processed in front of the customer, so the customer no longer has to worry about fraud: the customer punches in their own codes and processes the transaction themselves. 

Tips Management

Managing tips is a breeze with table service POS. You can set up tip pooling, determine how tips should be distributed (e.g., by hours worked, employees job, or on a share system), and give out tips to teams. 

Table Management and Reservations

Table management and reservations is a crucial piece of your table service POS mission success. Table status can be displayed using colors to keep turnover fluid and efficient, along with kitchen info like order status, and a clear display of each seat in the house by section or time or server. 

Reusable Scheduling Templates

The main benefit of reusable scheduling templates is that they are integral to managing your staff. Reusable templates save time and will ensure that you can more quickly get and maintain the right staff in your restaurant.  

Sales Data for Accurate Forecasting

Your table service POS will generate data on every aspect of your restaurant business, including sales over time and in real time. You can consolidate your data, perform trend analysis and forecasting to set operations, take advantage of opportunities, and compare your performance to your competition. 

Menu Management

You can use your table service point-of-sale to create menu items and categories in real time that will then be linked to your inventory. And with the menu information, servers can increase the average check size through upselling.

Loyalty Management

Your table service POS can build in a loyalty program to drive sales and ensure repeat business, including gift cards or loyalty cards. You can set it up based on points, or items, or even offer some form of promotional rewards. 

Notifications

Real-time notifications can be customized to serve a number of purposes, such as signaling when a customer is spending a significant amount, so you can add additional customer service, help staff know when they have been working too long in a 24-hour period, or alert the staff when an order is late. 

Inventory tracking

You can track and automate your inventory with an ingredient management tools POS software table service. See exactly how much food you go through, is still on hand, and you will need it.

Kitchen Display

With kitchen display, menu items can be sent to the kitchen and prep stations based on the length of time preparation takes. Individual prep stations can view the items they are responsible for by item, saving time and reducing errors.

Reporting

The data collected on the POS terminal can offer a wealth of reporting from taxes to sales to auditing as well as payroll and other labor management reports.

Food Safety

With tableside service and automated ordering, customer food allergies and diseases, like gluten free for celiacs, can be easily added to an order and flagged in the system for the kitchen staff. 

Ten Leading Global Table Service POS Systems

Below is a list of ten leading global table service POS system companies:

  • TouchBistro
  • Oracle Simphony MICROS
  • Focus POS
  • PAR
  • Square
  • Upserve
  • Lightspeed
  • Clover
  • Revel
  • Toast

Table Service POS Integrations

The current trend is to stack third-party integrations on top of your table service POS integrations to let these innovations help you to meet your customers’ and the industry’s ever changing needs. Integrations are the software that will work with your current system to extend its functionality.

Four integrations to round out your restaurant operations are: accounting, including bookkeeping functions; reporting, to ensure your analytics reflect industry best practices for inventory and expenses; scheduling, to track staff hours; and online ordering, to manage orders with higher accuracy.

Move Your Restaurant into the Future

Post-COVID restaurant customers want the convenience and speed of a corner take out with a dining experience that includes tableside service while they relax and chat. 

Table-service POS is the restaurant management platform for the future that will help you do both.  Ready for your mission?