If you’re like most restaurant operators, you’re constantly thinking about ways to cut costs—even with the recession’s ugly head beginning to retreat. Leveraging the advanced, yet easy-to-use features of a comprehensive restaurant POS system like pcAmerica’s Restaurant Pro Express can yield significant savings—in more areas than one.

Let’s start with ingredients. Ingredient tracking features seen on some restaurant POS systems allow orders to be based on previous usage, rather than on estimates alone. This eliminates over-purchasing and the subsequent waste of otherwise good ingredients. Recipe configuration tools allow operators to create recipes for individual menu items; each recipe includes a list of ingredients and the specific quantity of each ingredient used to prepare that item. Reports that show the total overall usage of each ingredient over a particular date range can be generated, too. For example, you might produce a report that indicates how many pounds of beef, chicken, fish, vegetables or the like were utilized on a given weekend day. The report can then become the basis of a more accurate order for the same day of the following weekend.

Restaurant POS software is also being used to curb labor expenditures. With a good system in place, you can monitor servers’ sales dollar per labor hour, in tandem with table turnover, to determine whether staffing levels are sufficient, but not excessive. Integrated time clocks, labor scheduling tools and associated reporting features, such as those found on Restaurant Pro Express, provides a great snapshot of restaurant labor costs.

For more information on using Restaurant Pro Express as a cost-cutting tool, contact pcAmerica.