- Is it easy to buy?
Managers have the choice of either buying the software by paying an upfront fee
or paying a fixed monthly rental wherein the vendor offers cloud based access on
a pay as you go basis. The restaurant
POS software is customized and maintained in the cloud by the vendor who
is also responsible for bug fixing.
- Is it easy to use and operate?
Fidelio, one of the oldest restaurant POS software built on the DOS platform retained
its market leadership simply because it was easy to use and operate through a keyboard.
until mouse operated point and click
restaurant POS systems came into place, Fidelio was still being used
in the front end to input sales data as it saved time. barcode scanning, radio frequency
identification devices that beamed data on mobiles finally monopolized the market
in the favour of GUI based systems that could be operated through the mobile device.
- Is it scalable?
If your operation, becomes popular and needs to scale up with rising demand; can
your systems keep up? Should you need to operate multiple POS terminals at one time,
can the systems be able to record and retrieve the data required on demand.Will
it be able to handle the strain if more than hundred users from various point of
sale locations login at the same time during carnival season? Is there a possibility
of users getting forcibly logged out during high traffic periods as it happens in
booking engines of railways, airlines all over the world?
- Does it offer accurate sales data?
Reliablebarcode scanning that can enable quick checkouts coupled withup-to the minute
sales reports is what users want.Business owners, need to know through restaurant POS software, the exact amount of
inventory lying unused as most of the items are perishables. Daily purchase and
sales reports with zero margin of error are important for any business.
- What sort of analytics does it offer?
Business insights that can help them save their business is what users desire from
a strong software system. By offering information about all aspects of their business,
it becomes a mini-ERP of sorts and the more information, the software throws up,
the more users want.
- What level of automation does it offer?
Expectations are higher from a superior quality software product and all business
users want automated reports to eliminate human error. Reports generated by humans
are a drain on the organization in terms of resources and a good restaurant POS
software should be able to produce automated reports at pre-defined intervals.
- How is the reputation of the vendor
offering the software?
In B2B settings, high pressure salesmanship hardly works as enterprise buyers are
astute in terms of quality. And they will buy only from vendors that enjoy good
word -of-mouth publicity in their peer group. For vendors, such positive publicity
helps them to command higher prices for their product and get the best prices for
their consistent efforts in fine-tuning well-conceived software products.