When you’re running a restaurant, you’re juggling dozens of responsibilities at any given time. Operations, finances, staff, marketing—and that doesn’t even include actually making and serving the food. And if you’ve committed to running your own restaurant, chances are the food is really your favorite part. 

To help you focus on the food and less on the juggling act, you need a strong restaurant point of sale (POS) system that can help you simplify your operations and shorten your to-do list. Here are three ways a quick service restaurant POS can help!

Effortlessly Manage All Your Menus

Menu management is one of the most important parts of running your restaurant. You want to make sure people can easily find and order the food you’ve worked so hard on. To help with this, choose a restaurant POS that enables you to create and manage all your digital menus in one place. 

If you noticed that plural in menus and got overwhelmed, don’t worry. Though it’s true you should have multiple menus and ways to access them—like QR code menus, online ordering options through your website, and digital display menus inside your restaurant or out in a drive-thru—a strong POS can help you manage them all with ease. 

Offering multiple menus and ordering options makes your food more accessible to more people. Some people, particularly younger diners, want the option to order their food online for pickup, while others may want to see a menu in your space and talk to staff about the options. By having menus in all these places, you make sure you’re reaching different people and catering to their preferences. 

But things move fast in a restaurant, and when you add a new menu item, run out of something, or make a change to a recipe, you shouldn’t have to make all those updates manually. 

The right restaurant POS will allow you to make your edit one time and push that change to all your digital menus—saving you time and potential mistakes on orders down the road. 

Multiple menus makes it easy for your customers to order from wherever they are—now, you need a system to help your kitchen actually make those orders. 

Keep Calm with a Kitchen Display System

No matter what kind of space your restaurant is in, clear communication between your front and back of house is key. Manually collecting tickets, shouting orders, or telling your chefs any changes to orders is a good way to get things lost. 

Instead, choose a restaurant POS that has a kitchen display system (KDS) that will automatically collect, aggregate, and display all the orders coming in. This way your staff can look in one place for everything they need to know. 

Your KDS should be able to route orders to the appropriate station, and your staff can customize the screen to only see what they need to be working on. You won’t lose tickets, your kitchen will know exactly what they need to work on, and orders will go out with fewer mistakes. 

When your KDS integrates with your restaurant POS, it will track every order no matter where they were placed. Whether your customers order online, over the phone, or in person, the KDS will triage them all, and your kitchen staff won’t need to jump between screens or track down tickets and sticky notes to complete them. 

Your customers will also get their food faster. The KDS will automatically text them when their order is ready, so your customers get notified immediately and can come grab their grub.

Automate Your Sales Tax

Okay, so you created your menu and people started ordering food. How do you make sure you’re accurately managing the sales tax on each order? 

A lot of restaurateurs didn’t get into the game to become sales tax experts, but it is an important part of your business. That’s why DAVO by Avalara integrates with your restaurant POS and automatically calculates sales tax for your restaurant: to give you peace of mind that it’s getting done, and getting done correctly. 

Once you integrate DAVO with your restaurant POS, you don’t actually have to think about it much again. DAVO will automatically collect sales tax from each transaction, file your tax return, and even pay your sales tax with the money it’s already set aside. 

Some states offer rebates for filing your state taxes in full and on time, so aside from the legal benefits of filing taxes on time, there’s potential financial benefits as well. Since DAVO automatically files on time for you, you won’t be leaving that money on the table. 

You’ll have access to reporting that you can check in on to make sure everything is running smoothly, but you won’t need to worry about sales tax in your day-to-day operations. Instead, you’ll be able to spend your time and energy on making good food and connecting with your customers. 

Choose a Restaurant POS Built for Quick Service

Choosing the right restaurant POS is an important part of setting up your business. It can make your life a lot easier in the long run, saving you time and even money. But there are a lot of POS options out there; how do you choose the one that’s right for your business?

Look for one that’s built specifically for quick service restaurants. It should account for all the specific needs that QSRs have, like menu management, easy payment processing and tip prompting, and transparent reporting. All these tools will help you run a thriving, profitable restaurant, without you having to spend all your time in your office.

Ben Simmons

Ben Simmons is co-founder and CEO of Table Needs, a fast-growing provider of restaurant technology and business services for quick service restaurants, coffee shops, and food trucks.