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Aldelo News & Blogs
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 Charge backs are unfortunately part of accepting credit cards and no business likes dealing with chargebacks, but they are a fact of life that getting out ahead of can help save you money. Before we talk about how to avoid chargebacks, Lets take a moment to talk about what a chargeback is. What is a chargeback? A Chargeback happens when a card holder contacts the issuing bank and disputes the charges made. As a result, a reversal of the charges is made of the original transaction and funds are pulled from the merchant and put in a holding account while the dispute is investigated. Merchants are typically notified by mail of the chargeback by there merchant processor and have a limited number of days to dispute the claim. Why do issuing banks allow this? There are a number of consumer protection laws that have come about over many years to help protect card holders who legitimately have experience fraud, unfair billing practices, or because a product did not meet the description of what the card holder received. How to avoid chargebacks? The first step is to use EMV devices, many charge backs happen because of claims of fraud. When cards just had a magnetic strip is was easy to duplicate the information that was on the magnetic strip and copy this over to a blank card. But EMV cards also have a chip embedded in them and this chip provides additional authentication that the card itself is real to the merchant processor and issuing bank. Many charge back attempts are stop right up front when the card holder still has the original card but is claiming fraud. The fact that EMV was used to run the card proves the card is not a duplicate and so claims of fraud can be stopped upfront. Address customer concerns when they happen. Lots of chargebacks are done because the card holder is unhappy about service or quality. Unhappy guest not only hurt your business by telling others about there negative experience but when they do a chargeback because of avoidable service or quality issues, it cost the business direct funds too. Print contact information on guest checks. This sounds like a simple thing, but guest may not find a manager or be too embarrassed to speak up, they may do a chargeback instead of looking for alternatives. Often times having the company name and phone number clearly on the guest check will give a guest and outlet to resolve a matter rather than feeling like they have no alternatives. Train your staff to check ID’s for cards just like they check id for alcohol. Actual fraud can be caught easily and save you a great deal of money simply by asking for id upfront when taking cards. Follow the guidelines setup by card brans. Each major card band has created a best practices list and although most overlap, reviewing their guidelines will help you understand why chargebacks happen.
What can you do when a chargeback happens? In short Fight it!! Aldelo Pay merchants can use the “Dispute Resolution Portal” making addressing chargebacks simpler than ever. Once you login you can see the chargeback, see the reason given and provide a response and even upload supporting documents if needed. Fighting a charge back does not cost you anything, Where losing cost you the amount of the sale! Most important types of Restaurant Technology and Hardware you should be taking advantage of!6/29/2020
 The restaurant industry is a rapidly changing place with new technology evolving to improve guest experiences, lower operating cost and improving record keeping. Restaurant guest now spend more time on line, care more about what they eat and the overall experience they have when dining out, getting take out, or looking for deliver and the rapid tech boom that has moved restaurants from the simple pen and paper to the digital age has opened up a large number of opportunities for restaurateurs . So what are the technologies that restaurateurs should be looking at?  Touch Screen Point of Sale, now before you start, Yes the Touch Screen point of sale has been out for decades, but advances in technology means you should not using the same old system. Touch Screen system have gotten smaller, faster, and simpler to use and even if you don’t see it at first if you update your current point of sale system, there is a lot going on under the hood as far as security changes, card encryption, and addon’s galore. Simply updating your software may help improve your system security if nothing else. Companies like Aldelo have not only updated an already feature rich product but improved a great deal of the securities and offered more flexibility in the size and dimensions of terminals you can use. But a touch screen point of sale can also streamline your production, keep track of inventory, help you make sure you stay profitable, keep track of your time cards and much more ! Mobile Ordering, this is a great way to help improve your guest experience! By allowing your staff to order right at the table they help eliminate mistakes, shorten wait times, spend more time with your guest, turn tables faster, and increase the number of customers you can see in a day. For merchants using Aldelo POS, you can even convert your existing Manu and setup data in just a few minutes. Now before you simply push this idea aside, Mobile devices are getting very cheap. Most cases adding mobile ordering is a faction of the cost of your point of sale terminal and if you could simply serve one more guest per day and prevent one incorrectly ordered meal, you can pay for this in just a few days. If you could improve guest experience by eliminating the time it takes to go back and forth to the point of sale station or bottle necks at the point of sale, and allowing your staff to spend more time chatting with your guest, Those guest are much more likely to return. We all know returning guest are gold !  