Portion control | Inventory and Item Cost Management with Recipes

This video covers a feature used by restaurants, as well as butchers and locations that need to build costs for items that they sell. If an item you sell, is comprised of several items that you buy, this is a great option for you.

As you can see the cost controls of this feature allow you track the usage of your underlying items, track their inventory and stop doing all the guess work. Know for sure, and know how to ensure your products are properly managed, there is no theft or waste that has gone unaccounted for.

How to make it happen: inputing recipes can take some work

We suggest you dedicate an hour or more of your time time on your schedule to list out the items you purchase into excel, then import all the products into the POS. This way you can have anyone work on getting your list of items together, make a column for the name, the cost the count, the vendor and the category. You can then spend the time after that making the recipes for groups of items, or for individual items. This will not affect your business on the sales side, it help your analysis however once you get your recipes input.

Data Protection for Your Point of Sale System

This is a three part series of data and system protection. It's goal is to make you a bit more aware of how to ensure your system is running consistently and how to recover from errors such as corrupt date, virus's and hardware failure.

In this first part we'll focus on data backup.

The Basics about Point of Sale Backup

CCS's primary data backup is in c:\backups of your primary computer. In order to ensure that the data is backed up daily when you close your day, you should close the day from your primary computer, or you should use another backup software to backup the system.

You may use our remote backup software, so that's important to understand that it's running and that you periodically check with us. If someone uninstalls it or if the software is stopped, we won't know. We only know when there is a transmission failure or the software alerts us itself. So it's good to set a schedule to check with us regarding the data backup.

Finally, you can also use some free applications like sqlbackupandftp to generate your own scheduled backup service to local backup drives. You can also use some software to backup to dropbox, google drive and other online services. All of these are very cost effective.

So we just want to stress to you, it's important to schedule yourself to check on your backups, and make sure that you have a backup located not on the computer itself, you can email backups, you can copy them to a usb drive. There are multiple options.

If you want more tech spec's on the backup services, please check out this page: http://cafecartel.com/kb/doku.php?id=guides:maintenance:start:back_up

If you have any questions, please let us know. We'll be here to help.

Reviewing your Virus plan. Protect from ransomware for your Point of Sale Systems

This is part 2 in our discussion of system management and data security.

Newer virus's pose a greater threat than older ones. Previously, if you received a virus, it might freeze your computer, or slow it down, or pop up a bunch of adds you didn't like.

It might have even been worse, for your operating system might not have been able to boot up.

Ransom ware is the new threat you can't ignore

At this point, if you use your point of sale for anything other than POS you are in danger of being high jacked by something worse than a normal virus you are used to. 93% of phishing emails are centered around ransomware. Websites, and other ways to receive viruses are now focusing more on ransomware. Ransomware puts a stranglehold on your operations if you don't have protection plan.

If you think a virus scanner will save you, then you might want to ride Titanic II

You should have four things to protect you against Ransomeware:

The only way to avoid the pitfalls of viruses are the following things.

• Virus Plan - Though it's not 100 percent going to ensure your success, it will prevent most attacks, it will provide a high level of security, and it's required for PCI Compliance.
Backup Plan - Make sure you store your data on a protected source, separate from the impingement that your computers can attack. Just because you have a backup file, doesn't mean it's safe.
• Get off XP Pro or XP 2009 - If you are using an older operating system, get off it now, these kinds of attacks will dramatically increase over time and they will first do so on older systems.
• Redundancy - have more than one POS System. Not only is this a good idea for your business, but if your POS System is down, you can't run your business. A ransomware attack means you'll need to resolve that prior to using the computer