Your point of sale system is a workhorse when it comes to ringing up transactions, but it can be put to equally productive use for the purchase of inventory and ingredients from suppliers.

Any point of sale solution worth its “salt”, so to speak, will allow you to stop generating paper purchase orders and instead create electronic documents that may be emailed to suppliers directly from the software. Suppliers then receive the orders on a timely basis, pushing the envelope in terms of on-time shipment.

A good point of sale program will also allow you to base and automatically produce purchase orders in line with user-defined minimum and maximum “on-hand” inventory and ingredient quantities, which can be determined through reviews of historical point of sale information and adjusted in accordance with sales trends and/or altered vendor/supplier lead times. You’re then prevented from over-ordering and incurring unnecessary expenditures, as well as from being forced to tell customers that the product or menu item they want is unavailable because of a stock or ingredient shortage.

pcAmerica’s Cash Register Express and Restaurant Pro Express point of sale solutions have been enhanced to include supplier email capabilities; Cash Register Express also features a “Quick Receive” screen for processing orders arriving at the store, and both solutions have inventory monitoring capabilities that enhance the purchasing process.

Visit www.pcamerica.com to learn more.