Self Ordering Kiosk, This is a great technology as it allows you to reduce operating cost by reducing redundant staff, but it never calls in sick, is never a no show, is always there when you need extra staff to take orders and allows your guest the ability to eliminate the wait both in line for quick service or counter service restaurants but at the table too as it can be an easy place for guest to order that extra drink, Desert or more right from the table too. (Self Ordering kiosk make great interactive digital menus too) Kiosk also allow for greater social distancing and reduce your staffs need to have prolonged exposure to guest Self Ordering Kiosk allow you to shorten lines, upsell addon’s your guest may not be aware of normally and help you eliminate staffing and productivity issues. Multi- Store Gift, This is an item that is overlooked by many merchants but gift is a great way to increase sales and gain returning customers. Multi-store gift just puts this on steroids! Gift Cards gives your guest the ability to share their favorite business with others who you might not otherwise be able to gain access to. Its also cash up front for sales that will happen in the future at a later date allowing merchants a greater liquidity (its like having an investor in your business). Gift cards that can be redeemed across your chain allows you to continue to gain customers over a wider geographic area and spread the word about how great your business is faster! Aldelo’s MASA gift even allows you to see where you sell and receive gift cards and do cross store settlement so each store has easily balanced books !  Kitchen Display system, Its hard to imagine all of the equipment that these can eliminate and reduce. From the old style ticket wheels and tickets hanging on the pass to the paper waist you eliminate and the need to replace the paper in the printer at the height of your busy hours. Digital kitchen display system allow you to organize the kitchen in several different ways depending on your style and needs. They help eliminate had to read paper tickets, lost orders, and can give a different view of what is happening in the kitchen for each job,( line cook, expeditor) as well as display only what is needed at each station. Eliminating a lot of data overload for your staff during those busy rushes .  Probably one of the least appreciated is EMV Integrated Payment , EMV payments has shifted how we all do business over the past few years and as much as none of us like mandates to change. This one has worked for many merchants as It has shifted the liability for chargebacks and help improve security for card holders. It’s also created a great deal of technology you may not be taking advantage of. Such as mobile payments (pay at the table), Tokenized payments (Making payments more secure, and the ability to adjust tickets when mistakes are made) better security, Simpler PCI validation and much more ! This in many cases cost merchants upfront, but is a cost savings over time for merchants as its easier to become PCI validated. Because Aldelo allows for such a wide variety of merchant processors there is a great deal of options for merchants to use integrated EMV devices.  Online Ordering, Online ordering is a growth area for most restauranteurs. Its allows restaurants to have orders place by the merchant from any web enabled devices and many merchant support multiple online companies allowing them to take orders from multiple sites directly to the point of sale and have them print to the kitchen or Kitchen display just like orders made in house. As Covid-19 has forced most restaurants to expand into the digital world this is one area that has been a tech boom. Aldelo as helped its merchants take advantage of this by having and open API that is published at Doc.Aldelo.io so merchants can integrate with anyone they choose or take advantage of existing integrations.
 The Two Drink Minimum is a staple at comedy clubs, night clubs, Jazz clubs and bars across the United States. Its intent is to guarantee a minimum food or drink ticket for each guest and help a venue recover the cost of operations at the same time lowering the entry fee to the club or bar. (Probably helps you laugh a little more at some bad jokes too). This is enforced by a variety of methods from upfront charges that get you tickets or tokens to trade in for drinks, to ticket requirements built into the point of sale. (This is supported in Aldelo POS for Windows and Aldelo Express for iPad and Android)
So why is this popular in Clubs and Bars? Well, Clubs and Bars that bring in entertainment to entice guest need to still pay for the simple things that keep a business running, the brink and mortar building, lights, staff, insurance, city licensing and more all adds up. Being able to require a minimum number of drinks helps ensure a minimum ticket for each guest. It also encourages you to purchase addition food, drinks, or services the club might offer since the wait staff is already coming by. The Aldelo software will help merchants keep track of this requirement by providing a prompt to the server when they try to close out a ticket that the requirement has not been met. It then their decision if this should be overridden or not. Why are the drink prices so high? Not only dues the business need to pay for the insurance, staff and all the things mentioned above, but the entertainment is not free either! Its not uncommon that a portion (if not all) of the drink revenue goes to the entertainer. Good entertainment cost money and a portion of this cost is passed in the per drink cost at some venues. Do Non-Alcoholic Drinks Count toward this Two Drink Minimum? Yes, Venues will allow non-Alcoholic beverages to count toward this minimum as most venues realize not everyone will want to be drink for a variety of reasons and normally venues will have nonalcoholic beverages and maybe even