Category: Order Entry

Oct
18
2011
October 18th, 2011 by Mike Spence

Recently I have read a number of articles about “new” POS products and features.   I love to hear what others in the industry are doing as it helps push us to make sure we are staying on top of the latest technology and features.

For us, our biggest challenge is how to let people know about all the things we sometimes take for granted.   Here are some of the top items that people are surprised we have already in the software:

Text Ordering – Yes – a customer can TEXT an order into your store and have it show up on the SP-1 POS.  We took that a step further and allow your customers to comment on Faceook or Twitter and place an order as well!  Seriously, this is one of the coolest new things you probably are not using yet!

Cloud based backups – Surprisingly we have been doing this since 2007!  SP-1 automatically backs up all of your data every night at 3am.   If you are on a support plan with us, then this is just one of the free perks.    If you are not for sure if your system is backed up, call us.

Remote access – We have multiple ways to handle this!  Our back office license allows you to connect to the POS from the office.  Or, you can use various FREE remote connection software to connect to the POS.  Finally we have three different corporate options that allow you to do everything from receive reporting at a central location to locking down the stores menu.    You don’t have to do everything from the store!

 

 

Posted in Order Entry, POS Features Tagged with:

Oct
11
2011
October 11th, 2011 by Mike Spence

There are a lot of reasons to use our SP-1 point of sale in your store.  We talk about ease of use, gift cards, and other features.    Some of these are features that make it easy to train, track customers or just help the you, the owner, understand what is happening.

What about your manager?  Well, we have some specific tools in SP-1 to help them out as well.   Here are four tools in SP-1 to help your restaurant or coffee shop manager out:

1)  Dashboard – this is the absolute easiest way for your manager to stay on top of the figures that matter day in and day out.   Simply by selecting the Dashboard button in SP-1, your manager can see total sales, labor to sales ratios as well as direct comparisons of today vrs last week, last month and last year.  This is a great way to have your manager be on top of things!

2) Hourly Summary  – This report will show your manager how many tickets were down by the 1/2 hour over a weekly period.  This becomes a fantastic tool to track busy times and trends.
3)  Ecomms – Employee Communications is another great tool for your manager.  With our included Ecomm system, your manager can email your employees directly from SP-1.  Better yet, SP-1 records the email and requires that the employee enter a random four digit code before being able to clock in!  By using Ecomms effectively, your manager will be able to stay on top of employees.
4) Employee Summary Report – One of the most underused reports by managers.  With this report, you can directly see, by employee who has the most sales, voids etc.  This can be a great tool to show how productive employees are.

Posted in Order Entry, Reporting Tagged with: ,

Sep
15
2011
September 15th, 2011 by Mike Spence

More on the on-going fight between coffee shop owners and people that want to camp in the store working on laptops etc.  This news  Grid Lock: Starbucks Covers Electrical Outlets to Curb Laptop Lingerers – TIME NewsFeed illustrates the frustration.

The issue is not that people want to hang out in the store, it’s that the customer doesn’t continue to buy product while sitting there.   Heck, I’m guessing that you want people in your store – the catch is you also want them buying product!

The best way I’ve seen to approach this without a confrontation is to use a product like WEBbeams. WEBbeams helps eliminate the whole issue by requiring a login code to access the WiFi connection.

When the customer orders product, SP-1 prints a unique, one time code.  That code is then used by the customer to log on to the WiFi system in the store.  The great thing is that the code can be for a limited amount of time.   So, if you have campers that want to sit, surf the web and stay all day, they will be forced to buy more product.

Give us a call to learn more about WEBbeams and SelbySoft!

Mike.

Posted in Hardware, Order Entry, POS Features Tagged with: , ,

Aug
02
2011
August 2nd, 2011 by Mike Spence

Do you sell coffee by the ounce or pound?  What about loose-leaf tea?  If so, you should look at a retail scale that is electronically hooked up to SP-1.  I touched on this briefly in a previous blog (Retail Options In SP-1) but thought it worth supplying some information about using the scale itself in SP-1. 

Scales are accurate.  So is SP-1.   Once you have an integrated scale, you will get 100% of the price per weight.  For example, with a scale, the employee puts the tea / coffee on the scale and l SP-1 calculate it.  If the tea weighs at 100.5 grams and is $19.75 per 100 grams the sale is calculated at $19.85.    We know that an employee will often round that tea to 100 grams to make it easy if they are typing it in.   Even worse is the employee who transposes a digit or misreads the scale.  At $.19 a gram mistakes add up quickly!

Scales are easy.   Take product, place on scale, hit a button.  It’s simple.  

Customers trust them.  When a customer knows the scale is electronically connected to the POS, they trust the totals that they are given more.  



Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371










Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371

Posted in Order Entry, Uncategorized Tagged with: ,

Jun
16
2011
June 16th, 2011 by ssadmin
Have you ever noticed that printer in the back of a kitchen at a busy restaurant?  Or maybe the monitor hanging above the espresso machine in a drive thru? 


Why are they there?   The simple answer is to print the order out right?   It goes deeper than that once you start really thinking about it.  


1)  They are efficient.  It’s true, they are.  Count how many steps an employee has to take to hand a receipt, cup or hand written note to the Barista or cook.  Then double it (they have to walk back right?).  Now multiply that by the number of orders you take in a day.  Virtually all of that time is wasted.  


