Top 3 Toughest Aspects of Payroll in Singapore

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Pragya Gupta

Assuming Payroll

Often times, companies generate payroll and pay out an entire month’s wages to an employee before the month has ended. We call this assuming payroll. This is how it works: If payroll is generated an the 25th and paid out on the 27th, the manager pays the full month’s wages, up till the 31st, assuming that the employee will make it to work on the last few days. If he doesn’t, the manager needs to deduct his wage in the next month

Assuming payroll is an inefficient and inaccurate way of paying employees. We’ve come across many business owners who do it in Singapore. Most of the time, it’s because they have been doing it for years and have never thought about changing the rule. We help our clients transition from assuming payroll to regular payroll which saves clients money and time. Here is a blog post on exactly how to transition from assuming to regular payroll.

Irregular Clock-in Timings

When an employee clocks in at 8.57am instead of 9.00am, the biometric device records it to the exact minute. Your HR manager needs to manually correct the irregularity because coming in 3 minutes early does not mean that the employee will get paid for those extra three minutes.

The PayrollHero app has a threshold feature that solves this problem. An HR manager can set a threshold: if an employee clocks in between 8.55am and 9.05am, their clock-in time resets to 9.00am, automatically correcting the irregularity that your HR manager would have had to deal with otherwise.

Disparate Systems for Time, Attendance, Scheduling and Payroll

payrollhero-benefits-features Business owners have multiple systems that deal with different HR problems; a biometric device to measure clock ins, a separate Excel sheet that imports data from the biometric device and generates payroll, another Excel sheet that needs to be updated every week with schedules for each employee and a whole other system that employees use to apply for leave. With so many systems to deal with, no wonder an HR manager barely has any time to engage with employees or find innovative ways to overcome Singapore’s labor crunch.

An end-to-end solution that removes any need for multiple devices is exactly what an HR manager needs. PayrollHero allows employees to click selfies on their phone or an iPad in the work site when they clock in. This data is stored in the Cloud and used when payroll is generate by the system. The same app is used when applying for leave or checking schedules for the week. An HR manager can use the app on his laptop, phone or any device with internet connection anywhere in the world and have full control over what is going on at his work site.

While these problems are seen as some of HR managers’ biggest in Singapore, they are faced by managers in the Philippines and pretty much any other place too. Some of the other problems HR managers need to deal with are changing tax laws, a labor crunch and laws against foreign workers in the country.

We hope that this post serves as a solution to some of your biggest HR problems. Do let us know your biggest HR problem and how you are currently dealing with it.

The New Employee PayrollHero Happiness Report

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Pragya Gupta

We recently announced that PayrollHero can generate employee happiness reports for our clients. What does that really mean?

PayrollHero takes in data in the form of selfies that employees have clicked on the app. The selfies are used to evaluate employee happiness by looking for certain metrics and correlating them to other selfies. For example, smiling for photos results in a different set of facial expressions than a serious face.

We know what you’re thinking. What if an employee smiles but isn’t really happy. Faking a smile is not hard and the metrics used to evaluate a real smile are the same as those used to evaluate a fake one. An employee could easily fool the app into thinking that the employee is happy when she really isn’t. Well, faking a smile has its own merits.

A Harvard study showed that a smile – whether fake or real – can be uplifting for one’s emotional well being. Granted, a momentary smile for a selfie certainly does not equate to happiness in life because a smile can be fake; but the act of smiling itself is a positive way to cope with sadness. Our preconceived notion that happiness causes us to smile is not always true. In fact, the reverse of that can work as well. A fake smile may be a better path towards happiness than others. It signals a willingness to stay positive in difficult times instead of suppressing ill feelings.

How does this relate to happiness reports? Well, from a high level, the happiness reports suggest a correlation between smiling and happiness and therefore suggest which employee or work site is the happiest. But with deeper inspection, the reports find a correlation between smiling and employees’ positive attitude. As a manager, you should consider the happiness report as a way of measuring positive sentiments in your workforce.

