January 26th, 2016 by Mike Spence

.A great Point of Sale system is one of the most important pieces of equipment you will buy for your location.  Think about this – Almost zero national chains skip POS when opening a new location.  Starbucks, Peets, Caribou, and more all have point of sale systems in their stores.

 

Why?  I can tell you it’s not because they just enjoy spending money!  It’s because they see the proven value of a good POS system when opening a coffee shop.

Opening a coffee shop

Opening a coffee shop

Look at some of the points that POS can help with:

Labor – keeping your labor costs under control is one of the biggest ways to save money.  SP-1 for Coffee with help you stop early clock-ins.  An extra 10 minutes at $10 an hour is $1.66 a shift.  Multiple that by a couple shifts a week per employee and you could be paying $1,500 – $3,000 a year in extra wages.  Take a deeper look and see how labor costs can be adjusted by viewing your on the fly labor percent.

Zero Training – SP-1 will make taking orders in your coffee shop easy.  This is a bit harder to quantify but easy means less mistakes.  Because the point of sale has all the prices set, employees simply make less errors.  This helps you and the customer.  Remember consistency is important in your pricing. If 10% of your orders are off by $.50, that is a huge amount a year. Easy means

Gift & Loyalty – This is the number one way to help increase customer retention.  Gift and prepaid cards help bring cash in the door and increase average dollar per ticket totals. Customer reward programs are proven to be effective when handled right.  We have seen customers use the gift & loyalty program to reduce credit card charges as well as decrease the speed of service.

Look & Feel – A cash register is not cool. Customers don’t trust them and they make your shop look inefficient and not quirky.  There are all different types of equipment available for you to use.  Wall mount options as well as counter options are available.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Gift Cards, Order Entry, POS Features Tagged with: , , , , , ,

January 2nd, 2015 by Mike Spence

Over the years we have been asked about doing an employee scheduling program.  It’s not that we don’t think scheduling is important, it’s just that something has always taken precedence.   Finally, we have been able to find a development spot to get this done!   This is a FREE upgrade for any of our customers that are current on a support plan.

Schedules can be set by employee for the current week and the next week.  The schedules are checked for time overlaps as well as potential overtime issues.    Once the schedule is in, it can easily be duplicated for the next week.  A number of new reports have been added that allow for printing of master schedules, individual schedules and blank schedules.

Once your employees are setup on the schedules, SP-1 will stop them from clocking in before their scheduled clock in time!   You can set the grace period for this action in SP-1.

For Example:  Let’s say the grace period is set to 10 minutes.  Sue is on the schedule from 8am to 1pm.  She arrives at 7:30am and starts to chat with the fellow employees and hang out.  Prior to the scheduling system, Sue could clock in and waste 10-30 minutes of payroll.

Now, when Sue clocks in, the system will ask for a manager password if she is more than ten minutes early!

Clocking in with scheduling.

Clocking in with scheduling.

 

 

Posted in Employees, Order Entry Tagged with: