In a restaurant, there are lots of moving parts that’s involved for it’s performance. Having a restaurant restaurant POS Software can greatly help in managing staff attendance and performance, the inventory system, accounting and customers’ details, can help any retail business owner improve business performance. How is that? A restaurant POS software has powerful tools that can manage employee and customer information as well as increases both efficiency and profits.

Customer Satisfaction Can Increase Profit

Customer satisfaction is an important factor for any restaurants, bars, casinos, hotels and convenient stores, by meeting your customers’ expectations on your products or services, you’ll get a higher chance of customer return. The more customer returns you get, the higher your profit is! So you have to make sure your employees are accurately giving orders, providing assistance to customers and make an overall great performance all the time. Using a POS software, with touch screen technology, can greatly increase ordering accuracy and decrease ordering time by 50%.

Because your goal is to increase your profit, many retail POS vendors have developed systems that when combined can produce excellent results like the POS systems that enables you to integrate your accounting software such as QuickBooks and Peachtree. With a POS software like these, you can rest assured that all your financial data will be up to date and accurate, you can even print sales report on any POS terminal just with the touch of a button!

Inventory management is a tough job. Manually handling and updating your inventory sure is tiring, time consuming and costly! It’s really though job for any restaurant owner. Install a proper POS software that can help accelerate inventory management, you will see and increase in efficiency with its advance management features, you can enter any information with the items as well, such as purchase date or date of expiry, you will never have to back to manual system ever again.

Proper ordering system. Placing an order should have the right timing, ordering too late can cause you to loose an available item, order too soon can cause a risk of the item going bad. Installing automated inventory management enables you to increase the efficiency of your products orders, set a special alert to notify you and your staff when you’re running low of items so you’d be able to re-order for them, as well as setting up notifications to alert you when expiration dates are nearing. If your restaurant still doesn’t have point of sale software for inventory management you are potentially losing money every day.

Fight Leakage With Proper Restaurant POS Solutions!

Decrease shrinkage up to 10% by having a good restaurant POS solution to back you up. And since all data is digitally recorded, you can have a full report on who processed a transaction and if the transaction made is accurate. This way, you can also ensure an easier way to investigate profit loss.

The information I gave you is just the bits and pieces of what a restaurant point of sale system is and the importance of having a POS software for your business. Get advice and do your research online before making your final decision on any POS system since it making the WRONG decision can cost you in the long run. You may also request for a free POS system quote where suppliers serving your area can send you their competitive price lists.

For more information or to have a local POS professional serving the restaurant industry in your area help you go to POS-For-Restaurants.com

1. Employee Scheduling. Some restaurant POS packages includes a “staff scheduling” feature. You can expect to increase efficiency and dramatically reduce overall labor costs by controlling clock-ins and clock-outs, utilizing forecasting tools and control staffing levels. This feature allows easy accessing staff schedules, unlimited shifts and multiple job positions for each staff. You can also tie in any number of security functions to a job position. Some of the packages has a feature that allows you to post schedule on a website and sends an email of the schedule to your staff automatically. Focus more on lowering labor cost while increasing your employee performance by efficiently and effectively managing your time & attendance information.

2. Software Upgrade Assurance (SUA). SUA gives you a distinct advantage when purchasing for a POS system. You are able to help stretch your investment and prolong the life of your restaurant point of sale system. Customers who are on an SUA plan will always have the most current software version. This basically keeps their POS system new. Every time you receive a software upgrade it’s just like buying the most current and advanced POS system available in the market with the newest and most up-to-date features for your restaurant. The most current feature set ensures that you have the best possible ROI by allowing you to take full advantage of the power the POS software offers.

Another advantage of having a SUA is that no additional software purchase is required for upgrading or replacing a hardware. If you need to replace hardware there’s a drastically lesser cost for upgrading it.

These programs typically works on a yearly small fee for their benefits. Ma customers are satisfied receiving the huge benefits of this program that helps your business reap the full return on their POS investment.

