11th September, 2019
It may not seem like it’s that important, but for restaurant owners, integrating key systems like POS and accounting means better control over your business and better able to chart a course to growth.
At its heart, hospitality is a people industry; it is fuelled by deep and meaningful interactions, flavoured by empathy, consideration and care.
Hospitality people are ‘people-people’; defined by their attention to detail in customer service and human engagement.
They’re not always ‘numbers people’ and that fact has caught many restaurateurs out in the past.
Fewer things glaze eyes over faster than talking with accountants and detailing the numbers-driven world of Profit and Loss Statements, breaking the world down into the hard reality of profit margins.
Anything that makes that world easier to understand, which makes that world less painful to view and limits the amount of time needed to spend tapping numbers into a computer, the better.
READ: 20 practical tips for increasing restaurant efficiency
And that’s the power of integrating accounting software with your POS.
Through a click of a button, two powerful software packages integrate into one up-to-date set of numbers, one point for data entry, and one comprehensive back office that empowers operational decision-making like never before.
Too good to be true?
Here are five benefits from integrating accounting software with your POS:
By integrating accounting software with the POS, you now have one powerful tool to draw reports from, and only one place to enter data into. An average café and restaurant processes thousands of invoices a year, and no manager or owner has time to do that data entry twice.
Through integration, every stakeholder, from owners to management to accountants to key staff, are talking to information produced from the same place.
The opportunity for data entry errors is literally halved, and the time saved is significant.
Through cloud-based accounting software integration, the same information is being viewed by multiple people in different locations via different devices.
Integrating accounting software with POS allows invoices for goods received (food for the kitchen or beverages for the bar) to be entered directly into your POS and be immediately reflected in your accounting software. Not only is this super-efficient, saving time and removing the need for out of hours bookkeeping, it provides clarity and transparency on invoices that are owed, and when they are due, and ensures that purchasing falls within a budget.
It allows for efficient management of credit notes for items that are unavailable from suppliers, for tracking what has been ordered from whom, and comparison between items that have been ordered and items that have been supplied, making it easier to identify product substitutions.
It also updates your inventory count and prevents over-ordering.
Because the cost of individual menu items can be broken down into their ingredient and recipes costs using Kounta’s Inventory add-on, and invoices can be entered into the POS upon receiving goods, a perpetual inventory (an inventory that is on-going) can be calculated at any time. This allows your second major cost, Cost Of Goods Sold (COGS), to be monitored at the click of a button.
In hospitality we see and feel the expenses of wages and purchasing every week; we write rosters, process payroll with our accounting software, and pay invoices, but our overheads (all the other expenses) are tricky. What can assume what our overheads will be based upon what they were last year (we access this from our accounting software’s Profit and Loss report) as a percentage of revenue, but key expenses like ‘power’ seem to continuously go up, and lease agreements often include an annual increase.
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Why are overheads so important? Because they, with labour and COGS, determine the pricing of every menu item. If overheads are increasing in real-time (when compared to what they were last year), but no other changes have taken place to offset the increases, Profit is being lost.
By integrating POS with our accounting software, every time we receive a bill and update it in our accounting software, we can take a profit ‘snapshot’ and understand if the assumptions that went into pricing the menu and designing the service are correct or need to be adjusted. This is crucial because it provides us with the information we need to monitor our ongoing profitability.
It is an unfortunate truth in Hospitality that misadventure happens; money may be stolen, days takings under-banked, or items are given away for free during service. Hospitality is a very dynamic and labour-intensive industry, and no manager or owner can be there keeping an eye on everything every day.
By integrating accounting software and POS transactions can be tracked in real-time and day takings logged and matched with bank deposits to dramatically reduce the opportunity for money to go missing.
It provides complete transparency for managers and owners, even when they are not physically in the business.
One of the most difficult things about hospitality is that the revenue that is taken through the tills and the expenses that are paid happen at different times.
The money taken in peak season may even be required to pay for some of the expenses incurred in winter’s slow trading months.
Wages are paid the week later than when the money was taken, when payroll is processed, PAYG, super contributions and workers compensation are paid throughout the year, GST is paid quarterly, power bills come every three months and invoices from bakery to meats and seafood, to wines and spirits all happen at different times.
Knowing the difference between the money that is being taken through the tills, and physically sitting in the bank, and the actual profit that the business has earned on top of all its expenses is essential to business survival. By integrating accounting software and POS, a business has much greater clarity over the liabilities it owes and allows for effective cash flow management; the very life-blood of business.
Successful hospitality management means making good business decisions in real-time. In the frenetic world of hospitality, the clarity gained by integrating accounting software and POS is one of the most powerful things a business can do to maximise its profitability and ensure its ongoing success.
Want to more about integrating POS with your online accounting software? Find out how Kounta can revolutionise your hospitality business today.