food that will allow them to satisfy this requirement. In most cases its simply mean to stop people from just coming and seeing a free show that the venue might have a lot invested in. (Remember, good entertainment is not cheap). The Two drink minimum has been around in the US for a long time and is probability not going anywhere soon. As venues continue to search for ways to attract new customer and keep cost down this practice may even see a resurgence as venues reopen after Covid 19 Recently health departments across the United States have required that restaurants who are providing menus to guest use either digital menus that can be cleaned between users or disposable menus that are used only one time. This has raised and interesting question, are Digital menus cost effective in a Covid-19 world or are disposable menus the way to go? Well lets look at the cost of a paper disposable menu. If you are having these printed yourself on a desktop printer, you might get this as low as 0.04 per page if your just doing the most basic black and white and about 0.40 per page if your doing color with a nice finish and good paper. If you serve only 250 guest per day you could be looking at cost between $300.00 and $3000.00 per month If you went with a digital menu like Aldelo Kiosk, and you’re an Aldelo Pay merchant. You simply would need to purchase the iPad. (Aldelo Express Kiosk is free to Aldelo Pay merchants)
This means even if you are a small restaurant and serving a small number of guest this is most likely a very good place to save money and give your guest the ability to use an interactive menu to order there own food and drinks, eliminating errors. For those guests who do not want to order themselves, this is still and interactive menu that allows the staff to order for them at the table, Also eliminating many ordering mistakes.
Conclusion Digital menus are more cost effective ! Thermal printing takes place when a heated printhead contacts thermal paper. As the paper passes over the heated printhead the paper turns black at each place it is heated, creating words or images. Other colors are sometimes possible by applying heat at different temperatures to specially designed paper.
In 1993 only 5% of POS printers were thermal printers. By 2007 that percentage increased to over 34%. Today, almost all receipt printers are thermal and the number of thermal printers in the kitchen is growing fast. Why use a thermal receipt printer in your restaurant?
Reliability - Thermal receipt printers use printheads that are about three inches wide and have no moving parts, on the other hand impact printers have about twenty or more moving parts and electrical devices. The printhead covers the whole width of the paper therefore printing one full line at a time. With no moving parts thermal printers are less likely to wear out. Less down time and fewer repairs directly affect your bottom line profitability. Thermal printers are durable and easy to use. Because there is no ribbon, thermal printers cost less to operate than impact printers. Most mobile printers are thermal High Quality Printing
In today's economy printer choice contributes to your restaurant's profitability. By choosing a thermal printer for the customer areas of your restaurant you will most likely see a decrease in total cost of ownership and an increase in customer service. When designers think of placing a remote printer in the kitchen or bar they are probably thinking of increasing speed of service or accuracy in food and drink preparation. They are probably not thinking of these printers as a deterrent to theft.
You are the business owner cannot be everywhere at once. As much as you would like to keep a close eye on your operation the fact remains that you are not able to watch the kitchen, the bar and take care of the floor. Having a reliable Point of Sale system is a vital part of your overall operation, especially with regard to security. When people think of places to steal in your business they automatically think of the cash register. That is the obvious choice since that is where the majority of the cash is kept. However, the next most obvious place people will steal is your kitchen or bar. That is where a good Point of Sale system with remote printers can really help deter theft and point out obvious problems. No Receipt, No Food It really is as simple as that. No food or drinks are prepared unless there is a receipt from the remote printer. In order to get this receipt the order must be placed by the server or cashier. This simple concept can mean thousands in lost revenues due to dishonest employees not collecting for food that was prepared by the kitchen. Even in kitchens where the owner is the chef theft is a daily occurrence. Dishonest employees will pass a hand written ticket to the kitchen. The food is prepared and served to the guest. No where is anything that closes this loop by requiring that the server or cashier actually record the sale. In a Point of Sale system the food is rung up first, then the ticket is printed in the kitchen on any of several remote printers. No ticket is printed until the order is entered by the server or cashier. The loop is closed, and the margin for theft is dramatically reduced. Multiple Remote Printers Close the Loop Tighter Most Point of Sale systems have the option for multiple remote printers. 6 is not an uncommon amount to have. As the business owner you should be thinking of how many preparation stations that you have in your kitchen. You should strategically place remote printers at each of these stations to help secure that portion of the kitchen. The Point of Sale system can be programmed to split the order by preparation station. This will allow the person working that station to prepare that portion of the overall order. For you as the business owner, you should be paying attention to what is being prepared at each station and if there is a receipt that matches that item. If no receipt has been printed by the remote printer then no food should be being prepared at that station. An expeditor printer should also be a consideration to print the entire order on a single receipt. This will allow the kitchen manager to know what each piece of the order is and what station is preparing it. The expeditor receipt will be essential in bringing the entire order together for delivery to the table. This too is a great theft deterrent in that the kitchen manager will know what stations should be preparing food and if a station is preparing something that was not ordered.  The History of Frequent Diner and Customer Loyalty