Finally, PayrollHero can use this data against employee records to find a trend in employee behavior. We can provide insight into whether happier employees are generally more punctual; whether unhappy employees experience a longer commute to work everyday; whether the happiest worksite equals highest earnings. This information is unique to PayrollHero’s data. Companies can leverage on it to make more informed decisions on what it takes to improve their bottom line.

Want to learn more? Contact us to chat further.

What Does It Take To Make Remote Work Work?

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Pragya Gupta

As a business owner, you are bound to look towards expanding your business at some point. In which case, you will have multiple offices at different locations. While you are in one worksite, you will want to stay in touch with employees in your other store locations. Staying connected is essential when your employees are spread out over the map. It’s even more important if your employees work remotely and do not often physically meet you or other employees on a regular basis.

Apps

At PayrollHero, we use a number of apps to facilitate remote work. These apps tie our employees together. We use the apps for face-to face interactions and for quick chats instead of spamming employees’ inboxes. The following apps might be useful for your company too:

Slack: This is the center of all our communication through different departments and offices. Slack allows you to create chat rooms and invite people to them. We use this feature to separate different functions of the team: engineering, business development, etc. Slack is also our metaphorical grapevine. We have chat rooms for random news, general musings and articles or books that anyone wants to share with the team. Slack also allows for private chats, thereby removing the need for emails to coordinate work. Slack is flexible in the sense that it has a number of integrations: Twitter, Mailchimp, appear.in.

Appear.in, Skype, Google Hangouts: Teams can’t function without face-to-face meetings. Bosses benefit from meeting their employees face-to-face in order to gauge their emotional state and general well-being. The app features and video quality differ but essentially they help you conduct online meetings.

Asana, Trello: To ensure that all tasks are tracked and accountable to the relevant employees, we use Asana. These apps are built to suit remote work. Asana allows you to assign tasks in a checklist format whereas Trello breaks down work in the form of projects in which tasks are outlined using cards. Both apps can be accessed online. So you or your employee can work from anywhere in the world and still stay on top of things.

Google Drive, Dropbox for Business: Keeping track of all the documents and sheets created by multiple departments across different worksites is essential. These apps are tailored towards businesses’ storage needs. With a subscription fee, you have access to unlimited storage, data analytics (for Google) and more. Both apps allow you to track who is editing files and what kind of access you want your employees to have for each file or folder.

It’s More Than Just Apps

Making remote work successful is more than having a suite of apps at your disposal. It requires a shift in the way you and your employees think about work. It requires trust in your employees to work even if you’re not monitoring them at the office. We have inculcated some practices that help maintain discipline and structure even when employees work at different locations across the work. Here are some that have helped us:

Morning catch ups: Every morning, at a time suitable to your employees in their respective time zones, each employee summarizes their work in 60 seconds. The format is: what they accomplished yesterday, what they couldn’t complete, what they will do today and roadblocks to completing their work. From the head of the team down to the entry-level employee must be able to summarize their work in under a minute. The meeting is helpful in understanding where the team is going and what can be done to remove roadblocks.

Handbooks: For new employees, or employees that have changed departments, it is hard to catch up to how things are done when the entire department works remotely. Writing down the steps to each task in a handbook and storing it in Google Drive/Dropbox cuts down on confusion and time wasted in connecting with the employee who knows how to do the required task. Handbooks remove any misunderstandings or errors. It is a fool-proof way of ensuring that the business continues in case someone is not available to lend a helping hand.

Using Slack to integrate the team: While Slack can be used to create chat rooms and do work, it is often a great tool to include everyone on the team and talk about common interests. Our chat-rooms like #random and #general are great spaces for employees to share ideas and talk about things outside of work. It is a place to plan outings over the weekend or share movie reviews. These conversations pull the team together and allow for cross-departmental interaction; something that could be missing while everyone is focusing on work.

