Engineer your POS system so that it mimics your menu. It sounds obvious, but so many restaurants are missing out on this trick.

In your POS, you should organize and present each food item from your inventory, including modifiers, in the same order as it appears on the menu. This way, your employees can handle conversational ordering - meaning, they can take orders in the same way that customers reel them off. Say a customer wants the cheeseburger, but please skip the ketchup, add lots of onions, and make the fries double. You know what – add some extra cheese to the burger. Your employee can instantly record it on the POS from the same view– no need to ask the guest to stop or repeat the order.

You can also set up different menus, depending on the shift or on what you offer in your restaurant. So, for example in the morning, when customers are ordering from the breakfast menu, your servers will see the breakfast menu items by default. By only seeing the menu items that are currently available they can flip quicker among the options, and upsell more, because they see the correct upsell items on their POS.

An average breakfast menu can include dozens of dishes, many of which are quite similar. Two scrambled eggs with bacon and fries. Three scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, and fries or potatoes.

If you list all the menu options as separate items on the POS, you’ll end up with an extremely long list. But that’s what too many restaurants still do. So, if a customer orders a dish, and their friend orders the very same dish, but with extra bacon, these are registered as two different dishes, with separate entries on the POS.

This kind of setup has several serious drawbacks for your business:

Ordering is slower. Your front-of-house staff has to wade through a long list of often similar options, and make sure they tap the correct one. It’s time consuming, and there’s the real risk of selecting the wrong dish.

• Reconciliation is difficult and time consuming. If you have ten separate dishes that include sausage and twenty that include fries on your menu, you’ll have to reconcile multiple dishes separately to the same item. That’s going to add a few hours – or days – to your reporting.
• Menu management becomes complicated. How can you optimize your menu if you don’t have a clear overview of what dishes sell best? If any variation on a plate – say, adding an egg to the omelet, or swapping the regular fries for sweet potato ones – causes it to be registered as a whole other dish, you can’t track how many guests are modifying your plates, and in which ways.
• You can’t accurately track inventory. If your servers need to go through a long list to add an extra like whipped cream, or avocado, chances are they will find simpler ways to do it, like writing it in the comments of the order, or just asking the chef to add extra bacon. This kind of behavior is common, and understandable in a busy restaurant. Unfortunately, the result is wrong inventory.

With LS Central for restaurants, you can set just a few dishes in your menu, and then use modifiers to add or remove ingredients. For example, you can record the basic breakfast plate with two eggs, two slices of bacon and medium fries. If a customer wants three slices of bacon and cheese on the fries, the server can simply add the extras to the plate.

Ordering is faster, but that’s just part of the benefit. By using fewer item numbers and modifiers, you can capture food costs more accurately, simplify inventory management, and align replenishment to actual use. Reporting and reconciliation are also easier to perform and more precise.

There are also benefits when it comes to menu engineering. When you know exactly how guests modify your dishes, you can better align your menu to your customers’ tastes and adjust or remove dishes that are unpopular. Having clear information on what sells will also help you price dishes and extras so that they deliver healthy returns.

Once you have your POS set up in the same way as your menu, you can make it even easier for your staff to flip between courses by color-coding items and categories.

For example, you could:

• Give each course a color code. The starters are blue, mains are purple, and desserts are pink.
• Color-code sections within your courses. Soups can be brown while salads can be green. Yellow for chicken. White for fish. And so on.
• Color code meal options. For example, a steakhouse may find it useful to label degrees of doneness for their steaks. Rare is dark red, medium rare is pink, well done is brown.
• Use a specific color for upcharge items, so staff can more easily turn over a higher profit – and inform guests of the charge if they need to.

With these kinds of color cues (which can be set as greyscale for those who are colorblind), your employees can find the right courses quicker, and clearly see all the options available for each menu item. It’ll make their job easier, and they’ll be able to provide guests with better and quicker service.

If you select a restaurant solution that can run the Point of Sale on self-service devices, such as a kiosk, ordering tablet, or a QR code you can increase both efficiency and guest satisfaction.

Self-service devices can speed up ordering and table turnover, as guests can order their meals when they are ready, without having to wait for a server to be free. This kind of automation is not meant to substitute employees. While guests are taking care of sending orders to the kitchen, your staff members have more time for higher value activities, from welcoming guests, to table delivery, to cross-selling activities such as drink service.