What is the best POS system for a growing small business? 

Tailored to your business. A food truck, a café, a pub or a restaurant all want happy staff and happy customers, but the detail of how that’s achieved will vary in each setting… you can tailor an EPOS to fit your business model perfectly.
 

Build customer profiles.

Your EPOS can allow you to build customer profiles to help you hone a winning customer experience. 

• Capture customer contact information for marketing.

• View all past orders by customer for up-selling and cross-selling.

• Download customer lists to identify trends in purchasing history.

• Issue and track store credit by customer.

Encourage loyalty with promotions, discounts and bundles. 

Our EPOS allows you to offer your customers a range of discounts which you can set parameters for. Such as a minimum purchase, frequency of visit or purchases that form a linked bundle, such as a meal deal. 

Rewards can be a designated amount or a percentage of an order. 

Loyalty rewards are available once you look up the customer by phone, name or email, making it an easy step in the customer journey.

Promotions, discounts and bundles are great for bringing customers into your business, but complications at the register can turn good sentiment bad. With our EPOS system, promotions are easy to build, apply and track, including:

• Automatic discounts.

• Item and order level discounts.

• Fixed-price discounts.

• Combo deals.

• Discount stacking.

• Discounts by category.

• Discounts for loyalty programmes.

• Custom discounts.

Data-driven decision making.

Our EPOS system makes it possible for you to generate individual customer metrics, including days since last visit, number of visits plus total and average spend. The customer profile tool can be used for your loyalty programme.

Customer metrics are key to providing a next-level service.

By having easy access to customer history, your staff can consider that data at the checkout to cross-sell other products or make other product recommendations.

These kinds of personalised experiences can boost customer loyalty, growing your customer loyalty, return visits and word-of-mouth reputation building.
 

Create high-level to granular reports.

You can see transactional history, such as past orders, number of visits and total spend, pull a list of the top items you’re selling by gross revenue and generate reports to show top categories by revenue and top suppliers by sales. 

From these you can interpret and use this data to inform future decisions – such as inventory ordering, your business times to help with staff rotas and see what motivates your customers to buy.  

Your EPOS from Elavon can provide the following reports:

• Sales reports by product, category, tag, supplier or employee.

• Shift-based reporting.

• Sales or payment type summary.

• Time-based sales.

• Gift card use.

• Receipts and transactional reporting.

An accurate and balanced inventory is a basic requirement of keeping your business running efficiently. Frequent items being out of stock are a sure way to damage the customer experience and hit your customer loyalty hard.
 

So to avoid inventory chaos hitting your bottom line through margins and cash flow, our EPOS system supports effective inventory management. It allows you to spot discrepancies, deficits and opportunities to improvement.

Having your front of house and stocks and storeroom linked means you never risk over-selling and under delivering to your customers, while also making management of the inventory, as it impacts your menu, far easier for your staff.

Real-time visibility.

Monitoring, in real time, which items on your menu are gaining in popularity allows you to quickly pivot to capitalise on high-earning moments. 

Our EPOS system can help you identify top-selling items and those products you haven’t sold in a while.

It also allows you to use customer-buying histories to see who may best respond to promotions for overstocked items, based on their past preferences and purchases.

Automated assistance.

Inventory management tools on our EPOS system can do far more than track numbers. They can speed up inventory processing tasks, with features like automatic barcode generation and batch product editing. You can also:

• Set up products with multi-level variations.

• Create categories for your products.

• Bulk upload products into your inventory.

• Create and track gift card sales.

Clear visibility of your inventory means you can improve your product offerings and take advantage of trends and opportunities to drive sales.
 

Talk to us about the features and levels of packages available. Premium features include: 

• Inventory alerts.

• Automated purchase orders.

• Stock taking.

• Inventory logging.

When face with stacked discounts and multiple payment methods, an older POS system could trip you up when faced with so many nuances. A more robust EPOS system that’s tailored to your specific business needs has functions to handle the many ways you do business – and then some!
 

Flexible order management.

The ability to share and sync information is one of the biggest benefits of an integrated EPOS system. It can work across multiple sites and be accessed from anywhere.
 

Premium features include: 

• Order splitting and merging, making it easy to consolidate transactions to meet customers’ needs.

• Table layout.

• Assigning table positions to items.

• Coursing options.

• Automatic serice charge.

Online Integration.

The need to serve customers on the go means online ordering is increasing and is a trend that’s only expected to grow. 

Through a streamlined mobile-friendly website, you can offer the same menu you do in-house.
 

Once an online order is placed, your staff will receive an in-app notification, and from there, they can choose to accept or reject if necessary.
 

Online orders can be set up to complete bypass the front of house, if necessary, and go straight to the kitchen. 