Finally, making remote work possible is about using apps to their maximum capacity and reviewing if they work or not. Managers need to be more mindful of their employees. Employees in turn need to make a conscious effort to stay on top of their work because remote work often results in the blurring of personal and professional life. Altogether, making remote work work is hugely beneficial to employees. All it takes is a little tweaking of the way things are usually done.

Changi’s Terminal 4: A Traveler’s Escapade

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Pragya Gupta

singapore airport restaurants Singapore’s Changi Airport is building its fourth terminal which is scheduled to open in 2017. Terminal 4, now 70% complete, will see 16 million passengers through the year. That’s an estimated total of 82 million passengers once T4 operates in full swing. We are super excited to see what Changi has in store for us, considering Terminals 1-3 have movie theaters, a butterfly garden, a 4 storey tall slide (a.k.a the tallest slide in Singapore) and who knows what else.

T4 will be a two storey building and 190, 000 square meters: the size of around 27 football pitches. This S$1.82 billion project is not just exciting for passengers. It is a massive opportunity for retailers and F&B outlets as well. With 17,000 square meters floor space devoted solely towards retail, there is plenty to look forward to. Changi has announced that the retail space will offer the most innovative design, offering customers a differentiated shopping experience.

In fact, everything about Terminal 4 is about giving commuters an enhanced experience at the airport. It starts with increasing productivity through its FAST@Changi concept. Fast And Seamless Travel (FAST) will reduce the need for manpower and increase the speed of check-in and immigration procedures. To facilitate this, Changi will have self check-in, self baggage tagging and automated baggage drop terminals. Facial recognition and biometric technology will reduce the number of security guards employed for manual visual checks at multiple checkpoints. If we haven’t said it enough before, here is another example of how technology is reducing the need for labour, saving time and money, all in one go.

Imagine entering an airport and walking straight to your gate without having to constantly pull out your boarding pass and passport to clear security checkpoints. Or if you’re anything like me, imagine all the extra time you’ve now got at duty free stores because you took just a couple of minutes checking in!

This is exactly what retail and F&B outlets are looking forward to. The FAST concept gets 16 million passengers through the doors of Terminal 4. It also gives these passengers more time on the retail floor to shop and dine. While designing the new concept, Changi switched on its ridiculously client focused side and implemented recommendations from the public on the theme. The design shows off Singapore’s local culture and heritage. The Peranakan-inspired storefront facades are just an example of what the walk – through concept at T4 will look like.

With a year and a half left till T4 opens, we know the retail space is dedicated to 80 outlets. It is still too early to tell which brands will be occupying the space. The amount of traffic that these stores will face in the initial period depends on the number of airlines that T4 will service. Changi has announced 6 airlines that will have access to T4: Cathay Pacific, AirAsia Berhad, Thai AirAsia, Indonesia AirAsia, Vietnam Airlines and Korean Air. In the year 2014, these 6 airlines added a total of 7 million passengers to the airport. A few more airlines will join these 6, resulting in an estimated 10 million passengers in the first year of operations. We’re looking forward to more updates on T4 and will keep you updated about the retail and F&B world inside T4!

Creative Destruction in the F&B Industry

Posted on July 16, 2015 by Pragya Gupta

Creative Destruction in the F&B Industry Creative destruction, a term coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942, is the concept of “incessant product and process innovation mechanism by which new production units replace outdated ones.” Schumpeter says that disruption is an important part of capitalism because it increases productivity.

As the term suggests, creative destruction isn’t a particularly comfortable concept, especially for those who are on the wrong side of it. The invention of the steam engine led to the creative destruction of travel by horses. The invention of automobiles led to the creative destruction of travel by steam engines. It’s an inevitable result of innovation which can make complete industries obsolete, and take thousands of jobs along with it. The positive outcome is that it creates new industries and redefines jobs within them.