2) Less Mistakes.  Order accuracy is key when thinking about implementing a monitor or printer for a make line.  Handwriting mistakes vanish when using this type of system.   The Barista and cooks know precisely what to make because it is all laid out in front of them.  Additions and subtractions are handled correctly as well. 

3) Theft Controls.  Want to stop product from being handed out without getting paid for it?  While a monitor or printer does not completely stop it from happening, it can certainly cut down the potential.  If you have two employees the rule is that without a paper slip or display on the monitor, you don’t make the product.   




Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371


1

Posted in Hardware, Order Entry, Uncategorized Tagged with: , ,

May
03
2011
May 3rd, 2011 by ssadmin
How many of you are using Twitter and Facebook to communicate with your customers? 

Hopefully, all of you!  Why?  Because it’s effective and free.  The only cost is in your time and while that is incredibly valuable, this is one area it’s worth spending it. 

Aside from a great way to communicate with customers and promote your business, these social media tools have a way to help increase your speed of service through SP-1 with our new WebOrder Interface.   


With this, you can have a simplified Twitter and Facebook order system that allows your customers to place an order on Twitter & Facebook!  

This order is then directly transmitted to SP-1 for your staff to finish.  It’s a great way to increase your speed of service with your customers!






Don’t hesitate to call us for more information. 










Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371

Posted in Order Entry, Uncategorized Tagged with: , ,

Mar
24
2011
March 24th, 2011 by ssadmin

Thinking about our MobileDash Options?  You haven’t seen anything yet! 




This new technology allows SP-1 to remotely communicate with you via email on a constant basis.

We started with being able to show you your:
Tostal tickets
Total sales
Average dollar per ticket
Total labor dollars
Labor percent
Total cost of goods
Total cost of goods percent

We then give you menu group breakdowns with totals!  This all is emailed to you on an hourly basis so you are completely in control of what is going on in your store. 

While all of this us pretty cool we decided that it could not stop there.  All of this was just the beginning of the reporting you receive from us.

MobileDash has been enhanced to provide new features as well! 



VoidTrack– Ticket voided?  You get an email!


TheftAlert– If an employee enters 911 as the password for no sale – you get an email alerting you to a potential robbery!


AuditTrack – When a void does happen you need to know what is happening. Audit track will show you what was voided who did it and when.


TimeManager– an employee clocks in? You get an email!

Nosale– No sale occurs? You get an email!



EmployeeMail. Are you familiar with our ecomm messaging system?  This takes it a step further so that your ecomms are automatically emailed to your employees


Do you use twitter ?  How would you you like to tweet specials from SP-1?  We have added this feature so that you can tweet specials directly from the system!





Don’t think this is the end of this type of development….Keep checking with us for cool options to come!


Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371

Posted in Order Entry, Reporting, Uncategorized Tagged with: , , ,

Mar
17
2011
March 17th, 2011 by ssadmin
Clock Out Options for Servers

If you have servers in your restaurant,  you will be interested in this.    I have occasionally heard from our customers that one of the issues they run up against is a server forgetting to close a table before their shift ends.  Now, the server collects the money but leaves that table on hold.  

This can throw a wrench in closing out the servers and reconciling the end of day paperwork.  

After thinking about this, our development guys decided to work on a new way of preventing this from happening.  


There is now a new feature in SP-1 that will allow you to prompt a server during clock out if they have tickets that have been left on hold.  This message will appear when you attempt to clock out.  





If you have a security level applied, a password will be required to select the “No Clock-Out” button.




Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371

Posted in Order Entry, POS Features, Uncategorized Tagged with: , ,

Mar
08
2011
March 8th, 2011 by ssadmin
Are you tracking labor cost?

After one of the last trade shows, I came away realizing that there are a number of people that don’t use our Employee Time feature.  I’m not sure what the thought is here as it is INCREDIBLY easy to track the employee time keeping in SP-1!

Once you have employees clocked in SP-1 starts tracking the time for each employee.  If you take the time to enter the wage per employee, then SP-1 is also tracking your labor cost!

Labor cost is automatically reported on your BSR (Business Summary Recap), Dashboard, as well as being reported on the MobileDash.  Having these numbers available to you are very important in controlling your costs on a regular basis.

One note, we do find people that are not tracking their salaried employees because they don’t clock in / out.  We have the ability to enter the daily salary of those employees in one spot so that it is reported with our labor percentages!  This can be found in Reports | Reports Setup: 1

Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371

Posted in Order Entry, Reporting, Uncategorized Tagged with: ,

Mar
01
2011
March 1st, 2011 by ssadmin
How Order Types Work


Order types are an interesting concept in SP-1.  Basically they give you the ability to assign a station to the type of order that will normally be accepted on that station.

This really comes in handy in environments with multiple stations.   For example, in a typical shop you may have:

















In this scenario, you have two stations for the front counter and two stations that are used to take phone orders.  By using a default order type we can help speed that service.  So, the phone stations would automatically be set to show the caller id or phone number screen and at the end of the order the type would be pre-set to “Pickup” or “Delivery” (depending on the type of business).    The order type can be changed on the fly as well.









Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371

Posted in Delivery, Order Entry, POS Features, Uncategorized Tagged with: ,

← Previous Article
Next Articles »