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The 4 Best Restaurant POS Systems

There are many POS systems out there, but it can be difficult to find which ones work best for your restaurant and which integrate with QuickBooks well.

And as a restaurant owner, it's one of the most important decisions you can make.

We have even started seeing contactless ordering with some of the systems. So, the order can get pretty large when it comes to building something seamless that reports to your bookkeeping software in a way that can be understood.

A simple 5-step guide to restaurant bookkeeping can help you understand exactly what to expect when building out your complete system, but for now, we'll focus on just the POS system.

What to think about when choosing the best restaurant POS system

You'll have a lot of things to think about when selecting a POS system for your restaurant, but the most important is whether it will make your life easier or harder when it comes to managing your business. The last thing you need is one more thing to do, right?

To ensure your and your team's success, you'll also have to pay attention to the system's hardware requirements. These include cash drawers, tablets, monitors, and card readers. 

Most POS companies are up-to-speed on making just about any hardware requirements able to be successful for you. So here are the last considerations that they don't do a good job of expressing:

1) Inventory and Product Management

Good inventory management software is hard to come by, and putting together a winning system in the inventory department is a completely separate difficulty.

The inventory system in QuickBooks Online does not do an amazing job of being flexible for the many different items you'll have to track and for monitoring food costs.

Read this article to understand how to rock your inventory.

2) Payment Processing.

To be successful in the restaurant industry, you'll need to accept credit and debit cards, especially if you're going to integrate contactless ordering.

You may even consider giving your wait staff a way to take orders at the table directly using tablets. If you haven't thought of that already, here's another idea.

Before making the ultimate decision in your POS system, make sure that the cards you're able to accept are payment methods that are allowable in the system.

3) Seamlessly Reports to your Bookkeeping Software

Why give yourself another headache? One of the things we commonly see within the restaurant industry is that systems are built well but don't communicate with accounting software in a way that makes sense.

The inventory items are off, or the daily sales summary isn't recorded properly to match the merchant service deposits made into your bank account.

When you're living on tight margins, you cannot afford to overlook expenses, losses, or other items that can make your margins look different than they actually are.

4 Amazing Restaurant POS Systems

We've spent a lot of time working in the restaurant industry and have found several that we'd like to consider the best restaurant POS systems.

Our top picks address the 3 additional points made above that aren't necessarily handled well by other restaurant POS systems.

Not only that, but they all integrate with QuickBooks Online! Here they are:

1. Toast POS

2. Lightspeed POS

3. Shopkeep

4. Square

restaurant POS system

1. Toast POS

The Good

Toast is one of our clients' most used POS systems, and it works really well. Their POS system was specifically designed to integrate with restaurants.

Toast is a very capable point-of-sale system that tracks inventory, manages waitstaff time, manages payroll, communicates with the kitchen, offers loyalty programs for your best customers, and offers processing and mobile ordering for more high-tech systems.

Toast is also scalable. If you plan to open a new restaurant, the system can track all expenses, costs, and revenue by location

A unique feature is that, unlike retail orders, every customer will have preferences in how they want their item made. Toast allows you to create an order without onions and enables the waitstaff to tell the cooking staff how a customer wants their steak cooked.

With increased food delivery service requests, the Toast Delivery Services program has also been a big hit. Customers can order food for delivery directly from you, and by using this program, you avoid some of the larger fees charged through third-party apps.

If you're worried about the amount of time you'll have to spend training new employees on the new system, there is Learn with Toast. It's a training portal that can give your new employees a way to reference issues as they come across them and keep one more task out of your hands.

Here's a big one: Toast helps you determine your pricing strategies.

One of the biggest mistakes we see restaurant owners make is that their vendors will increase the price of an item, and they won't adjust their prices accordingly. With data allowing you to see what is costing you the most, you can adjust your pricing strategy to make it work for you.

Could Be Better

Toast now has multiple payment options that can more closely fit where you are in your restaurant's lifecycle, from a starter package for single-location restaurants that costs you nothing upfront to a customized option for large restaurants or chains that need something created just for them. 

The payment processing fee covers all costs, meaning Toast only gets paid when you do at a rate of 2.99% + 15¢ per transaction on the Starter plan. The fees vary depending on the plan and type of transaction. 