So where is all of this going? McDonald’s recently announced its plan to install self ordering kiosks, thereby reducing manpower in their outlets. It’s not the only company to make a move towards automation. Chili’s Grill and Bar has made a move towards self ordering tablets. Restaurants in the US find automation a way to improve productivity.

There already exists a machine that creates 360 gourmet hamburgers in an hour. The entire machine could replace any human making burgers in the kitchen. According to this report, McDonald’s could fund the development of a burger making machine and see a one year return on investment. There are many reasons why companies are moving towards automating their processes.

In the United States, a big reason for this is the growing cost of labour. Currently, the minimum wage in the US is $7.25 per hour. For a few years now, workers in the F&B industry have protested that this number is far too low for it to be sustainable. They say that the reasonable wage floor should be at $15 per hour. LA recently passed legislation for $15 per hour.

The result of this is that fast food franchises are finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the labour costs. The alternative is to automate. Mundane and repetitive tasks can be done by smart machines. Jobs where human interaction is required, like serving food, can be taken up by people. Another reason why automation makes sense is that it’s more efficient and faster. Queues are shorter, human errors are less common, if not completely erased.

You can see parallels in the F&B industry between the US and countries like Japan and Singapore. On the one hand, labour costs are increasing in the US, forcing companies to automate. On the other hand, Japan and Singapore are facing a labour crunch often due to unwillingness of the countries’ citizens to participate in this industry, leading these countries to automate as well. The story is the same, where labour as a factor of production is being replaced by machines that can do the same work and produce better results. And this is where creative destruction fits in.

What does this mean for the F&B industry? Restaurant technology will develop and will facilitate automation. The hamburger machine by Momentum Machines, Inc is just the beginning in the back-end of a restaurant. POS systems, self ordering kiosks, cloud based scheduling applications and online reservation websites are taking over the work of regular staff in a restaurant. An entire ecosystem of automation surrounding retail and F&B already exists but what will trigger the momentum of creative destruction is the lack of a sustainable solution to the problem of increasing costs: in this case, the cost of labour.

Food Hygiene Regulations in Singapore

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Pragya Gupta

nea

In Singapore, food hygiene is monitored by the National Environment Agency (NEA). All food retail businesses must be registered to the NEA and regulated by the organization to prove that any food sold or produced by the food retail businesses is safe for consumption (retail businesses include restaurants, cafes, and more but excludes hawker centres).

Grading System

The NEA grades food service establishments based on personal and food hygiene and housekeeping of the premises. The grade must be displayed somewhere within the premises where it can be visible to the public. This is a method for the NEA to encourage establishments to improve their grade by adopting better practices. The assessment of the premises by the NEA results in the following grades:

A – a score of 85% or higher
B – a score of 70% to 84%
C – a score of 50% to 69%
D – a score of 40% to 49%

In order to help food service establishments to improve their cleanliness, the NEA has published the Food Handler’s Handbook and other practices and guiding materials.

Points Demerit System (PDS)

The PDS system is used in order to establish precedence for revoking licenses. Offences are categorized as minor, major and serious. Offences lead to demerit points. If an establishment collects 12 demerit points within 12 months, the establishment can be suspended for 2 to 4 weeks or its license can be revoked based on previous records. However this is a general guideline. The punishment differs for the type of establishment. For example, coffeeshops, food courts and canteens that accumulate 12 points over 12 months will be suspended for three days. Here is a detailed list of offences and the demerit points that they cost.

Food Handlers

The term food handlers refers to any person who is directly involved with food preparation: like the chefs, sous chefs, kitchen assistants, staff that handles beverages. Food handlers need to be registered by the NEA. As the owner of the establishment, you need to register all food handlers by filling up this form and submitting it to the nearest Regional Office. To find your nearest Regional Office, you must call 1800-2255 632 (1800-CALL NEA). In order to qualify as a food handler, a basic food hygiene course must be completed. The Food & Beverage Workforce Skills Qualification (WSQ) takes 6 hours of course work and 1.5 hours of assessment. Upon completion of assessment, the food handles will be given a Statement of Attainment. There are 2 subsequent refresher training sessions after 5 years and 10 years. The details on refresher training are on this page.