3. Proper Tip Handling. Some point of sale software products have tip tracking built into their time in attendance module. Once you set one of your staff as a tipped employee, the POS system will require a tip declaration before clock out. All servers or waiters who ring sales will have their total sales tracked. Tips collected through credit card sales are also tracked and shown on the server closeout report. Prior to clock out, the servers or waiters will be shown their total sales, collected charge tips collected and then asked to declare their cash tips. By this, you will be able to track and manage all declared tips, charge tips and hours worked for every tipped staff.

4. Frequent Diner & Customer Loyalty Programs. As the restaurant owner you would like your restaurant POS system to provide accurate information on your customer’s number and frequency of visits, buying habits, entice repeat visits and purchases through reward programs like a loyalty card, reward card or points card. You are able to do all this while managing the programs and preventing “sweet hearting” by employees. Sweet hearting happens when an employee promises a deal to a customer in order to make a sale.

Some of the restaurant POS packages come standard with a frequent diner or customer loyalty package that eases things within your business. They utilize secure methods of tracking your guests and their buying habits. Establish a database of guest’s information with an account number. This number can be their phone number or any number system you want. In what ever strategy you choose, the most popular and secure method is through magnetic cards with a logo of your restaurant. These cards can act as a simple reminder of your restaurant to your customers by having your business logo in their wallet or purse. The software will secure the reward programs you set in place and preventing the server/waiter from giving away food. Rewards are given only when earned through purchases, frequent visits or for items on your menu that you wish to highlight. Establishing reward programs takes your employees out of the game and place you in total control of everything.

As you can see, your business can be run more efficiently by using proper restaurant technology. There are many ways, methods you can use, to aid you in better management of your business so you will never have to waste more of your valuable time and money.

Michael Cummings is Vice President of Customer Relations at POS-for-Restaurants.com. With over 20 years of restaurant experience, POS-for-Restaurants.com helps you use your technology to be more efficient and more profitable.

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While credit card commercials show lines of dancing shoppers merrily using their credit cards and praise the convenience of a cashless society, they don’t stress out the very real danger of identify theft at the cash register.

The director,Monica Chauhan, for embedded solutions at Solidcore (www.solidcore.com), a leading provider of real-time change control software, cites Gartner Group statistics showing that 4 out of five data breaches occur at POS systems.

Lock It Down

Chauhan states that if these Point of Sale systems are not properly locked down, they can be susceptible to attacks. “For decades, embedded devices consisted of specialized hardware running proprietary software, but in recent times, there has been a shift towards standardization, such as Unified Point of Sale (UPoS) in the retail industry.”

“Standardization has enabled devices to become increasingly interconnected and has allowed for the use of off-the-shelf software on commoditized hardware running commercial or open operating systems, such as Windows XP Embedded, WEPOS (Windows Embedded for Point of Service), and Linux,” Chauhan observes.

According to Chauhan, greater system flexibility and quicker development time has created security risks for POS equipment owners.

These Are Vulnerable Systems

Robert J. McCullen, chairman and CEO of Trustwave (www.trustwave.com), a security firm that specializes in information security and compliance management solutions, agreed to Chauhan that there are many POS systems that are vulnerable to attacks.

McCullen says, a little dial-up swipe machine has a low risk, but computer-based and/or have Internet access (risk lies in those two prime factors) devices are more prone to attacks.

Another thing, McCullen said that if a POS system stores credit card track data, exploitation can occur, and the swipe terminals can easily be exploited by tampering.

In general, as McCullen explained, hardware swipe terminals have low exploit risk, instead a higher risk of tampering, but with tampering comes the opportunity for hackers to read the cards, whether through a Bluetooth device used later to get the card data or other efforts in retrieving the information.

As Chauhan further points out other vulnerabilities, she claims that because today our POS systems are similar to networked PCs, constant patching is required. Chauhan also said that embedded systems have also become vulnerable to changes that are unauthorized and inappropriate as they are handed off to others in the distribution channel. Results of this can cause malfunctions to the equipment and may even loose their PCI DSS (PCI Data Security Standard) requirements.

