A POS system is the central command center for your restaurant, taking on various tasks like accepting orders, monitoring payments, managing inventory, and creating reports. Choosing the right restaurant POS system is critical to success in today’s omni-channel world.
But we know the grind never ends in the restaurant business! Even after purchasing the fundamental POS hardware and software, it's important to think about integrating additional solutions to improve how your business operates.
What is a POS integration?
A third-party POS integration is a solution designed to seamlessly connect your current restaurant POS system with another piece of software in your restaurant’s tech stack. This means extending the power and core functionality of your system to do more with more.
Integrations empower your POS to gather and exchange data through links with other systems. By integrating other software with your POS, you essentially create a comprehensive restaurant management system that oversees all aspects of your business from a single location.
In this post, we’ll explore the essential POS integrations that every restaurant owner should consider today. Once you’ve got a hang of the fundamental integrations and their benefits, you can make the best decision on which solutions will fit your restaurant's unique needs!
5 fundamental POS integrations for restaurants
Online Ordering and Delivery
Integrating your POS system with online ordering platforms and delivery services, such as Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash, helps your restaurant effectively manage and optimize takeout and delivery orders directly from one POS system. That way, you can tap into the growing demand for convenient food delivery, expand your customer base, and increase overall revenue. Already ahead of delivery? Perfect.
If you’re doing it without an order aggregator, you may be manually accepting orders from each of the delivery services’ individual tablets. To simplify your operations, consider adding an order aggregator to make life easier for you and your staff.
Otter's restaurant order management brings together orders from multiple delivery apps and centralizes them in a single, user-friendly tablet that can seamlessly integrate with your POS to send all your orders straight to the kitchen. You’ll be able to efficiently manage all your online and offline orders, reducing errors and streamlining the entire order fulfillment process.
Accounting Software
Bookkeeping can be a crunch, in a not so delicious way. Integrating accounting software with your POS streamlines financial record-keeping, reduces manual data entry, and minimizes errors. Accurate sales, expense, and tax tracking is also vital when it comes to making decisions for your restaurant, not to mention ensuring you’re complying with local financial regulations. If it sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is, and you know the pain!
Otter provides accounting for restaurants as a comprehensive solution that syncs directly with your restaurant POS to provide in-depth insights into cash flow, expenses, adjustments, delivery app payouts, and promotional spending patterns. Armed with these key data points, restaurant operators like you can make better, data-driven decisions to drive growth.
Menu Management
Nothing makes a first impression like a well-designed menu with mouthwatering images and descriptions. Integrating a menu management solution into your POS system opens the door for you to update your menu easily across channels. This helps your restaurant menus remain dynamic, appealing, and responsive to market trends, customer preferences, pricing changes, and inventory.
Otter’s Menu Management tool allows restaurant owners to make menu updates, 86 items, change prices, and more for any brand or location straight from their POS. The convenience of these features shaves time off the tedious task of menu updates, allowing you to focus instead on what you love doing – making delicious food and keeping customers happy.
Online Ordering (Direct-to-consumer delivery)
An increasing number of restaurant owners today prefer to receive orders directly from eaters rather than through third-party delivery apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash. This comes from the motivation to better support customers, while saving on costly commission fees. The good news is, customers actually prefer ordering directly from a restaurant’s own site, too!
This is where direct ordering integrations, such as Otter’s Online Ordering, come in. With direct online ordering, customers can place orders through your restaurant's website or app, bypassing the need for third-party platforms. This not only reduces costs for both the restaurant and the customer by eliminating commission fees, but also fosters a more direct connection. Think better service for your customers and increased loyalty for your restaurant – good things all around.
Analytics and Reporting
It’s become increasingly difficult for restaurants to find a source-of-truth for their performance data, especially now that most are balancing a busy dine-in, takeout, and delivery business. With this vast, fractured data, you could be missing operational optimizations that help increase orders and revenue. While manually analyzing data works in theory, it’s time-consuming and runs the inevitable risk of returning errors. Plus, getting lost in spreadsheets is probably the last thing you want to be doing.
Integrating a complete analytics solution straight into your restaurant POS system can uncover hidden challenges and new opportunities. With insightful data that actually makes sense across your restaurant metrics, you have a much higher chance of increasing profitability.
Otter Analytics is a powerful restaurant analytics software tool that integrates directly with your restaurant’s POS system and is designed to help restaurant owners make data-driven decisions. It provides a complete picture of sales, operations, finances, and marketing performance by hour, day, location, and more. With clean, easy-to-understand dashboards, you’ll be on your way to identifying performance patterns and minimizing issues like refunds and order errors in no time.
Seamless integration with Otter POS
As restaurant operations become more complex and diverse, having a powerful and flexible POS system is more important than ever. Otter POS offers seamless integration with top POS partners across online ordering, accounting, menu management, direct orders, analytics, reporting and more. If you’re looking to upgrade your tech stack for long-term success in an increasingly competitive restaurant world, experience the full potential of these integrations and more with Otter POS.
