The Best Enterprise POS Systems for Restaurants
Restaurants that have grown into successful franchises — or even those that simply have multiple locations — have much different point of sale needs than restaurants with just a single location.
Enterprise POS systems allow users access to a lot more features that are necessary on a franchise level. With a good enterprise POS, users will be able to easily manage the menus, people, and general operations of multiple restaurants easily from a single dashboard. They’ll also be able to analyze and compare how sales, revenue, and customer behavior change from one restaurant location to the next, and how they change across the board.
If you’re looking for an enterprise POS system for your restaurant franchise, there are plenty of options on the market today. The one you choose will depend on your own restaurant’s POS needs, and on which features are the most important to you and your employees or franchisees.
Below, we highlight some of the best enterprise POS systems for restaurants and explain what makes each of them stand out.
Truffle POS
Truffle POS comes standard with all the features that each restaurant needs to be successful in today’s market landscape, including online ordering, delivery management, online reservations, cloud kitchen management — and even special features like contactless food locker pickup.
Unlike other enterprise POS systems, Truffle POS can also run on any hardware platform, Windows, iOS & Android, which can be a serious advantage for restaurant owners looking to save money by using their current equipment.
In addition to core POS features, Truffle POS makes it simple for franchise owners to manage restaurants across their city, state, region, or country. Here are some of the features that Truffle POS offers specifically for multi-location restaurants and restaurant franchises:
- Real-time sales statistics across locations – See in real-time how franchise operators are doing on a local or national level. For any report, you can drill down to groups of restaurants in a particular city, state, or region.
- Detailed inventory reporting across locations – With Truffle POS, you can see how food costs are affecting profitability across all your locations and for different recipes. You can also see, at a glance, where all of your inventory is with central warehousing features.
- Recipe consistency – Because you’ll be able to see which ingredients were used for each recipe across all your locations, you can ensure that your customers are getting the same experience across the entire scope of your brand.
- Royalty reporting – Truffle POS gives franchise owners the option to receive automated royalty payment reports, and they can also set custom royalty and ad spend percentages for each restaurant location.
- Simple growth tools – With Truffle POS, adding new restaurant locations takes just a few minutes thanks to the ability to transfer information from similar locations.
- Regional and national promotions and marketing – Franchise administrators can change pricing and promotions for all locations or run them at a local, regional or national level. They can also reach out to customers across the country or at any geographic level with built-in marketing tools.
- Simple menu updates across locations – Truffle POS users can introduce new menu items locally, regionally, or nationally across restaurant locations, with no need to change the menus for each location manually.
- Automated operational processes – The best enterprise POS systems for restaurants, including Truffle POS, also make it easier for operators to train employees, check for quality, and implement processes in a uniform way across all locations. When potential franchisees understand that they’ll have structure and guidance on all of these internal processes through the POS system, your restaurant will become much more attractive to them.
Micros POS
Oracle’s MICROS POS has been on the market for more than 40 years and is used by businesses all over the world. It offers both cloud-based and on-site software installations. The primary industries served by MICROS POS are restaurants, hotels, resorts, casinos, stadiums, arenas, cruise ships, transportation hubs, and retail stores.
If you’re uncomfortable with cloud-based systems for whatever reason, you might be looking into Micros POS, which touts features such as security and reliability as some of its main advantages due to its local installation (Newer programs store most of their information in the cloud) and specialized hardware.
However, having locally installed hardware also generally means that each restaurant location will be on the line to pay for a full suite of Oracle hardware, including workstations and tablets.
MICROS POS doesn’t have a suite of driver/delivery features that have become more important to restaurateurs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Restaurant owners will have to rely on integrations with third party delivery apps if they want to offer delivery to their customers. MICROS also lacks modern features such as integrations with food lockers for contactless pickup.
However, enterprise users may be especially interested in the fact that Oracle MICROS supports restaurants in a variety of languages, currencies, and local regulations across more than 100 countries. Individual franchisees can customize their graphical interfaces to match their restaurant’s look, feel, and layout, which may vary regionally.
