On Friday/Saturdays or any peak times you will be inevitably faced with turning away customers, more so if your staff are inexperienced. A good restaurant EPOS system can definitely help and you can combined this with efficient management to really help your business succeed.

This situation is even more evident for destination restaurants with a mix of walk in and advance reservations. However, when handled correctly you can very easily increase your turnover by a 20%-30% with a relatively simple analysis of your current business trends and some changes to your reservation-taking practices.

You just need to follow our simple guide – please note – this guide is based around using an eatPOS EPOS though the analysis may be possible with other systems, but of course we recommend the eatPOS cloud POS point of sale system (why make your life harder!).

Study the trends using the back office reporting find your busiest periods, which should correspond to when you’ve been turning away the most customers in your restaurant. Perhaps ask staff to record when this is so you can verify against the cloud back-office reporting.

Find out, of the tables in that period, what the split was between walk-ins and advance reservations.

Now, if you find a significant proportion, say, over 25%, were from advanced reservations, then you can easily increase you turnover as above by simply asking them to go for the slot closest to their time but when it is quieter for you.

Obviously, during quieter times, you can provide a more personalized and dedicated service. Remind the customers of this (especially larger parties) and they will most likely be happy with that and will take the alternative time!

The last thing you want to do is to have a restaurant full of reserved table and find that you are turning away walk-in customers. Again, we touched on this in one of our previous articles.

Now, this is not a silver bullet, and may require a bit of tweaking, but it is a relatively pain-free process and made much easier with a good Takeaway Epos system.

Not everyone will be happy to change their timings but you will find most will be happy to do so in return for the promise of better service in a quieter period.

Obviously if you feel that you are going to lose that booking, you might want to take a view on whether to just allow that booking to proceed in their originally requested timeslot!

eatPOS EPOS can certainly help with this process with clear, concise reporting that allows you to easily identify busy periods.