A new year is upon us. Restaurant owners should take this as an opportunity for a fresh start—to reinvent their cash management processes in order to improve efficiency and productivity.
The better your cash management, the better your restaurant. It’s 2016—there’s no reason to be using archaic devices and machines or handling cash manually. It’s time to implement cash management solutions. When you do, you’ll not only find yourself with greater accuracy, more productive employees, and reduced losses, but you’ll also improve customer service, which is, of course, your top priority. Cash management solutions can help you to provide quicker, more convenient, and more accurate service to your customers, which will lead to a boost in profits.
Use these top three solutions to get started on the road to a better restaurant.
1. Upgraded POS System
Your waiters depend on your POS system, so it needs to be reliable. If you purchased your system years ago, it’s time for an update. Getting an upgraded, top-of-the-line POS system can improve order accuracy to reduce waste, increase employee productivity and save time, reduce training costs, and provide better customer service.
Choose a point-of-sales system that offers easy-to-use and up-to-date technology, intuitive software, entry-of-cash deposits and shift settlement options, and integrated payment processing. When you upgrade your system, you’ll make it easier and faster for customers to pay, make it simpler for your waiters to learn the system, and spend less time on cash handling.
2. Bill and Coin Sorters
Even though credit and debit are popular payment options, customers still often prefer to pay with cash so you likely handle a lot of money every day. Though you won’t need to pay fees to accept cash, you’ll actually spend more money for this payment option due to increased risks, wasted time, and higher labour costs.
Counting and sorting all of the cash you’ve received throughout the day can be tedious and time consuming. In addition, it can also be risky. Having your employees manually counting and sorting your money can make you vulnerable to internal theft. It can also lead to a higher rate of human error. It’s easy to forget to count one bill, to transpose numbers during reporting, or to mistake a twenty dollar bill for a ten.
Implementing cash sorters can eliminate these risks and losses as well as reduce wasted time. The machines can do the work at lightning speed—sorting your bills and coins by denomination all the while counting them with guaranteed accuracy. Plus, your employees won’t have the opportunity to be alone with your money in order to steal from you. You can reduce your labour costs, reduce your shrink rate, and keep more money in your pockets. What’s not to love?
3. Currency Recycling
Perhaps the most exciting of all the cash management solutions, cash recycling is the way of the future for restaurants that handle a lot of money on a daily basis. A cash recycler is a complex all-in-one machine that does it all—it automatically accepts and dispenses floats and cash for transactions, it stores your money, it authenticates bills to prevent you from accepting fraudulent cash, and it even reconciles your day’s sales.
Under-the-counter cash recyclers integrate into your POS ensuring total accuracy. Customers paying cash simply place their notes and/or coins into the recycler and their change is quickly dispensed freeing up your employees to package up the food ordered and move your lines faster. In many cases you can eliminate your food picker as your employee no longer needs to touch the cash they can now become both the order taker and the food gatherer.
With a cash recycler, you’ll always have enough cash on hand so you won’t have to worry about running low and having to perform a vault transaction. Since it safely stores your cash, you also won’t have to worry about till maximums putting you at risk of robbery. Your employees will also have minimal contact with your cash and accountability will be greatly increased.
You’ll benefit from a cash recycling system as it allows for centralized cash management, meaning that all of your money will be controlled in one place for efficient and streamlined processes.
