Sliding Scales!
Sliding scales
Want some really unusual pricing methods? Often, we run into store owners that have pricing that is not consistent from one modifier to another. There are three scenarios where a sliding scale makes sense:
1) Pricing that changes depending on the number of items on the ticket. For example, if you offer a special where a customer buys one item and then gets the second at a discount. Buy one pizza and get the second half off is a great example of this.
2) X amount of toppings or flavors free. This works for those of you that price a pizza where the cheese, one topping, two topping and three topping prices are all the same. Or, if you offer a drink with up to two flavor shots for the same price.
3) Non-proportional pricing. If you have modifiers or ingredients that vary in price according to the number that are added, then this is a great way to tackle this. This pricing is very common in pizza where you might have a one topping pizza for $10, two topping is $12, three topping $12.50 and four topping $13.50.
With sliding scale pricing, you can specify pricing by the number of items ordered or by the number of ingredients or modifiers added.
Call us with more questions!
F.A.S.T. Order Taking for Your Coffee Shop!
F.A.S.T. Order Taking!
F.A.S.T. Stands for Fast Action Screen Technology and along with Active Ticket Technology makes SP-1 one of the quickest systems to accurately take an order on.
This is a setting that can be changed per Menu Group and is designed to help make it easier for employees to take an order. With this enabled, any order can be taken in the same method that the customer orders it. So, instead of a top down approach where the employee inturrupts the customer and asks “What size?”, the employee can start the order by selecting the modifier, specialty or size first. This allows your employee to quickly place the order without thinking about how it is done.
Want to turn F.A.S.T. on in your menu? It’s easy, just click the FAST button when you are in Menu Groups section of Master Files!
Do you know what a price table is?
Do you know about Price Tables in SP-1? Price tables are a way of assigning a three letter codes to pricing. For instance FLV or LGT for Flavor or Large Topping.
These are setup so that SP-1 can be incredibly flexible on the pricing. Using a price table instead of absolute pricing can make it easy to change prices in the future. Let’s say you have 10 ingredients and price them at $.50 each. With absolute pricing, you would need to change each of the 10 ingredients when pricing changed. If you used a price table instead, you would place the three letter combination on each of those. Then, if you decided to change the price, you only change the price table one time and all 10 ingredients are modified.
Another advantage is that a price table can be setup by time or day of the week. This allows you to specify up to nine different prices per day per item if needed!
Don’t hesitate to call us to find out more about how this can help you.
Gift cards methods
Did you know that the SelbySoft has three ways of handling your gift card systems?
The first and most popular method is our internal gift card system. This is built into every SP-1 system and gives you the ability to use gift, prepaid and rewards (or loyalty cards) completely free of charge in your store. This method is designed for either single locations or locations that don’t need to share a gift card between stores.
The second option is primarily for people with multiple locations. In this scenario, our Corporate Reporting software handles all of the gift, prepaid and rewards (or loyalty)cards. The cards then will work across all the locations.
The third option is to handle the gift cards through a third party credit card processor. In this case we primarily recommend Mercury Payment Systems as they have a no fee gift & reward system. Mercury is a great choice if the store needs to provide balances online or if the stores involved are part of a franchise system. Mercury has the ability to handle Corporate Pooling between the stores.
Coffee Fest New York – March 9-11th
This week we will be at the Coffee Fest show in New York from the 9th to the 11th. If you happen to be in the area, stop by! We are in booth 224 & 226!
Mike Spence will be hosting a seminar on Tracking Sales with Technology at 9am on the 10th at the New York Coffee Fest as well.
More information on the show can be found at: http://coffeefest.com/Event/Attendee/Default.aspx
New time clock option
SP-1 has a new feature involving the Time Clock. This feature comes from customer suggestions we have received over the last year or so.
This feature allows your employees to clock out or in while the system is still in Order Entry. Currently, if you want to clock in or out on an order taking station, the employee has to exit to the logo screen, then allow the other employee to clock in or out. Then the original employee has to log back on to the system and enter Order Entry to be able to take the next order. This can be a little slow in some cases.
In the future, a Time Clock button (see picture) will show up in Order Entry at the bottom right hand corner. This will only show up when you are not in the middle of an order and cannot be done by the person that is currently logged in. Additionally, there is a switch in System Setup Operations 4 that controls this ability for people that don’t want to activate this.
How to record Square transactions in SP-1
Occasionally we are asked how to record a payment made in some way other than our default methods. As a quick review, SP-1 has the ability to accept:
Cash
Check
Credit Card (five per transaction)
Account Charges (billing a customer)
Gift Cards (five per transaction)
Sometimes, that’s not enough. We have customers that take paper gift certificates, accept script, barter cash or even credit card transactions from an outside source like Square or Mogley.
In SP-1 we have the ability to create five special payment options to record items like this. When you select the gift card button, you will see those buttons at the top. In the example below, you see Mogley, Square and Gift Certificate options. This will also allow you to record an account number or approval number on the transaction. Keep in mind that it does not process through those methods, just record that it happened.
Of course, we will report on each of these as well (see below). Call us for more information!
