What are the features in a good hotel Point of Sale (POS) System
A Point of Sale (POS) system is a critical feature of any hotel that provides any additional outlets along with the rooms. These outlets could be restaurants, cafes, spas, gift shops or any other outlets that involves selling items, and managing inventory of those items in a way that integrates with the hotel management system.
A good hotel point of sale system does not only help make invoices / billings, but also helps in enhancing business profitability and customer satisfaction by integrating all features of the hotel marketing, operations, and CRM seamlessly into one system.
Here are the essential features of a good POS system:
Simplicity & Ease of Use:
A good POS system should be simple to understand, train, and learn and should be easily used by any staff of the hotel, even if the staff is not a trained professional.
Integration with Hotel PMS:
integration with Hotel Propety Management System is one of the most important features that differentiate a good hotel POS system because invoices can be posted to Room Folios, and can be cleared off during checkout instead of at Room Outlet.
Integration with Inventory Management / Stores system:
Every POS outlet involves consumption of items that need to be tracked. A good POS system should integrate seamlessly with the Stores & Inventory module to track the consumption of each items, so that every time any item is consumed, the inventory is automatically reduced. Moreover, the consumption can be tracked as expenses, so that the hotel profitability can be easily calculated.
Ability to Process Payments:
All payment types should be supported in a good hotel POS system, including credit cards, cash, bank transfer, electronic payments, and ability to transfer the invoices to Rooms. Moreover the POS system should be integrated to EDC / Credit Card machines for ease of use, tracking of payments & reporting.
Reports & Analytics:
All reports that include items sold, consumed, payments processed, complimentary orders, cancelled payments etc should be supported by a good hotel POS System. Moreover, all POS related data should automatically flow into the complete hotel management system that includes Night Audit Report, Accounting Reports, Expenses, and other parts of the system.
Easy Access / Cloud based:
Most traditional POS systems are on-premise installations, which needed to be manually installed on the local hotel server and need constant maintenance, upgrade, security enablemet. The advantage of a cloud based POS system that integrates with hotel management system seamlessly, and is easily available to any user / machine in any location that has an internet connection, and does not need to maintained / upgraded regularly, as all those come automatically.