PCI Data Security Standard Challenges

Chauhan and McCullen both agreed that Point of Sale equipment is faced with unique challenges when complying with the PCI DSS.

“Requirement 5 states that you must use and regularly update antivirus software,” Chauhan says. Antivirus software can be a very high overhead expense for a low-footprint POS system, she even notes; however, the need for an antivirus software can be eliminated with a change control software.

As an example, Chauhan explains that NEC Infrontia installed change control software on its POS offerings and thus prevented unauthorized code from breaking unpatched systems. It allowed NEC Infrontia to remove the antivirus software that was impacting the performance of its devices, according to Chauhan.

The the PCI DSS Requirement 6, develop and maintain secure systems and applications. It also presents unique challenges, Chauhan notes.

It’ll be a very challenging on the part of POS equipment providers to ensure their systems will supply the PCI compliance after shipping them to the dealer network and put into production at the retail location.

A large supplier of technology and POS systems for independent grocers and small chains, StoreNext (www.storenext.com), have solved their patching challenges with PCI DSS Requirement 6 by embedding Solidcore change control in its systems.

“In addition, StoreNext was able to reduce the amount of time spent on monthly test and patch distribution cycles by reducing its patch frequency to quarterly,” Chauhan states. Chauhan also claims that the PCI auditing requirement can be met through change control software.

Other difficult areas, as McCullen states, include data encryption and user-based access controls.

Any Questions?

If you would like to know more about this topic or have a question in mind, you may ask for advice with our Restaurant POS
professional serving your area.

The author of this article is the Vice President of Customer Relations at www.POS-For-Restaurants.com with over 20 years experience in the restaurant point of sale industry.

In order to make projections of future sales, restaurant manager keeps track of their business for the past few weeks and converted those numbers into an employee schedule. And when the day is done, the manager sits down on his desk calculating time cards for the day’s labor percentage where success or failure of those efforts is determined.

But today, these manual tasks are eliminated with the help of a restaurant POS system where managers doesn’t have to do things by hand.

With the minimum wage set to rise to .25 over the next few years, operators are looking for every tool they can find to keep labor costs under control.

Jim Phillips the general manager of a Pizza Inn restaurant, tracks down his daily labor record via the store’s Point of Sale System. He uses a restaurant point of sale system from Pixel Point.

“I check my labor cost every 45 minutes when I’m in the restaurant,” Phillips  said. “I can pull it up on the terminal, hit labor cost and it tells me where my labor stands, or if I want to I can go into my hourly stats and look at those,” says Phillips.

The restaurant POS system can display forecasted sales, actual sales and a variance between the two, as well as scheduled versus actual hours.

“The system tells me everything I need to know,” Phillips said. “I can look at the POS and see the number of pickups for any given hour; the number of dine-ins and the number of buffets. It gives me my supervisor hours, my kitchen hours and my assistant’s hours all in a breakdown.”

An extra pair of eyes

Other POS reports show labor trends over time, and owners or district managers can track labor cost manager performance shift-to-shift, said Jennifer Wiebe the marketing manager of Speedline Solutions. This system also provide detailed reports on manual editing of time clock reports where you can easily spot potential abuse.

Time clock reports and schedules also can provide important documentation for labor board reviews of attendance-related employee terminations, she said.

And by the end of the day, a system such as Phillips’ can generate payroll- and employee-information export files to integrate with above-store accounting systems or third-party payroll services.

It can also assist managers when assigning staff shifts by forecasting sales and generating a schedule based on those sales.

With sales forecasting and labor plans, operators can schedule efficiently to meet their labor targets. Pixel Point’s scheduling tool is linked with employee skills and availability which can speed up scheduling process.”

Hours and breaks restriction is easily done through schedule- and time-clock alerts. The schedule can also include a built-in time clock that requires a manager’s for overriding untimely ins and outs.

