Bakery POS System
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 Bakery POS 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.
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.
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 bakery epos system. Some larger EPoS suppliers may even offer a dedicated app store with proprietary and 3rd party apps designed for specific tasks and needs. By integrating your EPoS system with these platforms you can open up new sales channels and move your business data where you need it for other administrative tasks.
Industry Spotlight
Featured Bakery Software Integration
Cybake Bakery Management Software
Cybake is a dedicated bakery ERP software suite. ERP software is a fancy name for software designed to help and manage and improve day to day processes in areas like manufacturing and supply chain logistics. As it’s created specifically for bakeries it can use the data from your compatible bakery POS system and use that data to help you forecast future demand.
Inventory
Understanding your stock in an bakery 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 bakery item.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.
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.
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. Integrated payments, if supported by your bakery epos system take out an extra step in the process, speeding up service and reducing staff errors.
Speed
Speed of service is paramount – quick order entry and fast payment processing is good for customers and good for reducing customer wait times. If your business experiences periods of exceptionally high traffic it’s important to understand how a system will perform.
How To Choose The Best Bakery EPoS System?
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
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.
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.
Contracts & Committments
The advent of the cloud speeded up the separation of the hardware and software costs of an EPoS system. Historically you’d buy or lease the hardware and buy a licence for the software. Some systems are still sold like this but for cloud based systems you’ll increasingly see a monthly charge for the system. Alongside this, some providers will have a minimum contract (and we often see this for payment processing too). While some EPoS solutions don’t have any contract length terms, if you can’t use some or all of the hardware with different epos software for pubs that can also create an additional cost and complication if you change your mind later.
Digital Signage
Would you like to have digital signage for your menus or to use for your in store marketing?
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.
Ingredients
Important for legal allergy and nutrition requirements – providing this information directly within the EPoS system allows staff to provide immediate and detailed product information to customers.
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.
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.
Payment Processing
Historically EPoS and payment systems were often separate. So orders would be tracked on the EPoS till and then payments would be handled as a seperate task. Integrated payments (where the payment could also be processed directly from the EPoS system) have become increasingly popular as it helped to speed up service and reduce the chances of staff error in entering in the payment amount on a PDQ machine. Nowadays many EPoS systems are being provided by payment providers themselves or EPoS suppliers have a preferred vendor for payments. This means that comparing card processing charges is something you need to consider when buying the system. You may be tied to the provider of the EPoS system and their charges, so you can’t necessarily shop around separately for the cheapest payments deal and need to consider the blended cost of both the EPoS system and the card payment charges at the same time.
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?