A restaurant’s expenses need to be carefully calculated to ensure the business is lucrative and not prone to wastage.

Labour costs are often one of the biggest restaurant expenses and become harder to manage when issues like unauthorised overtime, employee time theft and buddy clocking come into play.

Buddy clocking, or buddy punching, is when one employee clocks in on another’s behalf. This could happen for several reasons, like when an employee is ill and cannot get a sick note to be excused from work or is simply running late. In the US alone, buddy clocking costs restaurant owners $373 million each year. So how do restaurant owners bridge this payroll gap? The answer is simple: by using their trusted point-of-sale system.

  • A biometric time clock
    The problem with sign-in sheets or even time clock logins is that employees can easily fabricate their times. This is easily overcome with a point-of-sale system that has a time clock at every work station. Pilot PoS systems use biometric fingerprint scanning so employees just log in with their own fingerprint, which eliminates the risk of buddy clocking.
  • Correcting time clock records to ensure accuracy
    Restaurant managers should closely monitor the time clock records of employees and, if they spot a mistake, should easily be able to correct errors. Even though fingerprint scanning provides accurate records, restaurant owners can access those that are protected with security measures to add authorised overtime or to make adjustments.
  • Tip tracking
    With Pilot’s point of sale, employees enter the total amount paid once a bill has been settled. The system not only calculates tips, but also records the information which can be recalled during cash-up. Restaurant managers can then easily see the total amount of cash or card tips that were given to a server.
  • Financial reporting
    Accountants and restaurant owners need to know exactly what is going on with the establishment’s finances. Once there are blurry areas, it opens up potential weak spots that can be exploited. To combat this, Pilot’s systems can be integrated with Sage Pastel accounting software to correlate financial records and ensure amounts are accurate and updated. It then collects all this information, and other valuable data, which is displayed in PilotLive reports – these are easy to understand and can be used to identify possible inconsistencies.

Your point of sale is one of your most valuable assets. If used to its full capability, it will provide all the additional features that an advanced, modern-day PoS should have. Pilot’s PoS solutions are intuitive, comprehensive and offer the type of features that have been specifically designed to support your restaurant in various ways. Curious to find out what the rest of these features are?