Since the creation of restaurants, owners have always wanted and needed to know who their customers are and what they like to eat and drink. This information is vital to the ongoing success of a restaurant. In addition to knowing their customers they sometimes gave away food or drinks in an attempt to buy favor with those customers. While this worked in most cases there were no controls in place to prevent abuse by employees nor were there any requirements other than the good mood of the owner. Abuse of this method of rewarding customers was rampant. Employees would take advantage of this and give the same favors to their friends. This drove food and bar costs skyward, while making the employees rich through additional tips from their happy friends. In an attempt to control this madness someone came up with punch cards and stamps. The abuse of the system slowed but was not stopped. How many of us have gotten an extra punch in our cards or extra stamps from a waiter in an attempt to get a better tip? This happens daily in restaurants with this system. Then came the counterfeiters of these cards and stamps. Recently the Subway chain had to end their 20-year old Sub Club stamp program for this very reason. The Need to Manage Frequent Diner and Customer Loyalty The need is great. As the business owner you need your point of sale system to provide accurate customer information on buying habits, number of visits, frequency of visits, entice repeat visits and purchases through reward programs. Do all this while managing the programs and preventing "sweet hearting" by employees. No small task. Especially with the creative employees that so many restaurants employ. The Solution for Managing Frequent Diner and Customer Loyalty Some point of sale software comes standard with a frequent diner or customer loyalty package that does all these things and more. Some Frequent Diner Module utilizes secure methods of tracking your guests and their buying habits. You establish a database of guest's information with an account number. This number can be their phone number or any number system you desire. However, the most popular and most secure method is through magnetic cards with your logo on them. These cards act as a constant reminder of your restaurant by having your logo in their wallet or purse. These Frequent Diner Module will secure the reward programs you put in place and preventing the employees from giving away food. Rewards are giving only when earned through purchases, frequent visits or for items on your menu that you wish to highlight. The establishment of reward programs takes your employees out of the game and puts you in charge. You may establish multiple reward programs and assign them to customers on an individual basis. Not every frequent diner has to belong to every program. You have the choice of which customers are involved in which programs. Reward programs can be established to highlight a new item, feature a portion of your menu or encourage your customers to come back during a specific meal period. Programs can be created to reward customers after a specified number of visits or for how much they spend. Rewards can be a % off, $ off, a specified item free, or other creative rewards. You have the option to have instant rewards or make the reward good on their next visit. The Benefit of Managing Frequent Diner and Customer Loyalty to You Imagine being able to market directly to your customer base. Imagine having detail knowledge of their buying habits how often they came, when was their last visit, their anniversary and birthdays. With this information you could create marketing materials targeted at your customers and bring them back more often. Imagine having the ability to establish reward programs to build meal periods that have been traditionally slow. If you need to build your lunch business, establish reward programs based around this meal period and then distribute your frequent diner magnetic cards to businesses and their employees in your area. Don't just sit back and wait on someone to walk in your door. Go out and get them! Imagine having the ability to highlight low cost menu items and use them to reward customers. In real dollars and profits the frequent diner module can generate huge results. Let's say you have a $10 ticket average per person with a 35% food cost. If you created a program that rewards a customer with a free appetizer every 5 visits. Appetizers have an average price of $4 and have the same 35% food cost. If the person ate alone for those 5 visits you would have enjoyed $50 in sales and $32.50 in profits. Your customer has now earned a reward of a free appetizer on their next visit at a cost to you of only $2.60. This means that you have a net profit of $29.90 on sales that were increased through rewarding the customer for repeat visits. If this guest brought a date then your profits would have been $62.40 with a cost of the program of only $2.60! Imagine the rewards YOU will get for increased sales of your repeat customers. Point of sale systems are never complete without printers. Not only do you need printers for receipts, journals and credit card payments, if you are a restaurant you need printers in the kitchen to help stop theft.
