Restaurant POS and kitchen management software

Most restaurant POS systems are good at taking orders and printing bills. The gap is what happens after: which ingredients were used, what they cost, what needs reordering and how the day's sales land in the accounts. When the POS and the stock sheet are separate, food cost is a guess made at month end.

A connected system follows each sale through:

• Order taken at the table, counter or for takeaway, and sent to the right kitchen station.
• Recipe for each menu item deducts ingredients from the outlet's store.
• Stock levels trigger purchase requests, which go through procurement and goods receipt.
• Sales, purchases and stock movements post to the general ledger.
• Reports show sales, consumption and cost per item and outlet.

The Membership Club & Restaurant ERP I architected runs restaurant POS and kitchen alongside recipes and inventory, procurement, warehousing and the accounting general ledger, plus membership, rooms and events. That means a member can dine and have the charge land on the same record as their subscription, and the kitchen's consumption is visible in the same books.

A single cafe with a short menu is usually well served by an off-the-shelf POS. Custom software starts to pay off when you run several outlets with central purchasing, need recipe-level costing, bill members or hotel guests to an account, or want the POS to post into an ERP rather than export a spreadsheet.

Hardware such as receipt printers, kitchen screens and card terminals is reviewed during scoping, since what can be integrated depends on the devices and payment providers you use.

Before go-live, the menu is set up with modifiers, prices per outlet and the station each item routes to, and recipes are entered with quantities and units. Getting recipes right is the slow part, because they decide every food cost figure the system reports afterwards.

A first phase normally covers the menu, POS and kitchen routing for one outlet, so staff learn the system before it carries more. Recipes and stock deduction, purchasing, more outlets and accounting follow. Each phase has a written scope and a fixed price.