Food Safety Management System (FSMS)

The FSMS is used to ensure that manufacture, distribution and storage of food is safe for consumption. Every food service establishment must have an FSMS plan. The components of the plan are the following:

1. FSMS Plan

a. Flow diagram: with Critical Control Points identified

b. Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points: charts for Critical Control Points (CCPs)

2. “WSQ Apply Food Safety Management System for Food Service Establishments” Certificate (Statement of Attainment)

For more information on the FSMS and the requirements for your FSMS plan, click here. The link also gives information on different rules for new caterers and caterers that need to renew their license.

Finally, the NEA along with Spring Singapore has created a Singapore Standard for food service establishments so that they can make their FSMS plans by referring to the guideline. The guideline is $42 and can be purchased here. The process of creating the FSMS plan involves a workshop which includes 14 hours of course work and 5 hours of assessment.

That sums up the brief introduction to food hygiene regulations in Singapore. Hope that helps!

4 Job Boards to Hire Your Best Recruits in Southeast Asia

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Pragya Gupta

unnamed-1 Today, there are a mind boggling number of channels to use while searching for the best candidate to join your team. In Singapore, the number one channel for recruiters to hire employees is through an online jobs portal. The other Southeast Asian nations are catching up to the trend. Which means, not only do you have to post in multiple online portals, you also have to stand out from every other company in your industry because everyone is using the most popular channel. We want to help you with that. Here we have a list of jobs portals, both conventional and specialized, for restaurant and retail owners to recruit staff.

Recruitasia: This website is devoted to the hospitality sector in Singapore. This is a great site for very specific roles for your establishment. It also provides industry news so that you can stay ahead of the curve when you are recruiting. Currently, the website is in beta stage. During this stage, jobs can be posted free of charge while the website is adding new features and receiving customer feedback to improve their application procedure.

JobsDB: This website runs ads in many Southeast Asian countries: Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and China. In Singapore, it currently has 300 positions posted on the website under F&B. In the Philippines, the site features 960 positions. Every recruiting ad costs SGD 99. However, JobsDB is turning over all Job ads to JobStreet.com.ph in order to streamline the two recruiting sites into one.

JobStreet.com: JobStreet runs in Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Currently, the Singapore site is featuring approximately 800 vacant positions in the F&B industry.This is the largest recruitment website in the Philippines and one you cannot miss while posting ads. The Philippine website is currently running a promo package that is 40% off the standard price (the standard price being PHP 5,600). The Singapore website runs 3 packages, based on number of ads you want to post and how long you want them to stay live. The price ranges between SGD 180 to SGD 400.

Kalibrr Kalibrr: This startup recruitment website works on a completely different pricing strategy. Instead of charging employers per ad, the ads are free and the database is open for employers to find their best candidate. They are charged a minimal fee of PHP 50 only when they want to contact the candidate. This company is becoming increasingly popular in the Philippines with around 1000 applicants signing up every day. Kalibrr features restaurants and retail as the most popular searches. (Disclosure, both Mike Stephenson and Stephen Jagger of PayrollHero are investors in Kalibrr)

These four are a few of the most popular recruiting website in Southeast Asia. We hope this list is useful and do let us know if you have any additions to the list that are unconventional or special to the retail or restaurant industries.

How to Get an Import License in Singapore

Posted on June 4, 2015 by Pragya Gupta

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How do you import the best ingredients for that awesome burger?

Scenario 1: Your restaurant is up and running. We’ve got your back with the liquor license. But now, you want to introduce a new segment to your restaurant: modern Japanese. You realize you need to import supplies in order to wow your customers.

