Six Ways to Automate Your Menu for Time Savings

Whether you operate a single restaurant, or a large chain with regional differences, automating these key functions in your POS menu can improve order-taking speed and accuracy, simplify administration, and improve customer service.

1. Automate Pricing Based on Customer Group or Time of Day

Your POS should allow you to create alternate prices that apply to specific customer groups (like sports teams, schools, or retirees), or on certain dates or times.
For example, you might use a Price Group to create a special price that is applied only in certain situations:

• It could be customer-based—to give special pricing to VIP customers, or members of an organization.
• Or it could be based on time and date—for happy hour pricing, or "Wing Wednesdays."

2. Automate Location-based Pricing

Chains may use master corporate menus to control food cost and brand consistency. By standardizing menu offerings, recipes, and portion size, a brand can:

• protect margins;
• deliver a more consistent product;
• prevent conflicts between online ordering PLU’s and individual store menus; and
• streamline IT operations.

In the latest release of SpeedLine point of sale, for instance, a corporate menu manager can use Store Groups to make prices, items, modifiers, value meals, coupons—any element of a menu—specific to individual locations or regions. So only the items that should be available at a location appear on the menu screens, and prices are always correct.

Pro Tip: After you’ve built a master menu, look at using the POS to distribute it to chain locations. For example, chain-wide menus built with SpeedLine can be pushed to the stores with SpeedLink Enterprise. Set the new menu to activate immediately, or on the date you choose. Store Groups will ensure that the new menu will be tailored to each location or region when it activates.

3. Automate 2 for 1 Pricing

A POS system designed for pizza will easily handle custom pricing models, including the automatic pricing of 2-for-1 and similar offers.

4. Automate Seasonal Offerings

In your POS system, set an expiration date on menu items, such as seasonal or promotional items that you want to make available to your customers for a limited time. When the offer is over, the button for the pumpkin pie or heart-shaped pizza simply disappears from the menu screens.

5. Automate Modifier Selection

One advanced POS function that helps increase order accuracy and train new employees is “enforced”  modifiers. These appear in pop-up windows if the order taker has forgotten to select an add-on or choice, like dressing for a salad, or crust flavor for a pizza.

6. Automate Coupons

If you have an extensive set of coupons, it can take some time for the order taker to locate the correct one in a sea of buttons. If your POS system supports the capability, set it to “auto discover” and display only the coupons that apply to the current order, for easy selection.

Some of these changes are small, and others may require a larger time investment to set up—but over time, automation can add up to big time savings!