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Your Point of Sale (POS) terminal is the epicenter of your restaurant. With the days of analogue, hand-written checks steadily fading away, it’s easy to look at your POS and wonder how anyone ever got by without one.
POS benefits at first glance are without a doubt impressive. Your POS system reduces ordering errors, increases front-of-house and back-of-house efficiency, and helps you control inventory. It’s probably the most-touched item in your restaurant! Your POS is a reliable tool that helps make everyone’s jobs easier, and while it seems like the ultimate solution, there may be some areas where it needs a bit of a boost.
In this case, we’re talking about scheduling. Some POS systems offer a built-in employee schedule builder. At first glance, it seems like a logical functionality, right? You already run all orders, shift clock-ins and outs, and checks through your POS, so why not use it as your scheduler, too?
How Scheduling Software Improves Your POS Benefits
It’s time to give your POS a break. To build smart schedules in minutes, you’ll want to look beyond the scheduler that’s been built into it.
Here are three ways that adding a separate web- and mobile-based scheduling tool like 7shifts to your restaurant’s tech arsenal can give you the upper hand on building schedules, managing employee availability, keeping your staff happy, and keeping your bottom line at top of mind.
Swap the Paper Trail for Pixels
When you use a stand-alone scheduling tool, you’ll no longer have to sift through details from texts, phone calls, and sticky notes, then manually type the info into your POS terminal. Instead, everything you’ll need to build smart schedules will be right there within the cloud-based software, automatically collected from your staff. Here are a few of the ways that restaurant scheduling software like 7shifts will lighten your load:
- All employee availability info will be in one place. Employee availability is submitted via the free mobile app and is ready for when you want to build your schedule. All the hours and requests will automatically help shape your schedule, so you’ll never have to guess about availability again. Plus, you’ll receive notifications when staff members submit availability changes, and you can easily approve or decline time-off requests via web or mobile.
- Go digital and save a tree! With a standalone scheduling software system like 7shifts, you won’t have to print out another schedule ever again. As soon as you publish a new schedule, it’s sent directly to your employees’ mobile devices. Your entire team will always have the up-to-the-moment version of the week’s schedule right within reach.
- To keep operations flowing smoothly, your managers need to communicate. Traditionally, these exchanges happen in a binder, a notebook, or on a note left for the next shift’s manager. Why not keep everything together in a secure place? 7shifts has it covered with its customizable Manager Log Book. Managers can make shift notes, flag important details, and share follow-up tasks via mobile & web. As soon as a log entry is made, all managers will be notified and able to reply and collaborate. And, because it’s cloud-based, your log book’s searchable history is always available on the web or mobile.
Work Wherever You Are
POS-based scheduling can keep you glued to the terminal when it’s time to build your weekly schedule. When you move to a solution with web- and mobile-friendly backends, you’ll be able to work where you wish.
- With 7shifts, you can review schedule changes, shift trades, shift replacements, and more on the go. And when you can create a schedule in minutes—not hours—you’ll have more time to spend on the restaurant floor supporting your team and being available for customers.
- With the 7shifts web and Mobile Dashboard, you’ll be able to track sales and labor performance from your mobile device, making restaurant management a pocket-sized task. You’ll have access to hourly sales & labor, pulled directly from your POS or free 7punches time-clock. Armed with information that’s unique to your restaurant’s performance, you’ll be ready to make better business decisions, spot variances, make schedule-adjustment opportunities, and quickly identify trends in your sales and labor that will help you reduce your labor costs.
Schedule Smart and Save
Many schedulers that come with POS systems don’t offer the range of data you’d hope for when you want to build the best schedule possible. Imagine the simplicity of building a schedule with all your targets, budgets, and forecasts right there and ready to reference. Luckily, it can be so. With data integrations and at-a-glance performance information, you won’t have to head into a scheduling session with only your best guess to guide you.
- The benefit to using a scheduling product like 7shifts is that it works with leading restaurant POS systems including Toast, Touchbistro, Upserve, and Square. Check out our ever-growing list of integrated partners, and if you use one of them, learn about the benefits of integrating! Integrations allow our app to use your restaurant’s data about past and current sales and labor to create informed, accurate, and helpful projections. You’ll also be able to schedule smarter with the information drawn from your restaurant’s performance.
- Stop starting from scratch! No more staring at a POS scheduler’s blank screen every time a schedule is due. With 7shifts, your completed schedule is literally a click away. When you create templates that suit your restaurant’s needs and employee availability, our auto-scheduling function will populate a data-informed schedule in seconds. You’ll reduce your time spent scheduling by 80% and you’ll feel confident in the result.
- Stay informed and prepared. No more wondering about who made a change to a shift—7shifts uses audit logs to track when someone makes a schedule adjustment. 7shifts also pulls in weather data (watch your POS scheduler do that!) to help you create more accurate schedules for upcoming days. Finally, since every schedule is archived within 7shifts, you’ll always be able to review all your past schedules, which helps you stay in compliance with labor laws that require a backlog of schedules to be kept on file for certain periods of time.
Point of Sale systems are fantastic at what they do. They track sales, cash flow, inventory, and help your team upsell. They keep your servers and kitchen staff connected. But, when it comes to the ability to offer data that can shape optimized schedules, they can be easily outpaced by software specifically dedicated to the task.
With your POS system running alongside—or even integrated with—7shifts, you’ll always be guided by data that will create schedules, and you’ll always have proper coverage for every shift. Learn more about what 7shifts can do to make every schedule your best schedule. Start your free trial today.
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