Need Help From Point Of Success Users

Pizza Shop Talk The Think Tank
1

About 2 months ago I replaced my old DOS pos with Point Of Success and all appeared to be going well or so I thought.

I researched for over 2 years and looked at many systems before deciding on Point of Success.
One of the key issues I know I addressed prior to making my selection. was that of rounding up of the topping count. I can only assume that the rep and I were not on the same page when we discussed this.

The system will not round up the topping count for pricing.

We charge by topping count, as do most places
Any time there is an odd half topping the application should charge for a whole topping.
If the customer orders a sausage with ½ onions we want to charge for 2 topping.
Point Of Success will actually calculate ½ the price of the topping and only charge that amount.

My customers are used to this pricing and we all know it takes just as much labor to put onions on half the pizza as the whole thing.

I have talked to Jeff at Point of Success who while being helpful admitted that the soft ware will not do this

This is a popular pricing strategy for operators so I find it odd that Point Of Success doesn’t support it.

I am quite pleased with everything about the system and Jeff did say this would be a consideration for future issues. Meanwhile I am losing $30-40 weekly because I cant charge for the whole topping.
I still believe Point Of Success to be an excellent value with great support. And if you don’t need to adopt this pricing strategy I would highly recommend it.

Do any of you Point of Success users have a work around for this??

2

I’m not a user, but an awkward work-around could be to create a whole new category of toppings that are “half at full price” for the odd halfs. If would be tricky to account for them as the phone conversation goes on . . . but it could be done.

Set them to record full price, but read on the printout and receipt as half toppings. Just a thought.

3

Al,

Why would you charge you customer full price if they only receive half the topping?
I understand that you may have them used to this pricing but why?
I guess it’s like filling up 1/2 or 3/4 of your gas tank and being charged for the full tank.
Just my thoughts as a possible consumer.

Good luck!

4

We do use Point of Success, but we do not charge full price for a 1/2 topping on a pizza. I agree with NicksPizza though that you could work around it by creating extra buttons that say “1/2 Onion”, but you would need to have three buttons for each topping: for example, “Onion”, “Half 1 Onion”, and “Half 2 Onion”, because you would have to be able to distinguish between pizzas where the customer wants, for example, “Bacon and Onion on the same half” versus “Bacon on one half and Onion on the other”.

It seems to me that it would just be easier to charge 1/2 price. You are using half of the normal amount of toppings, so your food cost is different for a 1/2 topping, and in my opinion, it takes less time to put a topping on half of the pizza versus the whole pizza (at least for most toppings) so your labor costs would not be exactly the same.

Just my thoughts.

5

No help here really, except for supporting your pricing.
I use Firefly, and it’s a basic configuration option to charge the pizza at the rate of the “most expensive half”.
Also, kinda nifty, it lets us handle quarters and thirds too.

6

There are a number of ways to look at this. First are you using a super button for pizza? If you are the you could use the onion topping button and a comment button to say onions on half. You colud also progran the super button to charge for the most expensive portion meaning that if tyou have 1/2 loaded and 1/2 cheese the pizza charges the loaded price for the full pizza.

7

I’m not familiar with Point of Success, but have ideas that may help you. First I need to know exactly how you are trying to price. I understand that a cheese pizza with half pepperoni should be priced the same as if it had pepperoni on the whole pizza. Now what if it has pepperoni on one half and sausage on the other half? Are you trying to price it as one or two toppings? If those same two toppings are on the same half how do you price it? My experience with Vital Link has made me learn how to cope with a variety of stupid half topping priceing that in my mind do not fit the norm. Let me know more of your pricing structure and I probably know a way around it to price correctly.

8

SHOULD OF BOUGHT REVENTION POS WOULD OF SOLVED ALL PROBLEMS THEY WOULD OF CHANGED THE PROGRAM TO FIT YOUR NEEDS!!!

9

Would have promised changes and would still be waiting to see them

10

Let me clarify Al’s situation a little for you:

He’s rounding up the number of toppings for a pizza like this:

one half topping, charge for one full topping
two half toppings, charge for one full topping
three half toppings, charge for two full toppings
four half toppings, charge for two full toppings

Basically, the topping charge is rounded up to the nearest full topping. This happens no matter what portion of the pizza has the topping. Charging for toppings in this way is not what I would call “common,” but it is done in some pizzerias

He is using the superbutton for pizza and it does have the ability to charge for the most expensive half. This will work perfectly as long as the half-pie toppings are not all on one half of the pizza. .

The philosophy behind this pricing is not to gouge the customer, but to be paid for the extra work, logistics and potential errors that come with partial pie toppings. I have had to remake partial-pie topping pizzas many times, so I know it can be a problem!

To recover some of the cost involved in partial-pie toppings, some pizzerias charge a little more than half of the full topping price, but less than the full topping price. That’s where Point of Success’ advanced pricing calculation can help, but it won’t solve Al’s problem. If Al wants to change the way he charges a premium for partial-pie toppings, this will work perfectly.

A work-around would be to have Point of Success calculate prices for a half-pie topping by dividing the full topping price by two, then place one button on the menu that would be used to charge for the extra half topping when rounding up to the nearest full topping. For example, two half toppings would charge the full topping price automatically, but when three half toppings were ordered, then the extra halt topping charge button would be used to add that extra half-topping charge.

If anyone has another idea for a work-around or a suggestion for Al to help him recover some of the cost for partial-pie toppings, jump in anywhere!

11

Thank you all for your response

I looked at many fine POS systems. Point Of Success represents a great value, has plenty of reports and. the support is great. Always professional and when they say they are going to get back to you, they get back to you!