And during busy times, you can pause online ordering to allow your staff to catch up or adjust fulfilment times.

Being able to let your customer pay how they want to can only enhance the customer experience. So you need to be able to handle anything from contactless payments to digital wallets - which are the fastest growing payment type, allowing your customers to pay using smart devices, such as their phone or watch. 
 

Contactless payments. 

In hospitality environments no-touch payments have become an industry standard and customer expectation. Through our EPOS system you instantly have a range of contactless payment options, from digital wallets in smart devices to cards than be waved or tapped near a card reader, as well as integrated into an online ordering site to sync with the rest of the system. Customers receipts are also flexible – printable, emailable or sent as a text.
 

Contactless dining. 

Online and mobile payments are an integral part of today’s business operations, providing opportunities that match your customers’ preferences. With QR codes on your tables, your customers can scan, order and pay at the table through a mobile-optimised webpage. 
 

Gift card management. 

Being able to offer your customers gift cards can boost revenue. Especially around key holidays that bring people together or can be celebrated with food – Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and anniversaries.
 

With our EPOS system, not only will you have access to gift card management but customer branding support for physical and digital cards as well. 
 

No additional or repeated fees for selling or using gift cards, so the transaction fee of loading the card is not duplicated when it is spent.

Gifts cards can be compatible for digital wallets for devices on both iOS and Android operating systems, along with automatic balance updates.  
 

You’re in control. Gift cards can be used once or reloaded, and a detailed history of all gift card sales and transactions is available for viewing within your EPOS system.
 

Returns, Refunds and exchanges. 

Refunds can be stressful, but tools within our EPOS system can greatly improve this experience for both your staff and your customer. 

The return or refund process can be expedited by setting rules on the forms of a refund. Transaction search tools also provide ways to make returns without a receipt, thanks to customer information filters such as name, phone number or order number.  

Partial and mixed payments.

Splitting the bill is a common ask, as is bringing tables of bills together. In the past, your team would have had to manually divide bills, which is both time consuming and prone to human error.  
 

Our EPOS system makes it easy to pay the bill in full, or offer bill-splitting by fraction, custom amount or by person. You even have the option to close one part of a tab while keeping the rest open if one member of the party needs to leave early.
 

Customers occasionally want to pay with more than one form of payment – like paying part in cash, part through gift card, credit card or even store credit. Our EPOS system makes that easy too. 

Managing your employees is critical to the successful growth of your business. However, it can quickly become a pain point for most business owners owing the time and effort required. Our EPOS system, fortunately, provides access to advanced staffing tools to help save time and reduce headaches. Some of the tools available include:

• Clock-in/clock-out feature with timesheet reporting.

• Multi-location employee support.

• Employee role management with multiple user types. 

• Tip and gratuity reporting.

• Employee sales by product reporting.

• Estimated wage reporting.

• Hourly rate tracking. 

Smart time-capturing tools.

As our EPOS system has cloud functionality, you can review timecards records from anywhere.

With timesheet reports, you can sort by staff member or period, which is helpful information to help you support employees who struggle with time management.

Payroll assistance. 

While your team is a major asset to your business, they are also one of the largest costs. Our EPOS system generates labour cost reports which measure gross hourly wage against revenue. This can help you find ways to tighten your labour budget to identify if you need to hire staff. It also makes it easier to set up weekly schedules and allows you to block off time for specific staff members.

By analysing sales reports and time clock histories, you can recognise employees who are excelling in your business and identify those who may need additional support. 

With functions and tools that help you to run your business more efficiently and keep all members of your team connected. 
 

Connecting your customers’ orders to the kitchen and bar.

Our EPOS can send and print orders in various locations. For instance, if a table of guests order food and drinks at the same time, their server can send the food orders to the kitchen, while the drinks order goes to the bar. Large restaurants could even send dessert or salad orders to the specific prep areas, and online orders can bypass the front of house and be printed directly in the kitchen.

The software also allows all members of the team to view order voids. This can be helpful if a customer changes their mind or if it needs to be updated or cancelled.

House accounts and open tabs.

If it fits your business model, house accounts and open tabs are great ways to appeal to repeat customers. 

A house account lets your customer carry a prepaid balance or open a tab to use for a day’s-long period before settling their bill.

You can set up parameters, so the account never goes into the negative and doesn’t exceed its balance limit. Our EPOS system comes with tools to create statements to send to customers and online payment options are also available.

Time-based discounts.

Happy hour or early bird dining will go a lot more smoothly with the automatic discount feature of our EPOS system, which takes a percentage off a product within a specified time slot. Simply enter in the start and end times for discounted drinks and dishes, then let our EPOS system do the work for you.