The holiday season is a hectic time for the hospitality trade. All across the country, restaurants and bars are gearing up for the festive rush, a glittery whirlwind of holiday parties, nights on the town and family gatherings.
Businesses have plenty to do to prepare for the surge of revellers determined to be as jolly as the season demands. Schedules must ensure adequate staff and stock orders must be placed in time to prevent fatal shortages midway through a busy night.
It’s wise to make sure your IT and POS equipment is in good working order ahead of the holiday rush. The modern bar and restaurant rely in no small part on technology, from order and inventory systems to POS and electronic payments. Nothing will disrupt peak business volume quite like a POS system failure on a packed evening in December.
Hospitality businesses live and die by the quality of their service as much as the food and drink they serve. If customers face excessive waits at the bar because old POS terminals can’t keep pace, they are likely head somewhere else and not return. Similarly, if restaurant patrons are left waiting an hour or more for food due to a slow or broken order, they won’t come back no matter how good the food is.
Slow service is bad enough, but imagine if the entire network went down. According to one study, 98% of businesses calculate that an hour’s worth of system downtime would cost them at least $100,000 in lost earnings. In a well-reported example, Starbucks was estimated to have lost millions in revenue in a single afternoon when its centralized POS system went down, forcing all of its North American outlets to close.
Protecting a long-term investment
So, what can bars and restaurants do to mitigate these risks over the busy festive period?
The best protection for any business is to partner with a reputable POS provider with a proven track record of high-quality maintenance and aftercare services. Your POS is a long-term investment, and only retains its value if it performs at an optimum level for your business.
Since 1989, AURES has been dedicated to POS systems and peripherals for restaurants, QSRs, bars and other growing hospitality segments. We partner with leading resellers who pair the latest restaurant POS software with our reliable and robust hardware to create high quality, long-lasting customer solutions.
AURES service agreements include always-available stock for parts and loan units to ensure rapid replacement turnarounds, real-time performance monitoring and asset tracking, plus a comprehensive preventative maintenance program.
To read more about how we can help keep your POS at peak performance this holiday season and all year round, click here.
