What’s cooking with restaurant POS in 2024? Listening to the plans of restaurant operators and industry leaders, it’s pretty clear that POS is taking an ever-more central role in operations.
That’s certainly the message that comes out of Hospitality Technology magazine’s most recent POS trends survey. Every year, the publication asks leading figures across the restaurant trade about their POS plans for the year ahead.
In 2024, the headline findings go something like this – restaurant operators are looking to expand the functionality of their POS systems, with self-service and mobile to the fore. Integration with wider systems is essential, with a view to improving data capture across the business.
Hospitality Technology had a really good take on what these findings say about the evolving role of POS in restaurants. If the kitchen is the heart of a restaurant, POS is these days very much the brains. We couldn’t agree more.
So what did the survey findings actually say?
Common drivers of investment
Asked about their POS purchasing plans for the year ahead, there’s a clear consensus on where investment strategies across the industry are focusing their attention. 84% of restaurant businesses plan to spend money on adding new functionality and features to their current POS.
However, it’s notable that the second most popular answer (50%) was investing in mobile POS. Elsewhere, asked which specific features and functionalities were driving POS purchases, 83% responded that they were interested in expanding the use of tablet-based POS. Restaurant owners are clearly switched on to the agility and convenience that mobile POS brings, and are making it a priority.
The most popular answer for which features and functionality were having the biggest influence on POS spending decisions, just narrowly ahead of mobile with 85%, was integration with other systems. Here we really see the idea of POS acting as the ‘brains’ of restaurant operations take shape.
Like most businesses, modern restaurants are awash with digital systems. Order management, kitchen display, transactions, inventory management. You need all of these working in sync, with a single convenient interface for them all. POS provides a ready-made solution. Sure, every business still needs a touchpoint for processing payments. But when you can handle orders, service, stock levels and more from the same screen, you get so much more value. The brains of the whole operation.
Restaurant operators also clearly see another benefit of routing all systems through POS. Asked which business drivers are impacting their POS investment plans, 83% said they have an eye on using data from POS to understand guest preferences and behavior better. POS is a fantastic source of data capture from transactions and other types of customer interaction. When you also connect all the other sources of data available from across your business, you get a much richer and more valuable picture.
Finally, going back to how restaurant operators are looking to diversify and expand their POS functionality, the top business driver for POS investment was developing their self-service options (85%). This is an interesting finding in the context of the flak self-service has been getting from some quarters lately, especially in retail. Clearly, in the restaurant sector at least, talk of self-service being on the decline is very premature.