As a restaurant owner, you might have run your business in the past without a POS (Point of Sale) system. Undoubtedly, it demanded a lot of effort from you and your staff. Having to write down the order and pass it verbally or by hand to the kitchen staff where it is routed to the appropriate preparation stations. Then, once the order is prepared, which might consist of various dishes and drinks that were prepared in different stations, the order is combined and delivered to the customer. The customer will then have to pay for his meal, if he hasn’t already, and a manually written receipt will have to be prepared and given to him upon his request. All of this and we didn’t even talk about call handling, order changes, order cancellations, deliveries, and all the other day-to-day activities that have to be managed during normal restaurant operations. It is obvious to see why such a manual operation could lead to numerous operational breakdowns since it is highly dependent on human interactions and could lead to frustration between staff members in case a mistake should ever occur in a customer’s order.

With a restaurant POS system however, each member of the restaurant’s staff would have his own authentication credentials and authorization level on the system. This would hold them accountable for any action they perform since their activities are logged in the system and could limit their authorities to the activities they are assigned to. Whenever an order is entered into the system, each item ordered will be printed or displayed on the corresponding preparation station in the kitchen automatically. Whenever a new customer calls, the waiter or waitress attending the call could enter his details into the system with a few clicks so that in the future, if he ever calls again, his details such as his name, address and order history would pop up automatically on the screen facilitating a much quicker and efficient operation.

With the right reporting insights, the business owner can see how his restaurant is performing and eliminate any costs that do not add value. In addition to that, the restaurant owner would be able to determine the fast-moving items and the busy periods of the restaurant so he can manage his resources more effectively. Plenty of reports can be generated from the system and if there is a special requirement, a custom report could be developed.

Our team of consultants at H.A. Consultancies will be happy to assist you in choosing between the different types of software and hardware and identify the best restaurant POS system to meet your needs. H.A. Consultancies has a vast experience in implementing POS solutions across Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

 

 

Running a restaurant business comes with long list of challenges. We regularly get restaurant owners asking us how would installing a POS system would help their business, but they do not want the usual answer of streamlining operations or keeping records of sales. They are more interested in understanding how a POS system would help them with internal control, specifically keeping record of inventories and ensuring that all sales transactions are in fact recorded. If you are one of these restaurant Bahrain owners, please read on.

 

coso cube

Coso cube

 

Internal control is an important factor in running any business. Segregation of duties and physical stock counts are cornerstones of internal control policies. However, with a restaurant, it is a bit more difficult to implement such internal control policies for a simple reason, cooking is an art, not a science. It would be challenging if not impossible to measure exactly how much of each ingredient was used to prepare a dish. While you might start with a recipe, the final dish might need a bit more salt or a little less sugar than what was initially anticipated. So how would a POS system adapt to these variations?

Well, it is not simple. Loading the recipes into the POS system is a first step, however, it is usually an iterative process. During the first few months of installing a restaurant POS system, inventory depletion will have to be monitored closely. It is not unusual to find that there are huge variations between the recipe and the actual consumption. The recipes in the POS system will have to be updated regularly during the first few months to better reflect actual consumption. Even when that is done, however, you should still expect some variations between actual and planned consumption. The idea is to minimize these variations to an acceptable sustainable range.

Once the recipe is locked, it would be easier to track variations in consumption. The POS system Bahrain will calculate the quantities that should be available in the raw materials inventory by deducting the amounts required to prepare each dish that is ordered from the opening inventory. Physical stock counts will still have to be conducted on a regular basis to ensure that all variations are accounted for. If any abnormal variations are noticed, an investigation can be carried out to identify the root cause.

 

Aldelo bahrain POS Summary Report

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of maintaining such a system is accounting for new inventories that are purchased. Reports from the POS Bahrain system will be useless if the data is not accurate. Entering purchases into the system is usually an activity that is overlooked with the hustle and bustle of the day-to-day operations of a restaurant.

With a properly configured system, restaurant owners usually report an increase in profits of about 30%. This increase in profits can be attributed to a variety of reasons. The fact that a POS system exists, in itself, is reason enough for employees to become more conscious about their actions. Kitchen staff will become more careful with the use of ingredients and perhaps become less generous than they previously were. Waiters and cashiers will become more careful when taking and punching in orders because they now know that if they make a mistake, it will all be recorded in the POS system under their name.

At H.A. Consultancies, we take pride in the fact that we are able to help businesses reach their full potential by employing technology that best suites them. There are a variety of POS Bahrain systems available in the market, each with its own set of pros and cons. H.A. Consultancies is a partner with some of the world leading POS system software and hardware providers such as Aldelo Bahrain, Xera POS Bahrain, PixelPoint Bahrain, POSbank Bahrain, and FEC Bahrain. If you are not sure which system is the best match for you, it would be our pleasure to help.

 POS Marketing

A Point of Sale (POS) system is a retail management system that tracks the time and location of sales transactions. It also calculates the amount owed by the customer and provides receipts upon completion of a purchase.