Printers in the kitchen are often overlooked for their importance in getting the orders to the kitchen, producing easy to read receipts and as a theft deterrent. Printers in the kitchen reduce noise and confusion and truly speed up service to your customers by eliminating trips to the kitchen to deliver food orders. If you are a restaurant and do not have printers in your kitchen you might as well not have a point of sale system. That is how important kitchen printers are to your business. Not too many years ago we installed a simple point of sale system in a small restaurant. The restaurant was a converted house where the owner of the restaurant was the chef. He felt that since he was running the kitchen and the restaurant was small that he had great control of the restaurant. His purpose for investing in a point of sale system was so that he did not have to read the hand written tickets being presented by his wait staff. At the end of the first night of business with the new point of sale system we looked at the sales totals and found that they had done $300 more than identical nights in the recent past. For his size operation this was substantial. The owner was astonished as he swore that they had not prepared any more food than they normally would. He could not account for the additional business. Upon further examination of the point of sale reports we found that he had a big increase in the amount of appetizers that were sold that night. He had not prepared that many more than he would only any other night, but the sales increase was definitely attributed to appetizer sales that night. What this meant was the kitchen did not produce any additional food that night. The owner did have the kitchen completely under control. What he did not control without a point of sale system was the servers not charging for the food he was preparing. The new system for preparing food required that a receipt be printed on the kitchen printer before the chef/owner would prepare the food. In order for this receipt to be printed the server had to enter the order into the point of sale system. This tandem of a point of sale system and a kitchen printer closed the loop for the restaurant owner. This is a good example of a simple solution that too many restaurant owners overlook. Too often the kitchen printer is seen as an after thought and an unimportant aspect of a point of sale system. What the restaurant owner should look at is how many preparation stations do they have in the kitchen and how could we utilize printers to speed production and deter theft. Instead of looking at the cost of kitchen printers the restaurant owners should be considering how these low-cost additions to their point of sale systems will have the fastest return on investment of any aspect of their new system.  You would never want your point of sale system to be down because you ran out of paper. The same is true with regard to not have a supply of ribbons to use when your existing ribbon gets too light to read.
We are not suggesting that you have a warehouse full of backup printers, but we are suggesting that you can almost eliminate your downtime by having a single backup printer for your business. Receipt and remote printers are the parts of your point of sale system most prone to failure. They get the most use and have the most wear and tear of any part of your system. If a part of your point of sale system is going to break it will most likely be one of your printers. The Reality of Service and Repairs Point of sale dealers today are passing the manufacturer warranty directly to the business owner. In more and more situations, this means that the dealer that you bought the equipment from is not the person who is repairing the broken hardware. In most cases, they send the printer off for repair and never get beyond the simple repairs that can be done locally. What this means for you is less cost of repairs but a longer down time. In many cases the local dealer will offer you a loaner program. Sometimes, this loaner program is in the form of a maintenance plan. Most maintenance plans call for you, the business owner to prepay for a quarterly or annual contract that covers repairs and a loaner. Look closely at the cost of this contract to fully understand what you are paying for. You might be shocked at the cost when compared to owning your own backup equipment. Even in the best of situations you should expect to have hours of downtime if a replacement printer is needed. Even with your prepaid service agreement the technician has drive time to your place of business or there is shipping time if you are more than a day of travel from the service provider's office. In most businesses this is totally unacceptable and can cause significant loss of customer service. If you are a customer oriented company, this is totally unacceptable. If you want to have your customers return for future visits then must avoid this situation at all costs. You Have Backup Ribbons Don't You? The price of printers are coming down along with the cost of other computer peripherals. There really is not need for your customers to suffer through the down time caused by a faulty printer. You keep backup supplies such as ribbons and paper for your printers. You keep other supplies in your operation and you should consider keeping a backup printer as well. Even if you have a mixture of thermal printers and dot matrix printers in your point of sale system, you should consider having a simple dot matrix printer as a backup. Printers today are almost all "plug and play" with identical printer drivers. This makes many of them interchangeable with other makes and models. In most cases you can exchange a dot matrix printer for a thermal printer without any difficulties. The only real difference you might encounter is a speed difference between a thermal and dot matrix printer. Other than that you should not have any major problems exchanging a dot matrix for thermal at the point of sale. For restaurants, you would not want to put a thermal printer in a kitchen environment simply because the receipt would turn black from the heat in the kitchen. For this reason, if you only