Gift cards and Cash Drawers

Does your cash drawer open when you use a gift card?  It doesn't have to! 


Under the Cash Drawer options in System Setup | Cash Drawer, you can select to have the drawer   stay closed when a gift or credit card is used.  


This allows you to limit employee access to the physical cash drawer.

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

NEW MobileDash

Thinking about our MobileDash Options?  You haven't seen anything yet! 




This new technology allows SP-1 to remotely communicate with you via email on a constant basis.

We started with being able to show you your:
Tostal tickets
Total sales
Average dollar per ticket
Total labor dollars
Labor percent
Total cost of goods
Total cost of goods percent

We then give you menu group breakdowns with totals!  This all is emailed to you on an hourly basis so you are completely in control of what is going on in your store. 


While all of this us pretty cool we decided that it could not stop there.  All of this was just the beginning of the reporting you receive from us.

MobileDash has been enhanced to provide new features as well! 

VoidTrack- Ticket voided?  You get an email!


TheftAlert- If an employee enters 911 as the password for no sale - you get an email alerting you to a potential robbery!

AuditTrack - When a void does happen you need to know what is happening. Audit track will show you what was voided who did it and when.

TimeManager- an employee clocks in? You get an email!

Nosale- No sale occurs? You get an email!

EmployeeMail. Are you familiar with our ecomm messaging system?  This takes it a step further so that your ecomms are automatically emailed to your employees

Do you use twitter ?  How would you you like to tweet specials from SP-1?  We have added this feature so that you can tweet specials directly from the system!

Don't think this is the end of this type of development....Keep checking with us for cool options to come!


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

Reporting - Daily Sales Recap

Continuing our introduction to SP-1 reporting. . . 

The Daily Sales Recap section of SP-1 reporting is where you can access most of the daily business reporting you will need to make intelligent decisions about your business.  

Think of this area as a 24 / 7 manager that can give you instant feedback on how the business is coming along.  Once you enter this area of reporting, you will see a number of report options:

Balance Till: This area is designed to do just that - allow you to balance a till.  This report shows every ticket that was added throughout the day.  You can provide an exception on the report for delivery tickets as those are handled through the driver.  This report can be run by the shift, the workstation or the day. The best use is to close out the actual cash drawer on a station and to close out a shift.   This can help you determine if you are over / short per drawer.  Keep in mind that this can also show and reflect credit cards, gift cards, tips, coupons and discounts.  This report should be run every day. 

Workstation Summary:  This report is designed to give you a picture of what is happening per workstation - including totals and menu breakdown. 


Employee Summary:  Use this to get a view of how well employees are doing from a cashier standpoint.  This report shows the total dollars that an employee sold, number of voids, number of tickets etc.  The great thing about this report is that the number of voids gives you a good indication of potential theft.


Shift Close - 40 Column:  This is very similar to the Balance Till but it is more of a summary.  You would use this report to print a receipt (on the thermal printer) for the shift.  This allows you to easily close out a till during your different shifts. 


Business Summary Recap:  This is the primary business report and is too large to go in depth with here.  This gives you a detailed listing of your day (week, month, year).  Labor percentages, menu mix breakdown down to the modifier level etc.  The important thing to remember here is that this should be run every day.  When this report is run, you have the ability to enter your cash, checks, credit cards etc for the day.  This will then compare those entries with what SP-1 has recorded.  You can then have an over/short to help see what is happening.


Hourly Recap by Week: This report is underused by most stores.  Basically this tracks, over a week the total number of tickets by hour and by menu group.  This is a great report because it shows you how many orders you had.  Use this to help schedule and plan your next week based on the last weeks sales. 


Credit Card Settlement:  This report allows you to reconcile your credit cards that were run through SP-1 with the credit card information reported by your processor. 


XML Ticket Summary: This is a customized export to an XML format.  This report can be brought into Microsoft Excel and used to provide full reporting beyond the normal reporting in SP-1. 

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

New Table Service Option

Clock Out Options for Servers

If you have servers in your restaurant,  you will be interested in this.    I have occasionally heard from our customers that one of the issues they run up against is a server forgetting to close a table before their shift ends.  Now, the server collects the money but leaves that table on hold.  

This can throw a wrench in closing out the servers and reconciling the end of day paperwork.  

After thinking about this, our development guys decided to work on a new way of preventing this from happening.  


There is now a new feature in SP-1 that will allow you to prompt a server during clock out if they have tickets that have been left on hold.  This message will appear when you attempt to clock out.  

If you have a security level applied, a password will be required to select the "No Clock-Out" button.

Contact us at:

SelbySoft

Mike Spence

800-454-4434

Sales@SelbySoft.com

WWW.SelbySoft.com

8326 Woodland Ave. E

Puyallup Wa 98371

Reporting - Categories To View

In my last blog I wrote that we would be looking at what reports SP-1 has to offer.  More importantly, we will look at what you should use them for.


