EPoS Systems For Takeaways
Step 1: Learn
Understand what EPoS can do for your business
Step 2: Quote
We’ll find appropriate systems for your needs
Step 3: Choose
Choose a system for your business
Integrations
Connect With Other Platforms
Payments
Process payments Quickly & Accurately
Data
Use your data with other platforms for accounting, delivery partners and marketing
Speed & Accuracy
Provide your customer with options and ensure order accuracy and provide speedy customer service.
Loyalty
If you want to track and reward your best customers this is easy to do with your POS system
Inventory
Understand what your business is using to make sure you don’t run out of stock while optimising against waste
How does a Takeaway EPoS System Help?
Accuracy
With so many different bakery products available ensuring order accuracy is vital both for customer service and to ensure you have the right business information for your bakery.
Centralised Order Management
Many takeaway food businesses are now multi-channel. Taking orders in store, by phone, via their own website and also via a number of popular food delivery platforms like Deliveroo, Uber Eats & Just Eat. Having all the orders processed centrally helps you manage your business in one place. So you can keep track of operations like the processing of orders, manage your inventory and perhaps most importantly collect the important data about your business in one place. If you have limited stock of a food item you can manage your sales to prevent overselling and causing customer service issues.
Data
If data is the new gold, then the information your system collects allows you to understand your sales and profitability so you can make informed business decisions. This data can then flow into other parts of your business like your accounting, marketing and strategy. If you’re trying to get your bakery production optimised for your sales – this data is priceless for both ensuring you don’t miss out on potential sales, while minimising wasteage.
Kitchen Display & Intelligent Order Routing
Modern kitchen displays can instantly display new orders for processing. If you’ve got multiple stations, or even if you’ve got kitchens in different locations you can intellingently route the order and it’s display to the right place. Whether you’re operating from a high street location, dark kitchen or multi site setup – getting the right orders to the right place, with minimum delay helps to keep the business running effectively at all times.
Loyalty
If you want to use a loyalty scheme to reward your best customers it can make sense to run this through your POS system. Some platforms like Square have this built-in. Larger bakery groups like Gails have moved away from stamp card based loyalty schemes as a POS based or app based loyalty scheme provides you with far more information about your customers behaviour. You can then look to reward your best customers and help your business grow.
Integrations
Depending on your requirements you can integrate your system into other platforms. Working out whether you need to be able to integrate with 3rd party software accounting software like Xero or connecting with delivery partners like Uber Eats, Deliveroo & Just Eat will help you pinpoint the right takeaway epos system. Software like Deliverect and Otter can help you intergrate both sales partners like Uber Eats and delivery partners like Stuart into one streamlined system. By integrating your EPoS system with these platforms you can open up new sales channels, fulfilment partners and move and control your business data where you need it to better understand your business.
Industry Spotlight
Featured Takeaway Software Integration
Deliverect / Otter
ABC
Inventory
Understanding your stock in a takeaway environment is absolutely vital. When you understand your sales and the volume of individual product sales you can begin to adjust your production to both meet demand and avoid wasteage. Keeping track of your sales and predicted production also allows you to order the right ingredients so you won’t find yourself missing a vital ingredient to your top selling items.This allows you to ensure you have the right products based on sales. It can also help you optimise your ordering to minimise wastage and maximise sales.
Menu Management
If you’re working with multiple sales channels being able to manage and control your menu centrally is a huge time saver.
Payments
Whether you choose to have a standalone payments system or payments integrated directly into your EPoS terminal, you can quickly take payments to streamline customer service, while ensuring accurate pricing.
Promotions
Whether you’re looking to offer promotions via delivery partners or using direct SMS and email marketing to drive orders to your own website, managing promotions from within your EPoS system helps you set them up and review performance. So you can test what works and what helps to drive growth for your business.
How to Choose The Best Epos Systems For Takeaways?
Why It Matters
As you consider the options provided by different bakery POS systems, it’s important to start building up a list of must have features. This will help narrow down the options and help you make an informed decision. If you need to make compromises based on costs or features you can do so having explored the options carefully. The best bakery EPoS system for you, is the one which helps your business grow with insights and actionable strategies.
Key Considerations
Budget & Costs
Integration
Ease of Use
Reliability & Service
On Site Service
Ordering Kiosks & Collection Point Displays
If you’ve got a busy on site service, you can deploy touch screen kiosks to take orders and securely process payments. Customer order tracking can be optimised with in-store displays which alert customers when their order is ready.
Takeaway
Bakery Self Service v Counter Sales
If your bakery operates on a self service model, then you’ll likely need your EPoS system to produce product and ingredient labels (including ingredient tracking for allergy information). For counter service, if you are selling items on a piece basis you may not need any additional equipment but if you are selling certain items by weight you may benefit from integrated calibrated weighing scales which will provide weight and cost information directly to your bakery EPoS system.
Budget & Costs
There are a range of different options at different price points. It’s important to consider both the upfront costs of different options (often the hardware costs) and the ongoing costs (software subscriptions, payment processing fees). On the other hand, a good idea of what functionality you need will help you identify the right system – so while cost is an important factor what it can do for you in enhancing your business can often exceed a small difference in costs. Ultimately you want to feel this is a wise business investment, something that will pay for itself many times over with the improvements it delivers and business insight it provides. Even for a startup giving some thought to whether a system can scale to multiple terminals and offer you enhanced functionality as you grow can be an important part of choosing the right system for your bakery.
