Managing Food Service With Your Bar and Restaurant POS System

Things are fast paced at your bustling business, and you need a bar and restaurant POS system that helps you manage food just as well as beverages. Arryved POS equips you with the toolbox you’ll need to do both!

Here are the best ways to utilize each POS tool to manage your food offerings:

Preparation Before Guest Arrival

Below are set-it-and-forget-it tools that you can set up with your bar restaurant POS system prior to guests knocking down your door for some grub!

Choose How You Service Separate Areas Using Venue Management

Differentiating areas of your bar and restaurant keeps your front of house staff organized, which is important to ensuring calm before the kitchen-slinging storm.

You can set up distinct venues in your bar restaurant POS system’s Service Portal. Here you decide which tables belong to each area and assign seat numbers to each spot. It gets better—you can also customize each venue with specific menu items and printer settings, depending on your business needs and guest preferences. Perhaps the patio venue offers drinks and small bites only, whereas the main dining area offers the full menu item list.  

The best part? All of your reporting can be broken down by venue with your bar restaurant POS system. If you can quickly identify the best performing venue in your business, you can evaluate what may be causing your other areas to fall short. Whether it’s a staffing issue or a lack of high dollar menu items, the faster you can pinpoint longer ticket times or smaller tab sizes, the faster you can solve the problem! 

And lastly, for the real crowd-pleaser from your bar restaurant POS system: dynamic tabs follow traveling guests. That means guests can start their evening sipping cocktails at the bar, enjoy dinner at a table, and have dessert cozied up by the fire pit—their tab stays open and they can keep ordering as much as they’re taste buds desire! 

Printer Management Increases Staff Efficiency & Organization

This feature is another favorite for FOH staff from your bar restaurant POS system: printer management. With the freedom to set up as many as 9 printers throughout your business, staff stay efficient and service stays fast for your hungry guests. 

Picture this: All coffee orders print right to your barista station, alcoholic beverages print at the bar, entrees at the grill, etc. This streamlined communication saves your servers steps and time, and keeps the team assembling food and beverages on top of the order queue. 

Your bar restaurant POS system also offers a kitchen display screen (KDS) if you prefer to eliminate paper tickets entirely. This large display projects all orders for the kitchen staff, and syncs instantly with roaming POS devices. As soon as an order is placed, the kitchen staff can get started on their magic!

Your KDS can also sync with off-premise orders, which brings us to…

Online Orders Function The Same As On-Site Orders

We all know the importance of off-premise ordering to diversify revenue streams, especially coming off a 2-year-long pandemic that got eaters and drinkers much more comfortable with takeout on the couch as a Friday night plan. Not only does your bar restaurant POS system help you set up your store and let you host it for free, it connects with all of your on-premise tools, too!

As mentioned, orders from your online store are received the same way on-premise orders are—either printed to the appropriate station or displayed on a central KDS. Reports can be narrowed down by whatever fits your fancy. That is, you can look at all on and off-premise orders from Friday 4-11pm, online orders only for the same time frame, and so on! 

Of course, all inventory management is also synced with all types of orders using your bar restaurant POS system—but more on that to come! 

Ensuring Seamless On-Site Service

So, you’ve done all of the necessary prep work to manage food service prior to guest arrival. Now it’s time for your bar restaurant POS system to shine during actual service!

Dynamic Tab Management Perfectly Curates The Dining Experience

Offering both beverages and food at your establishment means any guest has hundreds of combination options to choose from. That means your bar restaurant POS system needs dynamic tab functionality to make input of those orders quick and error-free.

Because you already set up seat numbers in each venue, splitting tabs just became a whole lot less painful. Your bar restaurant POS system lets you create sub tabs based on seat number, so checking any particular guest out is as easy as selecting their sub tab and closing it out! Now that guest can mosey, and their friends can continue to enjoy themselves.

