2. Promotions and happy hours

Promotions and happy hours have always been a great way for venues to draw customers in for their first drink, knowing that they will likely stay for a second, if not the evening. There are a number of ways an EPOS can deal with promotions, ranging from manually entering the discounts, using different product buttons during happy hours, or automatically applying relevant discounts as you key in an order. Our Bar EPOS automatically applies discounts, you simply set up parameters for any promotion on the back office, availability, products they relate to, if they just apply to loyalty members or a subset of your customer base & the system does the rest. Leaving staff to focus on serving great food and drinks, rather than remembering which promotions are relevant when and handling any manual processes. 

You’ll want to keep an eye on how much the promotions are costing you, to sense check they’re worth running. We offer a promotions report, which will detail how often the promotion or offer was redeemed, as well as the cost to you - i.e. how much you have discounted the sale by.

3. Recipes and nested recipes

When it comes to cocktails, you’ll be using measures of multiple stock items to make each drink. Any good hospitality focused EPOS with stock management capabilities should allow you to add recipes (for both food and drink items) detailing all the ingredients used in a product, and deduct accordingly from your stock levels. For example, for every Espresso Martini you sell, the EPOS will deduct the correct amounts of vodka, Kahlua & coffee. 

Our bar EPOS also allows you to add and track nested recipes. This means you can add a recipe for an item you make on site, that then forms an ingredient itself. The sugar syrup you will likely add to that Espresso Martini for example. Setting this up with its own recipe, and adding a measure of it to your Espresso Martini recipe will keep track on the sugar needed and used, and flag when you’re running low and need to order more, in your suggested orders. 

This function would also work if you’re making your own sauces or batch cooked items in your kitchen.

4. Cost price & GP tracking

To make sure you’re achieving the higher margins cocktails have to offer, you should know how much each drink costs you to make, and mark it up accordingly for your sale price. Adding recipes as detailed above to your back office, will help you do this. Our Bar EPOS will calculate the cost price automatically for you when adding a recipe, and will show you the GP you’re making in comparison to the sale price you set, allowing you to tweak the sale price if needed. In the current volatile market, you’re no doubt seeing prices of your stock increase week on week. Our back office will automatically increase the cost price of your drinks based on the rising cost of the raw ingredients, giving you the chance to increase sale prices if you need to.

5. Mobile ordering

By now you have likely worked out if your venue is one where mobile ordering has an ongoing place or not. If customers like the flexibility of being able to order another round of drinks, without leaving their table, or if your customers have had enough of the digital interaction and reverted in full back to ordering at the bar. 

If you’re a venue that has decided offering mobile ordering alongside bar service is popular, consider the placement of your higher margin products on the menu, and how you can make them look as eye catching as possible. When launching with our mobile ordering app during the pandemic, Mojo Bars placed their cocktails at the top of their menu, and saw a 350% increase in sales of cocktails. You should also consider including images of delicious looking serves to entice customers. You could use the same images you’re using in the staff notes, so the bar staff are making a drink that looks exactly as the customer is expecting it to. 

Keeping in mind all the points above, if you are a venue using mobile ordering, you should be looking for a solution that is fully integrated with your Bar EPOS. This means all the drinks ordered via this method will feed into the stock tracking, reporting and will also automatically trigger any relevant promotions and discounts.