Integrations for restaurant point of sale (POS) systems have become a huge trend in the industry. Automatically pulling POS data into your restaurant management system reduces errors while saving time for your employees, managers, and bookkeeping team.
In addition to the short-term efficiencies, POS integration can inform your business strategy over time through customized reporting and accessibility. When your restaurant management software system pulls detailed data directly from your sales POS system, you can see a real-time representation of your financial situation. Anomalies in your numbers can be immediately addressed through data-driven decisions.
POS software integration drives data collection that can help you run your business. A fully integrated POS system enables insights within two main categories that can benefit your bottom line: financial and operational reporting.
How restaurant POS integration works
POS integration is a streamlined connection between your POS software and your restaurant accounting and operations platform. With integration, your operations platform can pull detailed data directly from your POS in real-time. The integrated platform automatically inputs daily sales and labor accrual data entries into the accounting general ledger (GL). Detailed POS data integrated with your restaurant operations and accounting drives useful insights in sales reporting, menu engineering, recipe costing, labor details, and enhanced business analytics and reporting.
How restaurant POS integration improves operational reporting
Recipe Costing
Recording recipe costs can help you track usage, yield, and waste, maximizing recipe efficiency. The sheer amount of data needed to track recipes and food costs can be very time-consuming to input manually, so many restaurateurs underutilize this key operational report. But with an integrated POS system, you can automatically calculate food costs and profit for specific menu items within the integrated system. Mapping your recipes to POS menu items allows you to obtain an accurate measure of food cost efficiency, through insights like tracking your actual versus theoretical food cost variance.
Menu engineering
Menu engineering maximizes your bottom line by enabling smart decisions about promoting the most profitable menu items. Ensure you are making informed decisions about popularity versus profitability by instantly integrating data about how much you’ve sold compared to item margin. Menu engineering data is driven by POS integration, with both sales mix polling and recipe costing coming from POS data. Use menu engineering data to determine whether specific menu items are over- or underpriced, when to revise recipe portions or ingredients, or whether to seize a new opportunity to promote a menu item that is high margin but low sales.
Smart scheduling
POS integration can ensure your labor is running as efficiently as the rest of your restaurant. Historical POS data automatically pulled through integration, can inform sales forecast numbers, allowing you to create smart employee schedules that optimize labor spend. In addition, with a daily payroll accrual, you can compare scheduled labor to actual numbers. With auto-created labor accrual journal entries created from the POS import each day of the pay period, you see true labor costs and the impact on your P&L. With POS integration, you can quickly spot any labor issues and address them in real-time, rather than waiting until the end of the month.
Flash report
A restaurant flash report tracks information about several critical labor data points, using integrated POS data to automatically track employee labor data and payroll. With an automated flash report, you can control labor costs through daily insight into your sales, labor as a percentage of sales, labor goals, and comps and discounts. Flash reports can be automated through your restaurant accounting software and POS integration solution.
How restaurant POS integration improves financial reporting
P&L statement
An integrated POS allows you to automate financial reports, at the frequency and detail you need, to make data-driven decisions about your business. For example, with POS integration, a profit and loss (P&L) statement, one of the most important indicators of restaurant health, can be automatically scheduled to deliver via email. Or, with complete sales reporting, you can customize a recurring comparative analysis by location. Business intelligence, based on real-time POS and operations trends, provides key data that you need to know to improve operations.
Labor data
POS integration allows you to transfer data between systems, track time entries, and accrue labor expenses in your GL. By automatically keeping track of key metrics, such as labor as a percentage of sales, you can optimize labor spending based on business trends. POS integration enables you to make immediate staffing decisions to control labor costs by automatically recording time entry details for different job titles. Real-time information about your labor benchmarks ensures you can make informed adjustments daily, instead of weekly or monthly. And with POS and payroll integration, payroll processing is efficiently streamlined, saving you the time and hassle of manually passing information to and from your payroll processor.
Daily sales summary
A POS-integrated platform creates transactions within your restaurant accounting software, labeling the “Daily Sales Summary” for each day and each restaurant location. A journal entry about revenue, tenders, and discounts is recorded from each sales ticket. This integration maps sales reporting and receipt details from your POS to your GL, creating a detailed road map for transactions. By automating this data transfer, data collection is streamlined, and insights are accessible from one centralized dashboard.
Conclusion
Integrations and open APIs enable Restaurant365 to connect with other systems including POS providers, vendors, and banks. The result is accurate, timely reporting that provides a clear and complete view of their businesses. Ask for a free demo of Restaurant365 today.