The functionalities of POS systems nowadays have extended vastly. Most point of sales track customer details such as name, phone number, email, address, and purchase history. There are multiple ways to export and collect the customer information from the point to sale either by the point of sale software or by the point of sale database.

 

POS Customer Database

POS Customer Database

 

So, now we have our customer’s details, what is next?

 

DIGITAL RE-MARKETING AND UP-SELLING

 

POS adding customer

POS adding customer

 

Digital Re-marketing is a smart way to connect with customers of your retail store or restaurant who may have not made any recent purchases. This technique aims to enhance brand awareness which should encourage your customers to make more purchases in the future.

While the employees of the retail store or restaurant can always upsell or cross sell while the customer is physically in the shop, a digital marketer would be able to upsell to the customer by highly targeted and personalized advertisements while he is at the comfort of his home. This is made possible thanks to the data gathered and stored on the POS system which allows the digital marketer to analyse customer preferences and purchasing trends.

 

DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS

 

Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing

 

The employees of the retail shop or restaurant must attempt to have the customer leave a trail. Any kind of trail will be beneficial. The customer name for example is essential to produce a more personalized advertisement. Moreover, the employees can try to have the customer’s contact details such as phone number and an email.

Phone numbers can be targeted by bulk SMS messaging platform to enhance the customer experience or to advertise offers and promotions.

While emails can be kept in an email database that can be imported to an email bulk messaging platform such as Mail Chimp.

 

NEED HELP?

 

H.A. Consultancies can provide you with all the point of sale hardware and software needed to start your business. You can visit our Digital Marketing Page to know more about our digital marketing packages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Choosing the best social media marketing platform

Social media has grown to be the most visited platforms on the planet, they even outnumbered the mighty search engine Google.

So, who do not want to increase traffic to their website?

First, we need to understand that there are so many social media platforms to market on. Let us list the most common and most visited social media platforms.

 

social media platforms stats 2017

social media platforms stats 2017

 

As we can see from the figure above, Facebook is dominating the social media monthly active visitors. With over 2 billion active visitors monthly, YouTube with 1.5 billion active users. While Instagram have over 700 million monthly active users and Twitter with 328 Million monthly users.

There are a few social media platforms that did not feature in the figure above like Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+.

 

know your target audience

 

 

To be able to deliver your services, products and content to the right audience, you should consider your existing customer database. What are their ages and genders? What are their behaviors? Should I deliver the same message to all my customers? Or should I segregate them and deliver each segment with an appropriate tone and message.

Google analytics provides an excellent tool to find out who are your audience. So let us look at a sample Google analytics report to find out these main categories.

  • Demographics
  • Interests
  • Geo
  • Behavior
  • Browser & OS

 

 

 

age statistics

age statistics

 

As the figure above shows, most your traffic is between 25 and 34 years old, followed by 18 – 24 years old.

Gender statistics

Gender statistics

As from the gender statistics graph shown, we can know that most our traffic are males with 69.9%.

I also created another customer report to show the age vs gender to determine what’s the gender in each age group.

gender in each age group

gender in each age group

 

The result is:

Most of our traffic are males between the age of 25 to 34, followed by males between 18 to 24. On the other hand, females between the age of 25 to 34 have 11.4% share from the whole traffic.

 

Google analytics can also provide an overview of the interests so the website owner has an overview of the traffic.

 

affinity category reach group

affinity category reach group

 

in market segment

in market segment

 

other category

other category

 

From the figures above the website owner can understand what the interests of the website users are so the marketing campaign should focus on those interests as well.

 

languages by users

languages by users

 

The website owner can also find out the languages of the visitors. As we can see from the figure above, the most used language is English, with a few foreign languages such as Spanish and French.

So, around 12% of the visitors are using different languages than English. Should the site owner consider providing content in that language? Or it seems that they understand English fine and the website owner should not consider focusing on content in another language.

To answer this question, we should consider the bounce rate of non-English segment, also we compare the session time length between English and non-English segment.

 

location by users

location by users

 

What are the services, products and content we want to market? Are we local business that operates locally? Or are we a worldwide service provider? Can we ship our product overseas? These are the type of questions that the marketer of a product, service and content should answer.

There is no benefit to target worldwide reach audience if the product, service or content cannot be delivered worldwide.

 

What kind of content you want to provide

 

there are 3 types of marketing content that you can provide in social media marketing platforms.

  • Video
  • Image
  • Text
  • And of course, a mixture between them

What is the best social media marketing platform to market video content on?

YouTube is the ultimate social media marketing platform for Videos, YouTube default max length is 15 Minutes.

Instagram (60 second video) and Facebook (up to 45 minutes) also can support video content.

What is the best social media marketing platform to market images content on?

Instagram is the best image sharing social media platform out there. Moreover, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn can support image content

What is the best social media platform to market text content on?

Twitter is famous for publishing short message text and Twitter will be a suitable platform to publish short messages.

For more professional services, LinkedIn is the social media platform to market on with more than 500 million professional users. Moreover, more than 85% of Pinterest users are females, so it is a perfect platform to target females.