Scenario 2: You are running a grocery store and want to sell imported products: meat, fish, eggs, processed food. Your supplies are coming in from all over the world and the suppliers are ready for business.

Your imported supplies need to be approved by Singapore Customs. You need an import license before you do anything else. How do you proceed?

Step 1: You need to register with Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority of Singapore (AVA). But before that you must make sure of the following:

Ensure that the imported products comply with the General Classification of Food and Food Products
Do note that importing fresh table eggs require an additional screening process to ensure that you have complied with the storage requirements. More on this here.
Make sure that the food establishment that is exporting food to Singapore is accredited by AVA. You can check here if the country or food establishment you are importing from is accredited by AVA.
An active Unique Entity Number (UEN) with Singapore Customs. To learn how to activate your customs account, click here.
A GIRO account for the payment of fees

Step 2: Submit an application to AVA through the e-licensing website. You can apply for a license to import meat, fish products, fresh fruits, vegetables and table eggs. To import processed food products and food appliances, you have to register on the same website (no license).

Step 3: You must pay for your license via GIRO

Here are the charges for licensing and registration fees:

License for Import/Export/Transshipment of Meat and Fish Products	SGD 84/year	Normal Service: 1 working day to processExpress Service: Same day processing. Pay an additional fee equal to the cost of your licence
Licence for Import/Transshipment of Fresh Fruits and Vegetables	S$378 per annum	Normal Service: 1 working day to processExpress Service: Same day processing. Pay an additional fee equal to the cost of your licence
Licence to Import Table Eggs	Free	5 working days to process
Registration to Import Processed Food Products and Food Appliances	Free	1 working day to process.

The process is straightforward and quick.

What To Do After The 3rd Store Grand Opening

Posted on June 4, 2015 by

Image by decor8blog.com

Success in your business would mean it’s time to expand, but this feat does not come without it’s own set of challenges.

After interviewing 3 different owners for our Retail/ Restaurant Executive Series, I’ve learnt that they all faced similar challenges in management, as soon as they’ve reached their 3rd store opening.

Here are some of the problems and solutions used by our retail/ restaurant executives when managing multiple store locations.

Keep Calm

Managing multiple locations means using technology to cut down on travel expenses

Implementing a different management system is necessary when you have several stores to oversee. Although it is not impossible, but it takes a lot of effort for you to constantly schedule your travel time to supervise different stores at different locations. Travel costs will pile up even more if your stores are located at different countries.

Getting your hands on free, cheap or available SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions will be save your company a chunk of money. While some businesses have their own custom- built software platforms as collaborative platforms, some of the more commonly-used tools are available online and widely used by small business owners. Some of the best cost saving productivity tools are available online- free or at low monthly costs like Google Documents, Skype, PipelineDeals.com.

As mentioned by our retail executive Andrew Masigan, owner of The Advent Manila Hospitality Group in the Philippines, he advice that “the trick is to put the important systems in place… the efficiency your company’s chain-of-command largely determines
how well your stores operate”.

Managing multiple locations means having putting a system in place

“You must have systems in place to be able to standardize the quality of your communications, products and results,” says Bert Martinez, founder of Bert Martinez Communications. Ensuring a strong internal system of operations would mean that you can save costs on training and reduce time required for supervision. Each employee will have a clear understanding of their responsibilities and boundaries.

In our interview with Adrien Desbaillets, President at SaladStop, he says that “a strong infrastructure is required to support the operation. Overheads start to escalate and a strong focus on SOPs, training, technology is required.” The point here is then to make each employee’s responsibility crystal clear through an organised structure and combine that with a system that measures each person. That way, everyone is accountable for delivering their work regardless of which location they are based at.

Managing multiple locations means shifting from micro management to systematized macro management

Before, Eileen Grey– owner of The Picture Company in the Philippines, didn’t need to think about an entire infrastructure when she opened her first store. She recalls it being just “very personal and mom and pop” until her 3rd store opening. Now she has to consider personnel training, back office space, production, logistics and others.