If you need the features in Toast, make sure that you're not overlooking another service because it's more expensive than the basic version.

They also require that you use them as your payment processor. This may feel a little binding, but their pricing remains very competitive with other payment processing agents and gives you one last vendor to manage.

 

2. Lightspeed POS

The Good

Lightspeed has built two separate POS systems: one for restaurants and the other for retailers.

This comes in handy as many software programs that are built as "software for all" have heavy advantages and disadvantages and often become so large that they are exhausting to use.

The inventory system allows you to automatically order stock from your vendors. Although you might want to keep ordering some expensive items yourself, this can at least help minimize the headache that can come with ordering very basic items.

Lightspeed's menu creation couldn't be simpler. It has a simplistic design and a feature to automatically change the menu by time, which can help keep the staff from accidentally ordering items from the kitchen that are no longer available, like breakfast items after lunch has already started to be served.

You can also make changes to item pricing for deliveries versus takeout and in-house orders.

Raw product management. Although raw product levels do not usually have a heavy impact on costs, managing them can help you monitor your food costs even tighter. The system will automatically update your inventory as items are ordered.

Could Be Better

Although Lightspeed offers an inventory management tool, it's not amazing. It works and can be used, but it's not an incredibly robust system. It's very basic and doesn't offer many options to customize to your needs.

This is certainly not the cheapest option on our list. However, with built-in sales process guides, you might be able to make up the difference by helping your wait staff increase your average ticket price.

 

Need help deciding which POS system works best for your restaurant?

Schedule a free analysis and we'll help you choose.

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3. Shopkeep

The Good

Shopkeep caters to a bunch of different businesses, especially small businesses. They do a great job of ensuring that small businesses can get a great system but don't have to spend every penny they have.

The inventory management process has been very mindful of creating something that works for small businesses.

This software's builder prioritized simplicity, and it's very intuitive. This means you shouldn't have to spend a lot of time training someone new on the system.

For restaurant owners, you can actually build items in the inventory management system to track raw goods and create builds of different menu items, allowing the owner to track and manage expenses more effectively.

With specific customer tracking, the owner can understand who their best clientele are and track purchases to make suggestions for the future.

This software integrates really well with QuickBooks, MailChimp, and even BigCommerce.

Could Be Better

The pricing strategy is not obvious. You have to call the company to get a quote. There is a great free solution for businesses that create less than $5000 worth of transactions a month, but it may take some time to speak with a sales rep to understand how much a business owner will have to pay.

Restaurants with an extremely high volume of sales may want to consider something else. This software was first built with retail in mind, so there may be some things you'd like to see in a successful restaurant that just isn't available.

The software was made to be utilized in only one location. Syncing locations up is possible, but there may be some hiccups along the way since it wasn't meant to do this.

 

4. Square

The Good

Square is extremely popular. One of the biggest reasons for this is that the software is free.

There are multiple pricing tiers You are charged 2.6% + .10¢ per card swipe, chip, or tap, but there's also no contract. For restaurants that have high volume and low tickets, this might be a method that ends up costing too much.

However, it is an advanced solution without additional fees.

It integrates with QuickBooks, Xero, WooCommerce, and even Magento. The applications that run within the software also continue to grow, meaning you can continue to add value to your payment system and better understand your business.

The ecosystem is one of the most valuable points of this particular POS system.

Square's offline mode offers great flexibility regarding where you can take your register. This is a great solution for mobile restaurants if you're traveling somewhere without WiFi service.

The free version also offers a great inventory management system. It might be worth testing before moving into a more complicated and expensive software service.

Could Be Better

As we've pointed out earlier, systems built to be the solution "for all" tend to have integration issues, but Square does have a separate version for restaurants.

This generally helps, but there are some additional features that should be seen that really aren't that strong.

There are many apps that can integrate into Square, and you can build a system that makes the most sense for you. However, that doesn't mean that all the apps will communicate together very effectively.

Conclusion

Although many other options are available, these are the ones we've found to be the best for restaurants specifically.

If you'd like to discuss the best way to set up your restaurant's POS system, feel free to fill out the contact form below. We'll be more than happy to help.

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