Business Priorities
Bakeries come in all shapes and sizes. Depending on the products and services you offer you’ll need to consider if the system you are interested in has the flexibility to meet your needs. You may have a thriving coffee business alongside the bakery, which would mean prioritising speed of service in your decision making. If you offer custom made cakes, you might be prepared to instead prioritise the ability to take custom cake orders.
But my business is unique?
Some platforms will already have a number of integrated modules in areas like sales reporting, loyalty and stock control. You should check these meet your needs. If you need to integrate with other software for example accouting software like Xero or delivery platforms like Uber Eats you should check the platform can support this. If you’re using the same platform for both payments and POS these should work together – but if you’re planning to use a different payments supplier then you need to check that the systems will be compatible to benefit from the time savings with an integrated system. Within the bakery environment you may already be using or planning to use dedicated ERP software like Cybake so you’ll want to make sure your EPoS system can communicate directly with the platform.
Capacity Control
Every business wants to maximise sales. You can’t forecast when you will be at your busiest so if you’re processing orders from multiple channels, it’s useful to have the ability to adjust your maximum capacity in a time slot, to prevent you overstretching your kitchen.. By understanding your capacity and automatically adjusting your delivery times to work within your capacity you can work at 100% without overwhelming your kitchen. Reducing customer service issues, delivery delays and the associated stress for the business owner and staff.
Cloud Based vs Local
Many of the most popular EPoS platforms are now based in the cloud, connecting via the internet to your data. This has advantages in areas like software updates, backups. However, it’s also important to understand what happens if you lose internet access – can you still use the cloud based epos system when it’s offline? For larger, multi-site businesses the benefits of a cloud based system become even stronger – the ability to monitor activity across a number of different sites and to be able to process the data centrally, provides stronger financial controls and decision making insight. Product and menu changes, along with new functionality can be updated centrally and pushed out to multiple locations at the same time.
Dedicated Website
If you want to grow your business outside of the delivery platforms like Just Eat, having your own managed website allows you take direct orders without paying commission. Having this website integrated with your takeaway EPoS System allows you to quickly receive orders, handle payments and provide customer order tracking to ensure smooth service and happy customers.
Digital Signage
Would you like to have digital signage for your menus or to use for your in store marketing?
Driver Management
Digital Signage
Employee Management
Do you need your POS system to help you track employee worked hours, organise staff schedules? Being able to log worked hours and absences helps to simplify your payroll, while the ability to schedule staff for when you need them helps to ensure your staff are helping customers at the right times.
Ease of Use & Training
As a business owner, you’ll often be responsible for training new staff in how to use your system. When you’re considering different options it’s important to consider how easy it is to use as this will have a direct impact on the time you’ll need to spend training your existing staff and any new staff. You need to distinguish between the owner tasks like adding new menu items and the day to day usage for accurate order processing and taking payments.
Integrations
Businesses often hesitate to introduce technology into their business because they hold onto to the somewhat misguided belief that their business operates uniquely. It’s certainly true that no two businesses are identical but there will be processes and systems you use which will also be used by other similar businesses. While an EPoS system might change how you do certain things compared to now and that transition may require adjustments overall the benefits almost always outweigh the downside. Understanding your business and then taking the time to understand the capabilities of different systems is time well spent for the growth and future success of your business.
Multi Language Support
If you need multi language support from your system to make life easier for you and your team, you should check that your takeaway epos system can support this. Many systems offer multi language options.
Invest your Time
Buying a system that doesn’t meet your needs will end up wasting far more time and money than investing time in the process of picking the right system. It needn’t be complicated but just like hiring the right staff, you need to ask the right questions. It’s always worth drilling down into the specifics. If an option offers a table planner and you’ve got a multi floor business, will it work in the way you imagine. The questions you don’t ask, can’t help you – so think carefully what you need to ensure a system can do for you. While the perfect system might not exist, the best system for you needs and budget will exist. Take the time to investigate. While the upfront cost of a system might not break the bank – the lifetime additional revenue from picking the right system is likely a big number, not one you should ignore. Providers may allow you to test a system, provide in-use videos of how it works and you can of course explore the web for reviews. If you’re testing out different systems, also consider that what seems overwhelming and complex at first, will quickly become routine.
Reliability & Support
Can the supplier offer you support when you need it? Are their support hours compatible with your working hours? How do they provide support – telephone, email, chat, web based ticketing system and how long do they take to respond. Your support needs will vary between time critical (when something is not working) and less time sensitive tasks like looking to find a new way to do things – so you need to make sure that you can get the support you need when you need it. It’s certainly not the case that bigger is always better – a small supplier with clued up, on-call support is just as capable as a large supplier with staff all over the world – but to make an informed choice it’s important to know what you can expect.
Tax
If you’re VAT registered, or likely to become VAT registered the bakery environment can be particularly challenging for tracking VAT. It seems that most of the more unusual VAT rules regarding food could apply in a bakery environment – for example eat in vs takeaway. Hot takeaway food vs hot food which is allowed to cool. While tax laws can change and you should always take specialist advice, being able to track your different types of sales is absolutely vital given the potential for different tax treatment.
Training, Onboarding & Ongoing Assistance
The initial hours spent operating your new EPoS system can be daunting. For a very straight forward operation with very few additional features it’s likely you’ll be upto speed in very little time. More complicated setup will take more time to understand and to optimise over the first few days and weeks. Does the supplier offer training (either on site, remotely or online) or a dedicated onboarding process to help you make the first steps with the minimum of fuss? Overtime you’ll likely want to add features or adjust the way the system operates to better suit your particular business. While there are many changes and updates you can make yourself, you will occasionally have new challenges or business goals which you want to achieve using your POS equipment, is the supplier responsive and interested in helping you achieve your goals?