As I said last time, reports are something that people love and hate.  They love the fact that the information is out there and hate the fact that they don't use it.   Let's try and clear some things up here. . . 




In SP-1 we try to put our reports in some specific categories:


Daily Sales - This is the main business reporting section.  In here you will find the reports that impact your sales totals and menu mix breakdowns.  We will cover this more later.


Time Keeping - This is where employee reporting is.  Hours, time worked, wages etc.


Delivery - Here we cover what happened to the drivers you have on the road.


Mailing / E-mail -  Marketing is what goes on with these reports.  This area is incredibly important as it can help you directly increase your sales and customer retention.


Ticket History - Specific, surgical reporting on some certain categories of discounting, comments etc.


Account Billing -  If you run an accounts payable system for your customers, this is where you will see what is outstanding. 


Order Processing -  If you use our Order Processing module, you will get quote time breakdowns here.


Street Names -  For those of you that do delivery, you can find out about your delivery area here.


Inventory - All of the inventory and portion control reports are handled here.  Including the variance reporting on inventory.


Deferred Orders - If you handle timed or scheduled ordering, you will find it here.


Customer - Specific reporting regarding customers is located here. 


Now that we have that out of the way, let's start to talk about these categories in more depth.   My next blog will focus on the Daily Sales area. 






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

Reporting - What reports should you look at?

Reporting in SP-1

One of the lessons I've learned over the years is that store owners have different ideas about what is important for them.   It shouldn't come as a surprise that this is true - after all, it's why people open their own businesses. 

Everyone of these store owners that purchases a POS is to see the reporting capabilities that the system will bring to their store.  Once the POS has been up and running for six to twelve months, we see owners starting to dig deeper into the reporting aspect and really looking at  the numbers provided.

So what "typical" reports should you be looking at?   While there is no one answer for all, we do have some suggestions on what might help you understand your business better.

In this next series of blogs, I'm going to cover some of these reports more in depth and how they can be useful - both in what they were originally designed for and what they are actually used for. 

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

Labor Cost and the Business Summary

Are you tracking labor cost?

After one of the last trade shows, I came away realizing that there are a number of people that don't use our Employee Time feature.  I'm not sure what the thought is here as it is INCREDIBLY easy to track the employee time keeping in SP-1!

Once you have employees clocked in SP-1 starts tracking the time for each employee.  If you take the time to enter the wage per employee, then SP-1 is also tracking your labor cost!

Labor cost is automatically reported on your BSR (Business Summary Recap), Dashboard, as well as being reported on the MobileDash.  Having these numbers available to you are very important in controlling your costs on a regular basis.

One note, we do find people that are not tracking their salaried employees because they don't clock in / out.  We have the ability to enter the daily salary of those employees in one spot so that it is reported with our labor percentages!  This can be found in Reports | Reports Setup: 1

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

Technology behind SP-1

It appears that it has become a marketing technique for POS companies to report on how much data they can store and handle.  I guess we have always taken for granted that you "over program" based on customer needs.

Just to satisfy curiosity I thought I'd check our statistics and see what we have to show off!  

999,999,999 Total number of customers.

10 email addresses per customer.

10 phone numbers per customer.

4 addresses per customer.

9,999 Total tickets per day.

9,999 Total Menu Groups (Coffee, pizza, ice cream, smoothie, sandwich etc.).

999 Active specialty or signature items per menu group  (Latte, Mocha, Meat lovers, Veggie etc).

999 Active modifiers per menu group (Vanilla, pepperoni, wheat, hot, cold, extra shot etc).

99,999,999,999,999 Inventory items.

99,999 Total employees.

9,999 Active employees at a time. 

5 Cash drawers per workstation.

30 workstations per store.

195,000 Unique price tables as well as flat $ pricing ($1.00, $2.00 etc).

Unlimited Discounts.

Unlimited Coupons.

Total tickets, customer order history and reporting all based on the size of the physical hard drive.

Other neat statistics:  SP-1 has many installations where the customer has been using our software for over 15 years!

Updates?  SP-1 has gone through over 87 version releases (free when you are on support) and over 500 minor program revisions since 1994.

Stability?  Over 6 of our employees have worked for us over 10 years.  Total combined SP-1 experience through Customer Service & Tech Support  is over 80 years!   

How Order Types work in SP-1

How Order Types Work

Order types are an interesting concept in SP-1.  Basically they give you the ability to assign a station to the type of order that will normally be accepted on that station.

This really comes in handy in environments with multiple stations.   For example, in a typical shop you may have:

In this scenario, you have two stations for the front counter and two stations that are used to take phone orders.  By using a default order type we can help speed that service.  So, the phone stations would automatically be set to show the caller id or phone number screen and at the end of the order the type would be pre-set to "Pickup" or "Delivery" (depending on the type of business).    The order type can be changed on the fly as well.

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