 

Conclusion

The best social media marketers are the ones that knows their audience, and know where are their target audience are. Also, they know their content and what social media will best present their content. Finally, the most successful ones are the ones who can mix and match these to deliver their content to their audience though the right channels.

 

Moody’s has recently lowered Bahrain’s long-term issuer rating by two notches to B1, from Ba2, and maintained the “negative” outlook. Before venturing into how this will impact the Bahrain’s economy, we need to understand first what is meant by credit ratings.

A credit rating is an assessment of an entity’s ability to pay its financial obligations. the ability to pay financial obligations is referred to as “creditworthiness.” Credit ratings apply to debt securities like bonds, notes, and other debt instruments (such as certain asset-backed securities) and do not apply to equity securities like common stock. Credit ratings also are assigned to companies and governments.

When making investment decisions, credit ratings and any related rating and industry trend reports can be helpful tools, provided they are used appropriately. Credit ratings may offer an alternative point of view to your own financial analysis or that of your financial adviser.

A downgrade to junk status is associated with high risk. Therefore, high borrowing costs. For governments it means allocating more to debt servicing costs (interest payment). Less money will be available for social grants, investment priorities, creating jobs and ultimately reducing the GDP growth potential of the country. More interest payment also crowds out other critical spending. Social services is an example. This is the main reason why a sovereign has to avoid being downgraded into a junk, or sub-investment grade.

 

 

Ratings agencies chart

Ratings Agencies Chart

 

Bahrain was downgraded to junk status by Moody’s back in March 2016 and has been sliding down the scale ever since. With this most recent downgrade it needs to go up four positions before beings considered as investment grade.

The recent downgrade to B1 reflects Moody’s view that the credit profile of the Bahraini government will continue to weaken materially in the coming years. The rating agency expects Bahrain’s government debt burden and debt affordability to weaken further significantly over the coming two to three years.

Although the Bahraini government has taken initial steps towards economic reforms, including lifting some subsidies from fuel and utility tariffs, government restructuring, and increasing fees on government services, these steps are not considered to be aggressive enough in light of the financial challenges. In Moody’s view, the most prominent revenue measure is the introduction of a value-added tax from 2018, but even this measure lacks clarity.

While Moody’s acknowledges the fact that Bahrain’s economy is fairly diversified, with non-oil sectors contributing close to 80% of nominal GDP on average since 2010, it is wary that the government shows no indication that it will use this economic base to materially diversify its revenue base to reduce its reliance on oil-related income which will continue to suffer from weak oil prices in the coming years. Non-oil economic performance will be supported by access to funding under the Gulf Development Fund. While these funds are not part of the Bahraini government’s budget, they will support the government in reducing investment expenditure without unduly harming growth.

 

Comparison of Moody’s Rating for Arab Countries

Comparison of Moody’s Rating for Arab Countries

 

Bahrain’s net asset international investment position, its stock of foreign assets minus foreign liabilities, which stood at 74.5% of GDP in 2016, provides some form of external buffer. However, Moody’s expects it to decline significantly because external liabilities will increase at a much faster rate than the country’s assets. More importantly, foreign exchange reserves at the Central Bank of Bahrain are low and very volatile, covering only around one month of goods and services imports. Following a pause in the dissemination of this data in 2015, the time series disclosed by the central bank more recently shows a material decline in foreign exchange reserves over the last two years, averaging only around $2.5 billion in the first quarter of 2017.

 

RATIONALE FOR THE NEGATIVE OUTLOOK

 

The negative outlook reflects continued downside risks to the B1 rating, which manifest themselves in heightened government and external liquidity risks. Given the expected large fiscal deficits and sizable amortization payments falling due over the coming years, Bahrain’s government gross financing needs will reach more than 30% of GDP over the next two years.

 

Bahrain public debt as percent of GDP

Bahrain Public Debt as Percent of GDP

 

The further deterioration in the government’s balance sheet, combined with continued external debt issuance from other countries in the region expected in 2017-2018, will lower the supply of external funding. In addition, in light of rising global interest rates the cost of funding will go up.

Moody’s expects that the combination of these two factors heightens the risk that finance is obtainable only at much less affordable rates for Bahrain, or potentially reduced amounts. While Moody’s would expect support from neighboring countries in times of crisis, predominantly from Saudi Arabia, there is no clarity about the form and timeliness of this support in the event that external funding dries up.

 

WHAT COULD MOVE THE RATING UP/DOWN

 

Given the negative rating outlook, any upward movement in the rating in the foreseeable future is highly unlikely. However, Moody’s would consider moving the outlook back to stable if a clear and credible fiscal and economic policy response were to emerge, offering the prospect of containing the deterioration in the fiscal balance and government balance sheet. In particular, a stabilization of government debt levels below 90% of GDP, and strengthening of Bahrain’s fiscal and external buffers would be credit-positive. A clear, sizable and timely support from one of its financially stronger neighbors could also contribute to stabilizing the outlook.

Signs of an emerging fiscal or balance-of-payments crisis would exert downward pressure on the rating. In particular, any signs of funding stress or loss of market access would trigger a further rating downgrade. A deterioration in the domestic or regional political environment would also be highly credit negative.