Top 4 POS Integrations For Restaurants

Your POS system is the hub of your restaurant business.

It handles orders, tracks payments and cash flow, manages inventory, and provides robust reporting to help you make decisions for front and back of house. 

In short, having the POS helps you operate smartly and keep costs in check, which is why choosing the best restaurant pos system system is essential for your business.

But if you’ve already invested in POS hardware and software, do you really need additional software integrations on top of that?

The answer is yes! The right POS integration can connect different parts of your business and help you run it better.

This additional software – called third-party integrations or third-party applications – acts as a bridge between tools you already use (e.g. accounting software) or introduces new tools (e.g online ordering aggregators) that help automate tasks for a more efficient use of your time – goodbye manual data entry!

This article will help you better understand what integrations you need and exactly how each POS integration can help you run your restaurant.

What Is a POS Integration?

A third-party POS integration is a software program designed to seamlessly connect with your current restaurant POS system, extending the core functionality of your system.

When you add these integrations to your POS, you build a full restaurant management system that controls all the different parts of your business from one place.

That central hub (your POS) collects and shares data between your different integrations, so you can complete different business functions. For example, daily sales totals are pulled directly from your POS into your accounting ledger by an accounting integration. This means you don’t have to do any manual data entry – three cheers for that!

A full restaurant management system helps you streamline your operations, making it easier to run your restaurant.

4 POS Integrations Your Restaurant Needs 

Third-party integrations – “stacked” on top of your POS software – are a growing trend in the restaurant industry. Why?

More and more restaurateurs recognize the value of tech to help them be more efficient and more profitable. And the restaurant tech industry is working overtime to meet the demand. There are more third-party apps for restaurant owners in the marketplace than ever before.

So how do you know which POS integrations your restaurant actually NEEDS, as opposed to the nice-to-haves?

Here are the top four restaurant POS integrations you need for a complete restaurant solution:

1. Accounting – Shogo
2. Reporting – Avero
3. Scheduling – 7shifts
4. Online Ordering – Deliverect

Let’s go through each POS integration and examine the added value they bring to your restaurant operations.

1. Accounting – Shogo

One of the most helpful POS integrations is an accounting software application.

TouchBistro’s restaurant POS is integrated with Shogo, a third-party integration that connects your POS software to Quickbooks accounting.

What’s Great About Shogo

The Shogo integration allows restaurants to map sales data (by category or item level) directly into their accounting software. Once mapping is set up, Shogo automatically posts the performance data in the accounting ledger at the end of every business day. Totals are pulled right from the POS system, completely eliminating error-prone, manual accounting entries in your bookkeeping. 

All basic accounting functions can be mapped: revenues, taxes, discounts, and all tender activity like credit cards, gift cards, and cash drawer transactions. This data is also posted by location, which makes it easier to group and compare multiple locations.

Historical data is tracked, too. Helpful month-to-month and year-over-year reports provide accurate snapshots of growth and inform your forecasts.

How the Shogo Integration Helps

One of the major benefits of integrating sales and accounting through your POS system is that sales totals move from your POS terminals to your accounting software automatically, eliminating delays and errors. The Shogo POS integration saves restaurant managers hours of tedious bookkeeping. No more dealing with multiple spreadsheets and manual data entry. 

Even more, you can easily access status updates through the dashboard. Reports can be viewed on-demand, at any time, from any device because the app is cloud-based.

Why Shogo Is the Best Accounting Integration

Reasons to love TouchBistro’s Shogo accounting integration:

• Seamless integration eliminates manual bookkeeping
• Flexible data mapping fits your accounting preferences
• Works in all restaurant types
• Sales data is available on-demand
• Accurate data means accurate books and taxes
• Free web and email support

2.  Reporting – Avero

What good is having performance data if you don’t use it to improve operations?

Reporting integrations like Avero help analyze operational data from your POS, so you can figure out exactly how your restaurant is performing. The Avero integration lets you create useful reports that help you control costs and increase profits.

What’s Great About Avero

Every day, your restaurant logs hundreds, maybe thousands of business transactions. Even more if you’re running multiple locations. The data captured by your POS software records every sale, at every hour, by each individual staff member. Inventory is measured down to the garlic clove. When you have Avero, you can view all this POS data and use it to find solutions to your most pressing business challenges.

Avero’s analytics engine is designed specifically for the hospitality industry. It can crunch your restaurant’s numbers in a range of different ways and deliver reports that address your exact concerns. 

Want to get a better grip on planning your inventory or reduce overall expenses? Maybe you need to keep theft in check or maximize sales during particular hours. Avero’s reports produce insights from your operational data that can help address all these things and more.

Avero also helps to contextualize your sales. For example, it can pull in weather and event data. Did the playoffs last year help to promote more bar sales? Or did the rainy summer weather affect your patio sales? 

Avero reports can interpret data with custom date ranges, employee groupings, or analyze a day’s or a year’s worth of figures on the fly. Precise, useful reports are then displayed on custom dashboards, available to you at any time, from anywhere.

How the Avero Integration Helps

Whether your concerns are focused on one kitchen or trends across multiple venues, Avero pulls all relevant POS data into its powerful analytics engine and interprets that information. You can then act on that insight and make informed, effective changes in your business operations.

