If we’re being honest, numbers aren’t why you got into the restaurant game. When you dream about starting your own restaurant, you picture yourself choosing the location, composing your first menu, finding the perfect décor and settling on a name. You probably don’t imagine sitting at a desk crunching numbers instead of the day’s leftovers. But a restaurant is a business and budgeting is an essential part of running one.

We’re getting close to the end of the year, which means that soon you’ll have to pull out your calculator and set out a budget for your restaurant for next year. But don’t despair just yet because if you have cutting-edge PoS software, you have an advantage. Point of Sale systems don’t just facilitate payments anymore – they capture troves of data that you can learn from and use to guide your financial planning.

Here are a few ways PoS software can help you budget more effectively.

Use timesheets to inform salary adjustments

Paying your staff fair and competitive salaries keeps them motivated to work and keeps the standard of service in your restaurant high. But what criteria are you using to assess performance? Compliments and complaints from patrons are a good indicator, but you’re probably not recording each one and relying on your memory. You’re not likely to remember them all come budget season and combing through reams of reviews is time-consuming.

Timesheets can supplement your performance assessment by clearly showing you how many hours each employee has logged. An intelligent PoS system uses fingerprint scanning to ensure that there’s no buddy clocking and the timesheets are accurate. Based on those, you can quickly see if you’re underpaying overperformers and vice versa.

Switch up your ordering based on sales volumes

You can use PoS software to inform your budgeting the same way you use it to develop your menu. Your PoS system keeps track of every meal your patrons are ordering so it can tell you which meals are popular and which ones aren’t. This doesn’t mean you should cut the unpopular items from your menu, but it does tell you that you probably shouldn’t be spending as much on them.

Here’s an example: you order equal amounts of duck and halibut every month, but the duck outperforms the halibut in sales and you end up wasting a lot of halibut. You can use sales volumes to justify your decision to start ordering half the amount of halibut, save money and avoid wastage.

Find the right suppliers with order comparisons

Cost vs quality is the main calculation that goes into choosing a supplier. Who can give you the freshest ingredients at the best price? You might think you have it figured out, but we have one more consideration to throw into the mix – time.

Your PoS software can show you the time between placing an order and having it delivered. It can also tell you the time between receiving ingredients and having to throw them away when they’re no longer fresh. Do you see where we’re going with this? Your supplier might be offering you the best price, but if they take too long to deliver, they cost you freshness in the long run. Conversely, a supplier that charges a bit more but delivers ahead of schedule might actually save you more money because fresher-for-longer ingredients mean fewer reorders.

Do it all with Pilot PoS Software

Technically, you can pick up on sales volume, productivity and supplier trends all on your own. But why would you want to when your PoS software can do it all for you? Pilot PoS Software is an industry-leading system designed to make every restaurant owner’s life easier. In addition to providing you with valuable budgeting insights, it harmonises your front- and back-of-house operations, simplifies your accounting and bookkeeping, optimises staff management and helps you market your establishment.

To learn more about everything Pilot PoS software is capable of, download our brochure below.

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