A restaurant’s menu is its heart and soul. It is something that every customer interacts with and makes decisions based on what looks or sounds appealing. However, a menu needs to be more than just attractive. A smartly engineered restaurant menu is high on profits and also well-designed to tempt customers to order more. This is where the role of restaurant menu management software comes into the picture.
Restaurant Menu Management Software: The Features To Lookout For
Before we move ahead and apprehend the features you should be looking out in a restaurant menu management software, we need to understand what this software is all about.
A restaurant menu management software is a feature of the POS software that is used to create and manage the restaurant menu. It is integrated with the billing and the inventory management module and helps you curate and manage the restaurant menu.
Here are the features you should look out for while choosing a restaurant menu management software.
1. Recipe Management
Software that gives you the facility of managing the recipe is something you should be investing in. A restaurant menu management software with a recipe management feature will help you standardize all your recipes across all your outlets.
These recipes include every ingredient that goes into preparing and presenting the dish. It also includes the quantities to be used, the temperature at which the dishes must be prepared and the cooking methods.
Having a standard recipe through a restaurant POS for each item is essential as it helps you not only maintain consistency in terms of taste and quality but also keeps your food costs in check by reducing undue wastage. A standard recipe has clearly defined portions and the amount to be consumed during the preparation of the item.
2. Central Menu Mangement
In the case of multiple outlets where the menu is the same, updating the menu at each outlet becomes extremely tedious and time-consuming. If you add or remove any menu item at the central level, it will automatically reflect across all the other restaurants. This would ensure you have the same menu throughout without much manual updation.
You can build a detailed menu at the central level and it will automatically start reflecting across all your outlets in real-time, thus saving time and also eliminating the risk of manual errors.
3. Ease In Creating Categories
If you run a restaurant you know you cannot categorize everything under “food.” You need to have different categorizations like starters, full course, vegetarian, non-vegetarian, beverages, etc.
Look for software that lets you easily create categories and allows you to efficiently edit them when required. Being able to create categories will help you easily navigate through the ordered food item and will allow you to notify the customer about its availability.
This will also make it simpler for the patrons to navigate through the digital menu and know precisely what they are looking for.
4. Smart Menu Display
The restaurant menu management feature displays the popular items along with the complete menu right on the POS which helps in upselling. This comes even more useful in the case of Tablet Ordering, where customers are placing orders themselves.
Along with the complete menu display, you can display your top-selling and high-profit items that prompt customers to order more.
5. Detailed Reporting and Insights
To answer the question of how to choose a restaurant POS, the software should be equipped with smart analytics that gives detailed reports and insights about your restaurant business. Integrated with the restaurant POS, the menu management software generates reports that give you detailed insights about your most selling and least selling items.
If you have a smart customer feedback management module, you can take item-specific feedback from customers. The POS records the performance of each individual menu item and gives you item-wise reports. Also, you can view the food cost of each item in the menu and identify which items are high-profit items and which are the ones which are costing you more money
Some of the best restaurants go out of business because they don’t pay much attention to the menu. It is important to regularly analyze and update the menu as per the customer demands, while still ensuring that the menu is high on profit, and a smart restaurant menu management software would help you do that and more.
Make sure that you keep the above-mentioned points in mind while choosing a restaurant menu management software for your restaurant!