Avero reports address 11 different operational categories such as sales, labor, productivity, and revenue management. You can even target specific areas of your business that you’re concerned about.

Here are some sample reports that could impact your bottom line:

• Labor Costs and Patterns – optimizes staff schedules
• Daily Logbook – increases productivity
• Theft Tracking – logs incidents and deters future cases
• Purchase Forecast – eliminates food waste

Why Avero Is the Best Reporting Integration

Reasons to love TouchBistro’s Avero reporting integration:

• Built specifically for hospitality
• Interprets your performance data to deliver useful actions
• Pulls in contextual sales info (e.g. weather, event data, etc.)
• Custom fields target specific business challenges
• Pulls data seamlessly from your POS system
• Reports are easy to understand and put into practice
• Dashboard and reports available on-demand

3. Scheduling – 7shifts

Optimizing employee schedules is a common challenge in the restaurant business. Enter TouchBistro’s integration with 7shifts – the restaurant scheduling solution that allows you to stay in control of labor management.

What’s Great About 7shifts

TouchBistro’s 7shifts integration shares operational data with the app to help you create schedules that meet your restaurant’s labor needs. No more pen and paper or spreadsheet and print schedules (which just end up getting moved around). Plus, the 7shifts scheduling integration can shave up to 80% off the time it takes to maintain a manual schedule.

The Mobile App Makes It Easy

Here’s how 7shifts schedules work:

• A restaurant manager creates an initial schedule that’s accessible online to staff through the 7shifts app.
• Employees use the app to check work hours, key in their availability, and request shift changes – which can be approved on the spot.
• Managers can adjust the work schedule in real-time and, thanks to the app, staff always have the latest version at their fingertips – something that’s especially useful if you use a rotating schedule.

Get the Right Staff Booked

Scheduling staff isn’t just about adding or subtracting the number of people on shift – it’s also about scheduling the right people. With access to employee POS information like table turnover and sales performance, 7shifts can help you know which employees to schedule when, so you know the right staff is in place – crucial during peak times and special events.

How the 7shifts Integration Helps

Predictive scheduling is how restaurants determine the number of staff members required for a given shift. It’s best to calculate these shift requirements using available POS data.

Why?

POS data shows how much revenue is generated by a specific employee in a given hour. This is referred to as SPMH (Sales Per Man Hour). Assuming the restaurant will generate the same amount of sales in those same hours, managers can predict exactly how many staff you need to reach that sales number.

Predictive scheduling not only saves the restaurant operational costs by not overscheduling employees, it also gives staff advance notice of work shifts – reducing surprises, no-shows, and the scramble to find people to cover missed shifts.

Why 7shifts Is the Best Scheduling Integration

Reasons to love TouchBistro’s 7shifts scheduling integration:

• Integration uses shared POS data for predictive scheduling
• Eliminates manual data entry and printed schedules
• App is accessible by all staff, at any time
• Employees always see the latest version
• Reduces labor costs by limiting early shift check-in
• Cuts the time to maintain staff schedules by 80%

4. Online Ordering – Deliverect

When it comes to customer expectations, using tech to power transactions takes the cake.

That’s why online ordering and delivery is a must-have for today’s restaurateurs. Deliverect, one of TouchBistro’s POS integration partners for online orders, makes it easier to get the most from this growing trend.

What’s Great About Deliverect

If you use delivery services like Uber Eats, Foodora, and DoorDash, you know that each of them has their own system for accepting orders. And all these individual order tablets can clutter your countertop and overwhelm your staff in no time.

TouchBistro’s Online Ordering POS integration through Deliverect lets you streamline the leading online ordering platforms directly into your POS. In other words, Deliverect aggregates all your orders coming from third-party apps and funnels them through your POS so you spend less time manually typing in orders and more time managing your business.

How the Deliverect Integration Helps

While it might seem like a small thing, getting online orders correct is a requirement for repeat business. With an online ordering POS integration like Deliverect, orders from third-party delivery apps like DoorDash go directly into your POS, which means they don’t get lost or entered incorrectly. Being consistently accurate is a huge advantage for restaurants – especially those that rely on delivery and takeout for a big part of their sales.

There are other upsides, too. 

You may need fewer staff members focused on online ordering when you have a direct POS integration because one terminal is easier to manage than a counter full of them.

You can also look at all delivery platforms from a single location, making it easier to compare and make decisions about which platforms are best for your business.

Why Deliverect Is the Best Online Ordering POS Integration

Reasons to love TouchBistro’s Online Ordering integration with Deliverect:

• Accurate online orders with no manual entry
• Streamlined delivery process
• Simplified accounting of all third-party delivery apps
• Real-time reports
• Reduced staff hours
• Dedicated support

Every POS integration is characterized by two key elements: automation and accuracy. Sharing POS data with other restaurant tools creates new ways to work smarter, cut costs, and keep customers coming back.

For effective, integrated solutions, choose a single POS vendor, like TouchBistro, to ensure that all restaurant apps use identical data across all your management tools. When everything operates as one, it creates a cohesive family of solutions that work together to improve your business. 

by Dana Krook

Dana is the former Content Marketing Manager at TouchBistro, sharing tips for and stories of restaurateurs turning their passion into success. She loves homemade hot sauce, deep fried pickles and finding excuses to consume real maple syrup.

Topics

Integrations Technology