Daddio : I do use the super button for the pizza and yes it can be programmed to charge for the most expensive portion. However when you do this the applicaton will charge full price for the topping that go on thae sme side
IE Large Pizza ½ saug and mush same side will be charged for 2 toppings.
It will charge for 2 full toppings and at this point we want only to charge for 1 topping.

Nicks Pizza,SaraH: Your correct any extra buttons or keystroke would be too awkward and time consuming and not an acceptable solution. We want to make the order taking process as easy as possible for the customer and especially the server.

Pizzapad:
This is an accepted pricing strategy in my area used by all my competition. I believe for me to educate the customer that we charge less would not result in any perceived value or increase in sales
And it is a labor issue. We don’t portions our veggies. Throw a hand full of mushrooms or onions on a pizza NEATLY ½ or whole and get that pizza in the oven! (Lets go, chop chop, quit talking, move it, its Friday night I got 20 tickets on the board!!). Sometimes it even takes longer to do half. More thought and precision involved.

Paul7979: what we want to accomplish is:
Large Cheese and sausage= charge for 1 topping
Large cheese ½ sausage= charge for 1 full topping
Large Cheese ½ sausage, other side ½ mush= charge for 1 topping
Large Cheese ½ sausage and mushrooms (on same side)= charge for 1 topping
Large Cheese all sausage, ½ mush= Charge for 2 toppings.

On a side note Point Of Success has nearly paid for itself. Although in a sad way. I had to fire my assistant manager of 7 years for stealing. Point of Success allowed me to track all her voids and deletions and coordinate the times to the videos. Its sad because I really liked this person and the money was going up her nose.

Again thank you all for your help and taking the time to respond.
And Jeff, thank you again for your concern. I know I made the right choice with Point Of Success.
It looks as I may have to do a bit more up selling and I hope this might be a consideration for a future release.

Al

12

Here’s your solution, kind of a pain in the a$$ until everyones trained right, but it will get your pizzas priced properly. Ithink this is the same as what Jeff explained towards the bottom of his post. Add another topping to your list called Nul Topping or whatever you care to name it. if someone wants a 1/2 sausage pizza you need to take the order as 1/2 sausage and 1/2 nul topping. Have this set to print just a period(.) on your makeline monitor and on your box lables so as not to throw off your pizza makers or oventender. After a bit of training, it will become habit and you won’t even realize that you’re doing it.

By the way Jeff, this policy is not so uncommon. This is the same way that Dominos, and Papa Johns price their pizzas as well as many of us indys that got our start at these places.

13

The way I set it up was in the settings, it asks if you should charge partial price for partial toppings, I set it to charge partially as to how much somebody wants, however I believe that you can deselect charging portion price as a portion of the total.

SECOUND, how did you track the deletions by your assistant manager so fast. how could you tell that the manager was deleting orders to pocket money and not for legitimate reasons.

also does this system keep drivers from being able to delete there own orders.

and lastly is it possible to set up the pos system to require closeing out the cash in the drawer before continuing on to closing out the day. this would probably keep managers from taking the extra cash at the end of a day, or deleting orders so as not to show a loss on the over short sheet, or just flat out delete orders to pocket cash at the end of the day.

14

Paul:
I now understand your idea and it might work. I rather eliminate as many keystrokes as possible but as you said if we could get everyone trained it should not be much of a problem. Until it sinks in I know we will have pizzas with the topping on the whole instead of the half. Thank you again for you help.

Tommy C:
I did try to use the partial price in the partial toppings setup. When I did the application would charge double for any toppings put on the half side of the pizza.

First I noticed money missing from my coin safe. Only 3 people have access and I am one.
At first the drawers were just short and she would indicate this on the reports. When questioned she would just say she didn’t know. Then the reports would be balanced but the actual count in the drawers would be short. We typically leave money in the drawers for the next day start up. Never been an issue. The shortages would be $20-30 and as time went on the shortages increases. I like this person. She started with me when she was 15 so she grew up in my store. I was in denial.

Point Of Success has an event log and tracks all deletions voids, times and ticket numbers. Additionally the till closing report shows of all transactions on the drawer, by server, time, amount tendered and change given. On a slower day you should be able to know how many of each denomination of bills you should have in the drawer .

I have 2 cameras in my store and everyone knows that for the past several years they have not been functional. Well I bought a new VCR and set the timer at the start of her shift. The cameras and VCR are in plain view and I even had to turn the VCR with the back facing out so you wouldn’t see the record light illuminated. I watched about 6 days of tape and you wouldn’t believe the slight of hand going on at the register. (Also all the slacking when your not there). You could plainly see for example a customer would come in and be handed 3 pizzas and she would go back and forth through five or six screens deleting 2 pizzas and charge the customer for 3. Many times the money wouldn’t go into the drawer and I’m not really sure where it went. I think she would stash it under the phone until no one was around and she could snatch it. She was sneaky and fast. And getting better at it. After the customer would leave she would do a little end zone dance to celebrate her score.

The final transaction completed on the last day she worked she deleted 4 orders of hot wings, charged the customer for them rang up an order of bread sticks. She got me for about 60 bucks that day.

The VCR does not have a time stamp so I went though the dumpster and pulled out as many of the original make tickets as I could. Now that I had the times and I could coordinate everything with the actions on the tape to fit it all together.

A nice feature with Point Of Success is the many levels of security one can set up. So I believe you can restrict the drivers from deleting there own orders.

You can do a drop at any time from the cash drawers. (this will be all tracked for you on the closing report)In fact I believe you can setup an alert to tell you when you reach a specified limit in each drawer.