bought a single backup printer for a point of sale system that had both thermal and dot matrix printers it would probably be a dot matrix printer. What Printer to Buy? Look at your point of sale printer to determine what type of interface it is. Many point of sale systems will use serial printers at all locations. This makes buying a replacement printer extremely simple. You need only buy a serial printer to backup all printers in your system. In systems where a parallel printer is used as the point of sale receipt printer and a serial or Ethernet printer is used for the remote printer you will need to buy 2 different printers as most printers do not have multiple interfaces. Note that I said most, as there are some printers that do have multiple interfaces. Please be sure before you buy that the printer truly will work with multiple interfaces. The Benefits to You This is easy. Downtime is reduced from hours or days to a matter of minutes. In the time it takes to call your service provider you could have already exchanged the broken printer and be back up servicing your customers. Now the situation is not as critical and your service provider can either dispatch a technician to gather your broken printer and send it off for service. You are not as stressed by having your point of sale system be crippled by a down printer. Your customers are not inconvenienced by not receiving a receipt, guest check or by having their food come out of the kitchen slow because the kitchen printer is down. In a matter of minutes you are back up and running where before you could have been down for days by a low-cost part of your point of sale system that you could have exchanged yourself. Don't be caught without a backup printer for your operation.  Balance Sales to Deposits
If the sale is recorded then there should be a corresponding deposit at the bank. It is just that simple. However, this is overlooked by the vast majority of business owners. Too many don't take the time to balance the 2 totals. If a sale is recorded then the tender should be in the drawer. If not, someone should be held accountable for the difference. Most restaurants that have servers have found a good method of accomplishing this through "Server Banking". In this method of doing business the server brings their own starting bank and makes change out of this bank. At the end of the shift the POS system will produce a report that shows credit card sales and a Cash Due amount. It is this Cash Due amount that the restaurant owner is interested in. The server produces this report, produces the credit card slips and then the exact amount owed the restaurant based upon the Cash Due amount. The rest of the cash they keep as their tips. The restaurant owner is never short when using this method. Use the blind balance routine in most systems to identify employees who commonly steal from your cash drawer. This module will calculate exactly how much cash should be in the drawer and ask the cashier to count and blindly enter the amount of cash that is in the drawer. The report shows instantly the over/short of the drawer and will not allow the cashier to re-enter a new cash amount. Using server banking and blind balance routines are great ways to match sales to deposits. By controlling your cash and charges you will see more of them actually reaching the bank. Identify you Best Sellers Use item and product movement reports to spotlight your top selling items. You should know almost daily what your best movers are and then make sure that you are never out of them. To miss a sale is a terrible thing. Being out of your top selling items will cost you sales and profits. Stay on top of your best sellers to make sure that you don't ever miss a sale. Just the opposite of this is knowing what is not selling in your business. All businesses work on turns of inventory. You should know what turns are expected in your vertical market. If you have product that is historically not meeting your turn expectations you should re-evaluate if you should continue stocking the item. What is worse is an item that is not selling at all. In restaurants it does not pay to continue to stock an item that is not selling or restock an item because you threw the last case out. In a retail store if you have to continue to knock the dust off of an item or if it has been on the shelf so long the packaging is starting to dry rot then you have a problem item. Know what items are not selling, reduce them for quick sell and then do not restock them. You are much better off pouring this money into items that do sell or draw new customers into your business. Understanding Your Labor Costs The fastest way to impact your bottom-line profits is via your labor costs. Having a good idea of what you are spending on labor, forecasted to spend and your over/short regarding hours spent is critical to your profitability. Using a POS system’s time clock feature will allow you to easily track the hours and dollars spent on labor. Taking reports daily gives you an idea of trends and will help you recognize when times are slow and when you should send people home. The right time to take a labor report might be when you see that sales are slow. See if your labor costs is running high and make cuts if necessary. If your POS systems includes a labor forecast and labor scheduling module you should absolutely take advantage of this program. The time you spend learning and making the labor schedule will quickly pay dividends in the form of increased profits. Without doubt, this module will bring additional profits faster than any other back office module. Think of the savings like this. If employees clock in 10 minutes early, it only takes 6 employees doing so to equal an hour of labor. At $15/hour that then equals to $105 per week or $5,460 per year is lost profits. Using the labor scheduling module and requiring employees to clock in on the POS system will stop them from clocking in earlier than their scheduled time and require manager approval to clock out late. Use all of these reports and modules to understand your business, make mid-day adjustments and control your operation to increase your profits. |