It is undeniable how much a point of sale can benefit your business. But if you’re in hospitality, then there are several added expectations of a POS. For example, you need to manage customers in different locations across the floor plan. This is in addition to navigating multiple dynamic carts whose lifetime till checkout is much longer than the average retail cart. The solution is a table layout embedded in the POS!
The Status Quo
Traditionally, servers at hospitality businesses use one of two options. The business might use a POS with a “hold” feature that allows them to keep a cart open whilst managing another one. Or, more commonly at restaurants, they keep the physical paper of the order until the customer decides to check out. Then, the checkout happens in the same way as retail businesses.
Now, an increasing number of hospitality business owners opt for table layout programs. These are visual maps of the floorplan of a given business with its tables showing a running total. A table layout program increases efficiency as the floor plan on-screen allows the server to click the table and add to its total in a fast and easy manner. This increase in efficiency leads to an increase in profit, as there is far less of a chance of calculation errors, or of misattribution of products. Layout programs may operate separately from the POS. Or, such as the case in Countr POS, they are integrated as a feature in the POS itself.
Countr’s Table Layout
All there is to do as a Countr client is to purchase the table layout extension, and then add a table layout in the dashboard of your account. And you’re good to go! After the floor plan layout is saved on the POS, servers have a variety of new features enabled on the POS. They can rename each table to a memorable name. They can merge tables if needed, and they can manage each cart individually in a dynamic manner. Once the table is ready to checkout, it’s a one-click step to produce a receipt or a payment prompt. If the server is also the host, then they can quickly glance at the color-coded layout to see which tables are available. With all of these options, table layout is a feature that’s beneficial to everyone involved in the experience!
Check out Countr’s tutorial on creating a table layout for more information!