Having systems and technology in place is good for the business, but it wouldn’t help much if there is no focus on communication. Establishing good communication practices within the whole business is key to collaborate with offices at different locations, co-workers and clients.

Good tips to foster good communication between offices at different locations can include using webcams during weekly team meetings or webinars so team members can see each other, establish a daily reporting system online and use a centralized task management software like Asana, Trello and others.

(Read on how PayrollHero stays in sync with our other offices across the globe)

PayrollHero can help you efficiently manage your multiple business locations and cut down on costs. Talk to us about our business or meet us at our next Meetup!

What is the future of POS for retail?

Posted on May 25, 2015 by

Image by squareup.com

The mobile point of sale system seems to be the buzzword circling around today’s retail industry. But the real question is if the mobile POS system is going to take over the traditional hardware?

We have notice recently that there is a movement towards the mobile POS option, however most retailers still find comfort with the traditional hardwired POS system for their business. Probably for this simple reason- business owners find the traditional machine more familiar to manage, secure and it comes with all the bells and whistles (eg, bar code scanner, receipt printer) at one price.

But do small businesses need to invest a large sum of money to get an all-in-one POS system from the get go? Or would it be wiser to have software that grows with your business, and add to the hardware as they need it?

Let’s think about the concerns of a business owner when choosing the right POS system.

The most common concern shared by most owners is that the traditional hardware gives them the sense of security and familiarity. The POS machine itself is built to withstand the daily grind of business. The POS is plug-in to a power point and does not require charging. The mobile POS system option can only last up to 3-4 hours on the phone or tablet, after which an hour downtime to charge. For a restaurant, this arrangement might not be suitable because POS system must be up and running from start to finish.

Next, a report by the Federal Reserve reveals that security concerns is another main reason why traditional POS system triumphs over mobile systems. Identity theft has been the top complaint on the Federal Trade Commission’s list of complaints for 13 years in a row. This shows that when it comes to credit card transactions, owners have more trust in POS systems than the mobile systems.

Additionally, the mobile system depends completely on the signal strength from wireless provider or a Wi-Fi connection which isn’t as reliable and secure compared to a hardwired connection. While some owners are skeptical about mobile POS not having security to protect cardholders data, business owners can be assured that mobile apps like Square adhere to the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

Another worry with mobile devices being small, it can be easily misplaced or stolen. Comparable to the bulky POS system- it is definitely harder to run out the door with that.

But, owners might not need to choose after all.

Although POS systems might be the better option for retail businesses, it doesn’t mean that the mobile software should be disregarded. The smart business owner would see these 2 systems as mutually exclusive and use both methods to provide better service and enhance customer experience. One does not need to replace the other.

Take for example, a restaurant having their waitresses carry personal tablets to ring up food orders at the table within seconds, that information is also automatically reflected on the main POS system. By cancelling out the time they would usually take to key every order at the machine- this saves time on service and improves workflow. The customer can then physically pay for their meal using the traditional POS system at the cashier once they are done.

Retail outlets in Singapore are doing just that! Taking customer experience to another level through an integrated POS system. Restaurants like Sakae Sushi improves efficiency and flow by installing iPad Minis at the table for customers to ring up orders on their own, without waiting for a waitress. The central POS system at the cashiers handles all the payments after customers are ready to pay for their meal.

iPad Mini for food orders at Sakae Sushi

Central POS system at Sakae Sushi

Saving costs with technology. The integrated POS system at your restaurant or retail outlet, would mean that business will need less employees to wait on customers. Service has become self-sufficient.

Last words. It makes sense for business owners to combine the familiarity and security of traditional POS system with the added features from the mobile system to enhance efficiency and customer experience. Although it is important to consider when integrating software into your service; and depending on the nature of the business, reducing the number of staff in place of machines could also mean you will lose the human touch in your service.

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