Windows 7 - I haven't been excited about Windows for a long time....

To be honest, since about 2,005 I have been more fascinated by Travis Young' onePOS applications, than by anything coming from Microsoft. Until lately: I installed Windows 7 and found an exciting new product. The team around Ballmer & Co has come up with something truly great!

What's new: for starters it looks like VISTA but graphically even more pleasing. Great graphics and the whole touch and feel is very innovative. The best: my 3 year old laptop runs considerably faster on Windows 7. It boots faster, it shuts down faster and programs start lightening fast. I am now ready to roll it out on all our office computers and once that is done, we will begin installing our clients. So first, like always when a new OS is around, learning it is paramount...

Get this: after the install I realized that the VGA driver was not the right one; the display did not look as crisp and clear as I had hoped. I was not in the mood to search for the right driver and rather felt like reading a book. A few hours later Windows displayed a message on my laptop: downloads are ready for you. I clicked install - and the system had found the right display driver - without anything I did - and installed it. After a re-boot the system displayed the new, semi-transparent look around the windows.

So far I have not encountered any issue or problem and cannot wait to begin installing it at a larger scale. Here's an interesting video that you may enjoy. It introduces the main new features of Windows 7. Have fun!

Payments at the Table

Customers like the idea, to have their credit cards never leave their eye-sight... OneSolution President, Chuck McDonald, demonstrates the use of the Verifon 670Vx with onePOS.

If you're interested in bringing this technology to your restaurant, give me a call: 480-225-6189.

Now Fine Tuned for Cashier Environment! By Travis Young

With release 2.7.00 of the onePOS system, the company has really fined tuned the onePOS system for use in a cashier environment.

The biggest new feature is the ability to bar code receipts and kitchen chits with the table number. The receipt or chit can then be scanned at the Active Check screen on the cashier terminal and up pops the check. If more than one server has the same table ID open, the cashier will be prompted to select which server to retrieve the check for. If you do not want this action to transfer the check from the server to the cashier you can use the shared tabs feature and the check will remain with the originating server (that way if the cashier pulls the wrong check, pressing Exit is all that is required to cancel the operation as opposed to doing a Give Back).

Another set of great new features revolves around the ability to merge several checks into one so that a single person can pay for multiple tickets. This can now be accomplished several ways:

• Using Move / Merge Check on the Check Options screen. This will allow you to send the check currently open to the check which you select. The target check must be already under the cashier's ID or you have to be using shared tabs. Once the merge operation is complete, the final merged check is displayed on the screen allowing you to merge another check or take payment right away. Because there is no security risk in allowing a server to merge their own checks, this option is turned on by default.
• Scanning the bar code on the bottom of the next check to merge onto the check currently on the screen. Simply open the first check and then scan the bar code for each additional check to merge onto the first check. There is no way to quickly undo this operation, so be sure to scan the correct checks. Because any bar code not programmed into the system for an item is checked to match the bar code on a guest check (the last 3 digits not including the final UPC check digit is checked against any open Table ID numbers) random / unknown bar code scanning could transfer checks unknowingly this feature is defaulted off.

We have made a sales video of onePOS for cashiering. You can see it here: http://www.onepos.com/Resources/Videos/onePOS_Cashiering.html

Pizza Weights Improve Kitchen Performance, by Travis Young

We just finished a unique installation at a Pizza Restaurant in Ohio. As most of you know, pizza databases are a bear, and this installation was no exception. In fact, as they charge differently for each of their toppings based on size and type of pizza (a total of 10) and by half or full topping (so each topping is in the database 20 times) this was likely more complex than normal.

To further complicate things, they wanted the weights of each topping to be displayed on the kitchen video system. This way, when a pie comes in, the employees at the pizza prep station do not need to lookup how much cheese to put on, how much mushrooms, etc... it says it right on the screen and saves them a ton of time.

Because onePOS can automatically ring in all of the toppings for a supreme, meat lovers, veggie, etc we were able to completely remove the weight charts from their pizza prep areas. The caveat to all of this was that the specialty pizzas all have different weights for toppings (less) than a normal pizza of the same size, and you can mix and match specialty pizzas, so each topping had to be put in the system yet another 20 times! Although a lot of work, the speed of the pizza line, especially for new employees, made it worth while.

FYI - There are new "mirror" features in 2.5.90+ that dramatically reduce the time it takes to copy a Screen Group from one screen to another, or add all new items to a new Screen Group.

Check out our Pizza Point of Sale Software

What Women Want - learn it for FREE!