Enterprise users can also view reports by employee, location, region, restaurant type, or across all locations as a whole. Ingredients, pricing, and adherence to local regulations can all be managed centrally.
Aloha
Aloha POS is a part of NCR Corporation, which was previously known as National Cash Register and established in 1884. NCR is an American company that produces both software and hardware, and Aloha POS caters mostly to restaurants.
Aloha is similar to Micros POS in both its advantages and disadvantages. Because the software is installed on local hardware instead of running on the cloud, Aloha touts the fact that there’s no chance of ever losing a transaction to something like an internet outage or power outage.
And, of course, with so many years in the industry, Aloha has a lot of experience and plenty of customers all over the globe. Using global-ready software is important if your restaurant franchise will be dealing in different currencies and languages.
Aloha is built to handle the needs of larger franchises, and allows users to compare and contrast sales and labor KPIs across multiple locations for various segments of time.
Just like with MICROS, though, if you use Aloha POS, each restaurant will be locked into using specialized hardware and may need to pay a little more upfront for it. More traditional programs may not have some of the latest integrations that restaurants have embraced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as driver delivery apps and apps that connect to food storage lockers for completely contactless pickup.
Revel
Revel Systems’ Restaurant POS System was among the first cloud-based POS to be designed for the iPad. This startup was founded in 2010, is headquartered in Atlanta, and serves some of the largest restaurant franchises in the world.
Revel offers specialty POS systems for pizza restaurants and cafes, and it also has a retail POS system.
It has both standard and advanced POS features, including loyalty, gift cards, online ordering, a kitchen display system, and customer relationship management features. The program also uses an open API, so it’s easy to integrate with plenty of third party apps to add even more functionality to the program. Revel also has drive-through management features and kiosk ordering features, which may have special appeal for certain types of restaurant franchises. With Revel Enterprise®, users can manage multiple locations from a central cloud dashboard.
However, Revel has yet to add features for online reservations or smart locker for food with your POS system, and users are limited to using iPads for their point of sale stations.
Toast
Toast, Inc. is a cloud-based restaurant software company based in Boston, Massachusetts and founded in 2012. Toast was also designed specifically for restaurants and is used in cafes, diners, fine dining establishments, bakeries, and other restaurants.
One of the first things that distinguishes Toast from other popular cloud-based POS programs for restaurants is that it’s built on the Android operating system and has a line of dedicated hardware. Toast claims that this hardware — unlike Apple iPads — is designed for the high-heat, high-impact world of restaurants.
Another thing to note about Toast is that its pricing structure is a little unique. The basic package includes a minimal number of features, with features such as loyalty, marketing, and online ordering considered “add-ons” to the basic package.
Similar to Revel, Toast also doesn’t come with features to manage online reservations or smart food lockers. You’ll also have to pay for a separate email marketing program, as email marketing is not included.
Toast has a feature called “Multi-Location Management,” which allows users to centralize and streamline things like menus, discounts, payment options, taxes, and more across various restaurant locations. Toast users can change permissions levels for specific franchisees to allow them to do things like change their own menus or run unique sales.
Toast’s multi-location management feature also allows users to segment and analyze real-time data about sales and labor across various locations.
Learn More About Truffle POS
Even if you’re still running a single restaurant location or just a few, it’s a good idea to understand what your POS system will be capable of as you grow so you don’t have to start your POS search from scratch.
Franchisees are looking for brands that have proven processes and systems in place to help them succeed. Truffle POS is the only all-in-one platform that enables restaurant franchises to automate their entire operation.
After working with and growing many of our clients to multi-store locations over 15 years, we know the effort and time it takes to grow your restaurant business, and how important it is to have a consistent brand experience for your guests. Truffle POS for Franchise Owners is the all-in-one tool your business needs.
Franchisees are looking for brands that have proven processes and systems in place to help them succeed.
We exist to automate your franchise operations, so that you can focus on adding more locations and delivering exceptional service to your customers & franchisees.