Tabs are also dynamic in that servers can send and hold certain orders depending on circumstance. For example:

• Expedite drink orders: Say staff is taking orders for a large table. A server can send through each drink order instantly, so the bar staff can get started on assembling beverages right away. By the time the last guest relays their order, drinks may already be showing up at the table via a drink runner!
• Coursing made easy: If you run a business on the fancier end, you may be more particular about when certain food items are delivered to each table. Your bar restaurant POS system can hold and send orders to the kitchen, so that each menu item is assembled and delivered hot, without compromising the curated cadence your meal requires.

Both of these dynamic tab tools are meant to surprise and delight your guests, and they definitely do just that! 

Savvy Digital Menus Automatically Update For You

We touched on managing different menus based on venue, but your bar restaurant POS system’s menu capabilities don’t stop there! You can also implement timed menus that automatically update offerings based on time of day. 

These savvy, digital menus are most helpful for discounting any specials of a particular day. Happy Hour menu pricing is the most prominent example of when you’d want a menu to automatically update. But other use cases could include late-night dessert specials, or a lunch menu with smaller portions transitioning into  larger helpings of the same options for dinner!

These handy timed menus eliminate questions for staff and eliminate pricing confusion for guests!

Modifiers Make Meal Customization Easy

Guest satisfaction is a top priority for you. That means allowing customers to customize their dishes however they’d like! Your bar restaurant POS system offers 2 types of quick modifiers that make these requests easy to input on tabs for your hustling servers:

Forced modifiers are attached to a particular menu item, and must be answered by the server adding to the tab. That means the server is automatically prompted to choose the forced modifier on their POS device, so as never to forget! An example of a forced modifier would be the prefered temperature of a steak, or the sides on a plate of BBQ.

Optional modifiers are just that: optional. This is where specific guest preferences can be typed in by a server using an open text format. Your bar restaurant POS system auto-fills with predictive text for common requests, such as GLUTEN-FREE, and applies a color-code for anything that’s considered an upcharge. Apart from dietary restrictions, other examples of optional modifiers include adding avocado to a sandwich or adding an additional side to any entree.

Personalizing each dish makes for happier guests and, oftentimes, larger tabs. These tab tools ensure that this customization doesn’t compromise your service speed!

Back End Tools That Inform Future Decisions

Your bar restaurant POS system has perfectly set you up with an organized space and tools for efficient, guest-focused service. Now let’s go over the necessary tools on the backend for managing food!

Inventory Management For Clean Data & Zero Waste

Offering food can double or even triple the amount of inventory you must track and manage. That’s why robust inventory management that seamlessly integrates with your bar restaurant POS system is an absolute must-have. 

You can build inventory counts into every item on the menu, both for on and off-premise sales. These numbers automatically count down as orders come in, and they are kicked from all menus across all staff and guest devices once the count reaches 0. That means it’s impossible for a guest to order something that’s no longer in stock!

Get even more granular with inventory management using an integration with your bar restaurant POS system! A software like Yellow Dog lets you track menu items by the ingredient, and ensures utmost accuracy as sales are processed through your POS. The same goes for any merchandise you’re selling, too!

Comprehensive Reporting Determines Success

You’ve crossed your T’s and dotted your I’s as far as set up, but you need a centralized hub where you can track performance and make proactive business decisions. Your online sales dashboard, supported by your bar restaurant POS system, is the one-stop online dashboard to do just that! Here, you can track inventory, sales, ranking of your menu items based on popularity, and more. 

With a cloud-based POS such as yours, all reporting is updated in real-time as orders come in. That means accessible sales numbers are available to you at any time and anywhere. You can enter COGS on items to determine profit margins and thus make informed decisions on what stays on the menu and what may need replacing. 

Access any number of other helpful reports, such as:

• Break down taxes into different categories, like food, beverage and merchandise
• See what is being discounted and by whom using comp reporting
• Schedule reports to go out to the people who need to know on a daily basis
• Utilize the depth of reporting to get a clear picture of revenue, costs, loss, and efficiency 

That wraps up the tools your kitchen needs to run smoothly and manage food efficiently. Time to get cookin’! Any questions on Arryved POS and how the system can help your business grow? Get in touch with us!