Did you see the movie with the ad-agency guy (Mel Gibson) who magically knew "what women want"? As a man you'd like to think you know what women want. But do you? And what do you know about what men want? If you're a restauranteur you certainly would like to better understand what your guests want. Somebody once said "running a business is easy. You open the doors and then your customers come in and tell you what they want..." There's truth to that - it's smart business to listen to what your clients want and try to deliver it - but there are other things you can do, like becoming an active fan of research and an avid student of research documents published FOR FREE.

What's out there?: for one there is all the wonderful research the National Restaurant Association publishes. My favorite are study's published by our great universities such as Michigan State and Cornell. Forgive me for mentioning them in a single sentence :-). Cornell has just recently published a great article on preferred seating spacing; must read for any interior designer or builder of restaurants. The latest find is a study on the very timely matter of on-line ordering and on-line reservations. They researched 696 guests and that certainly beats the random sample, a single restauranteur can do in his own place. Plus: who you have in your place is already the result of a selection process. Driven by many factors such as location, ambience, marketing and so on.

Online users are younger (who would have known?!) but also eat out more frequently. That's "gold" don't you think? If you want to register and read the full story please go to http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/ - it's all right there for those who want to know...

Tipping-Point - meet Sweet-Spot!

Wouldn't it make sense if you could bring your POS to the table? You'd ring everything in and send orders right from the table. Give the bar and kitchen the extra time, that is normally spent, walking to the POS terminal and entering in the order. With a handheld you're done ordering right then and there. Production has a head-start and the servers can stay in their station and have more face-time with guests.

So far this sounds like a no-brainer. Why then do only few restaurants here use handhelds, which are so very common in Asia, Europe and Latin America? When will restaurants begin to use mobile ordering - in a broader, bigger way in the US?

The idea of wireless ordering is fascinating: it was 1995 when I first saw a wireless ordering system in a Denny's in Tokyo, Japan. Each server had a small pad, the size of a pocket calculator and orders were sent wirelessly to the kitchen.

I was impressed. That seemed so natural and it was way faster than the traditionl way of ordering. In 2001 I saw something even more impressive: a single person taking all orders for a whole restaurant, filled to capacity with maybe 300 plus patrons. All food and beverage was served by runners. That was in Frankfurt Main, Germany and it was the sportsbar at the local Marriott Hotel. True story.

The efficiency gains seem to be obvious. Why then, are handhelds not used in a broader way in the US? My theory: 1) Too expensive, 2) not fool-proof enough and 3) "not there yet" from a technology perspective.

That was until this year: WIDEFLY, a company from Hong Kong is entering the US market this summer. They bring a handheld to the restaurant world that is priced under $900 with a credit card reader and under $700 without. Besides affordability - these handhelds are ruggedized (can take a drop) and - most importantly - the wireless has been designed to work real well in restaurants. Plus they tweaked the power usage and made it possible to run these things with a 4 day stand-by time and up to 16 hours per day.

Under $900 - that meets a financial sweetspot. Handhelds will pick-up momentum, when the price is right. And that means, not more expensive than traditional terminals. Many restaurant people instinctively think, that handhelds should be actually less expensive than terminals. With Widefly that is true. So maybe this is the one handheld, that will push mobile ordering to a tippingpoint and a world, where wireless mobile ordering is as widespread as traditional POS.

“If you can’t count it you can’t manage it”. Period.

Do you love "numbers"? Are you one of those who have a "feel for numbers"? Can you look at a P & L and spot in a matter of minutes what's not right and what needs to be reviewed? Furthermore, can you "translate" what the numbers tell you into action steps - to make your restaurant better?

Well, if not, here's help - I can assist you with that! This is an area, that you maybe do not expect from a "POS guy". Maybe from your CPA. My advice: without a great POS - like onePOS - you can't have the daily sales-, inventory- and payroll numbers put together quickly enough, to get actionable information quick. Like in "Quick"Books...

And without an interface between your inventory- and accounting package it is hard to do a weekly P & L. According to restaurant research a weekly P & L can help improving profits by as much as 20% over a monthly P & L. That's just because it's harder to manage without having the data within a week of something happening. That's why we provide fully integrated solutions including the link between your POS, inventory and QuickBooks.


Quickbooks latest version (2009) has a feature that allows your CPA to quickly spot an area that requires reconciliation or fixing. It also has a great new report generator with an easy export to Excel, which is really great to run quick budget comparisons. I certainly think, that QB has come a long way. And that it's a great choice for restaurants.

This year OneSolution in Scottsdale became a QuickBooks Pro Advisor and provides QuickBooks and other Intuit products to our clients. We also do installation and configuration and consulting for QuickBooks Pro. Our main focus is of course QuickBooks POS which is a great, fully integrated solution for retailers.