Online Backups

Backups, Backups, Backups (You Can't Say It Enough)!

Be honest, you don't backup regularly do you?  We know it's tough to admit out loud but experience shows that most of you don't run your backups.  To those of you who do, kudos and a question - when is the last time you checked it??

Customer opens DVD-RW drive and in place of a backup disk - a music cd.
Customer goes to restore a backup and finds that the disk was full a year ago!
Tech asks customer about backup. Customer responds with - what does that mean?
When asked about backups, customer responds with "we do one every year"!

These are real world scenarios that our support department addresses every day.  These don't even include the people that have fires (yes it happens), hurricanes (sand and water do not help computers), employees that damage machines (employee quits and kicks the machine over), theft (people steal the whole computer), and so on.    And we all know that when you need the backup - you really need it!  It's much easier to convince your insurance company with copies of all your sales history readily accessible. 

Are you taking advantage of our Online Backup?  Do you even know it exists?  Did you know it is FREE while on a support plan?  

If not, you are missing out on a fantastic part of our support!  

A couple of years ago SelbySoft thought about this long and hard.  We came up with an online backup and now offer that to every single customer on a support plan free of charge!  

This service allows you to sign up and have your information transmitted from your physical store location to our secure server at SelbySoft.  The transfer happens automatically at 3am every night regardless of employee interaction.  This allows us to insure that in the event of a catastrophic failure (lightning, fire etc) we still have a copy of your information! 

Now, this does not mean that we want you stop doing any backups in the store!  Remember, your SP-1 system can (and usually is) setup to perform a backup on site in two ways.  First, we copy all of your information from the main computer to a second computer in the location and then we copy the information to your cd/dvd backup as well.  These are all great ways to insure you have a full system backup.

Remember - Backup, Backup, Backup! And if you have any questions. . . Call us.

Contact us at:

SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
http://www.selbysoft.com/
8326 Woodland Ave. E

Puyallup Wa 98371

Cash Drawers, Theft and Accountability

Cash Drawers, Theft and Employee Accountability

Every day here at SelbySoft, we receive calls asking about shortages in the cash drawer.  While a number of these are simple mistakes by the crew, theft is an issue as well.  If we can make our cash handling employees accountable for the mistakes and shortages, then we are on our way to eliminating them.  

So, the question is how can we help?   It all starts by deciding who has access to cash in drawers and how we can minimize that.  

Let's start by defining how you probably handle the drawer in your location:

• Do you allow anyone in the store to handle the cash? 
• Do you have a dedicated cashier that must ring up every order?
• Do you have a couple people that you trust? 

All of the above work but only if handled properly.  The basic problem in most stores is that there are just too many hands in the drawer.  Then, when the drawer is short - who do you look at?

Let's talk about how we can make it better and more secure with SP-1

First, we lock down the cash drawer.  In SP-1 you can assign a cash drawer to an employee.  This helps insure employee accountability because only that employee can access the cash.  

The inconvenience with this is that the cashier may not always be at the front counter when the customer is ready to order.  With SP-1 we can make this an easier situation in two ways:

• Set your system to allow anyone to start a ticket but only the approved employee code to close out a ticket.  This provides you with the flexibility of having every employee being able to start an order (and then place it on hold) but only having one employee cash that customer out.

• Use multiple cash drawers.  SP-1 allows up to five cash drawers per station!  With this, you are actually assigning 1-5 employees to their own drawers.  If employee one takes an order, drawer one opens, employee two takes an order and drawer two opens.

With either method, you will be on your way to eliminating the potential for shortages in your drawer and increasing employee accountability.

Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
http://www.selbysoft.com/
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371

Order Processing

Order Processing

Talk about a little used but incredibly powerful part of SP-1.  This included feature does typically require an additional user license and computer to take advantage of it but the rewards can certainly outweigh the costs!

So, what is it?  Order Processing allows you more effectively control your make (food or drink) line and insure better customer service.  This is accomplished by effectively tracking the time it takes to prepare items. As a side, this system can also provide a reasonably accurate quote time printed on a customer receipt or displayed on a screen.

It's all accomplished by sending every order (or basing it simply on one menu item) to an Order Processing monitor that is located by the  make line.

These orders appear on that monitor as shown below:

So, once the crew has gone through and made the order (based on the printer/monitor) then they will mark the line off the Order Processing monitor.     The numbers on the far right show how long it has been since the order was placed.  Once the order is marked off, SP-1 can calculate a quote time based that! 

Think about it. . . you would then have an accurate time to quote your customers when they ask how long a wait is!

There are more benefits to this system however:  Order Processing gives you the ability to see how well your make line is doing.

This happens because as the items are made and ready to be handed to the customer or put in the oven, the employee will mark that the order is done.  This then let's us know what the average time it takes to make an order is. 

The above is a sample report from the Order Processing system.  We provide, by the menu group and by the hour, the average, low and high quote times for the day. 

We have customers that love this option as it allows them to focus on making the kitchen or barista line more responsible for getting orders out quickly and eliminating the bottlenecks in the order process. 

Contact us at:
SelbySoft
Mike Spence
800-454-4434
Sales@SelbySoft.com
WWW.SelbySoft.com
8326 Woodland Ave. E
Puyallup Wa 98371