The must-have features you should look for when choosing a restaurant POS

From beginning to end of service and beyond, a restaurant’s point-of-sale system is integral to keeping operations consolidated and running smoothly. Choosing the right POS system is therefore crucial to the ongoing success of any hospitality venue.

Far beyond facilitating simple customer transactions, modern POS systems can have a range of features that streamline restaurant operations and bring them into the future – including the integration of online ordering platforms, which are becoming ever more significant channels for restaurant sales.

It also goes without saying that the functions required of a restaurant POS will be different to that of a retail store, for example. In order to get the best out of a POS for your hospitality business, it pays to choose a system that is designed specifically with the needs of your industry in mind.

Square for Restaurants is a prime example of a modern POS system that is built from scratch with restaurants specifically in mind. No matter the type of hospitality business you are running – whether full service or grab-and-go – the Square for Restaurants POS software is built to complement your front-of-house, back-of-house and office, with customisable features to suit these different needs.

In partnership with Square, we’ve created the essential checklist on what to look for when choosing a POS for your hospitality business.

Create menus

With Square for Restaurants, you are able to create menus for each location and service that your business offers. Not only can you create a detailed menu with appetisers, dishes and drinks for each individual service, if you have multiple locations, you can tailor the menu settings to reflect any differences across your portfolio.

The menu function of the Square for Restaurants POS system also enables you to manage and track your inventory, and to view your inventory history. Item categories and modifiers can be custom-created to suit your business, allowing you to keep your order tickets, customer receipts and sales reports detailed and organised.

Set up team members

The Square for Restaurants POS system allows you to create individual profiles for each team member at your restaurant. Through this, you can limit permissions as well as track staff hours and tips.

With the system’s printable POS guides, you can also print out quick reference guides for use by your team members.

Connect hardware

Square for Restaurants is available and compatible with both iPad and Square Register. A custom-built app will give you access to the hardware you need to connect your compatible devices in both your restaurant’s kitchen and server stations.

If you’re using the Square Stand, you can also connect your Square Reader via the plug-and-play USB port, giving you multiple channels through which to operate your point of sale system.

Table and floor management

Being able to customise and build your table and floor plan through your point of sale system is an important function of any POS being used in a restaurant setting – to track orders and multiple courses, and keep on top of splits, tips and payments for each of your customers.

The Square for Restaurants POS allows you to map out your restaurant in detail by building a custom floorplan through your online Square Dashboard. From here, you can view check actions, including how to move assign or void checks. You can also process payments, split checks, accept tips and finalise checks.

Importantly, the POS system allows you to set up multiple courses. From here, you can choose to hold or fire courses, giving your kitchen and wait staff real-time transparency over each order, or create straight-fire item categories. Square also provides a full-featured Kitchen Display System, or KDS, allowing your kitchen to keep track of orders as they come in in real time.

Online orders

The number of online ordering platforms continues to increase with public demand, meaning its importance to the successful operations of a hospitality business will only continue to grow.

With Square for Restaurants integrations, you can keep track of these within the same system that you use to keep track of real-time orders from dine-in customers. This streamlines the process for your back-of-house and front-of-house staff, consolidating all orders in the one place.

Popular order platforms such as DoorDash, Deliver and Uber Eats can all be integrated within the Square for Restaurants POS, so that you can accept pickup and delivery orders online. Through this function, you are able to manage incoming orders from the Restaurants app or your online Square Dashboard. You can also use Deliverect to aggregate orders from multiple partners, all in one place.

End of day and reporting

The Square for Restaurants contains a comprehensive suite of reporting tools to make your end-of-day processes as smooth and as accurate as possible. Through the POS, you are able to customise your closing procedures to ensure that your team completes all of the steps required for your unique venue.

The end-of-day reports from these procedures are easily available in-app or online, where you can find detailed item breakdowns and team member sales.

The most important thing to look for when choosing a point-of-sale system for your business is to ensure it accurately reflects your own unique operations, via functions that can be custom-designed to suit your needs. If you are in the hospitality business, and running a restaurant or café, the Square for Restaurants POS system is built specifically with you in mind.