Mostly, operators sets their clock-in and clock-out times within 5 minutes before or after the actual time.

“Employees can’t clock in until 5 minutes before their scheduled shift or clock out late without a manager override. The system tells me if an employee is supposed to be off but he is still on the clock.”

The author of this article is a Customer Relations VP at POS-FOR-Restaurants.com – a national organization of retail and restaurant POS systems dealers.

For more information see their website at POS-For-Restaurants.com

Find out about the best restaurant point of sale systems that will help your business grow! Compare and learn everything about online restaurant management softwares.

Restaurant owners would do well to use a good restaurant point of sale system, but between the confusion of hardware and software, monthly contracts,programming setup, leasing equipment asll well as your peripherals, that simple old cash register sure is a relief.

But remember; that breath of fresh air can be costing a restaurant owner thousands more than the cost of a POS system every month. It sure is nice to have that POS system that can easily track staff schedule, kitchen inventory, keeps track of orders and wait times, maintains reservations systems and can even accept orders from the restaurant’s website, all in one convenient central computer system!

Restaurant POS hardware and Point of Sale Software

The software, whether it’s Aldelo, Aloha, FuturePOS or Micros, consists of the program you’re running and not your touch-screen monitor, hand held PDA devices, keyboards, mouse and printers. As with any expensive POS, there’s always a catch at the end so never close a deal on the spot. You may find several vendors who offers very low prices for their POS software, disregarding to inform you that it will only work with their super expensive computers.

Note that a company that really works hard to provide good quality programs does not need to make a business of vending computer components. Or worse, leasing them at extremely high rates. Before signing a deal, you need to know what each component will actually cost you. Paying a month for a computer sure is affordable but after a year, it’s likely paid off at $600, what’s worse is that the client will still be paying for the lease after another year, so while technology changes the outdated equipment is still being charged as if it were new.

Managing Your Restaurant Online

The ability to access the system from a remote computer would be a great feature. Imagine this – enjoying a lovely breakfast in Palm Beach with your laptop sitting next to you and seeing the security camera. With a few keystrokes you can check your labor percentage, you can even send an email to your bar manager to remind him of the big party tonight, and maybe invite some influential people to join.

You might want to do a few check ups to see if your server is still online, check your employees performance for today and how much the sales was last night. This feature is such a relief, now you can go back to being pampered.

Restaurant Point of Sale System Programming

There are POS systems that are specifically designed to be programmed by the end user, which can really be intimidating at first. Check to see if their company has a list of consultants or other help for programming to help you out. Many POS Software companies work with the restaurant owner to make sure that the software can satisfy their business needs.

It would be a great decision to look specifically for companies who are willing to provide these services for free while getting started. Charging for a refresher course a year later really isn’t out of line but charging for initial training isn’t standard practice with every company.

Finding The Best POS System for your Restaurant

Every restaurant has different needs. A burger drive through shop will be needing less options compared to a family style restaurants. A restaurant bar and grill requires different features than of a donut shop. Every restaurant differ in their needs. It’s much better to send away for every information packet. Is there a warranty or guarantee? Would there be a trial period given? Is it compatible with your current credit card processor, or it or it needs a different one? Can you export sales data to your Quickbooks or other accounting software?

Weighing all of the hardware and software options before making a decision can save a restaurant owner from the stress and headache of ending up with a point of sale system that doesn’t fit the bill. Listen well to a salesman’s 15 minute speech and review each pitch carefully. Lastly, consider listening to the advices and suggestions of other restaurant owners before deciding on which point of sale system you’re going with.

For more information, check out: www.POS-For-Restaurants.com

There are more and more restaurant and hospitality sector that are increasingly turning towards business management softwares to aid them with their needs, as well as to increase their efficiency.

It is with extreme importance that every restaurant must select the restaurant POS software suite that’s flexible to meet their needs and can grow with their business.

While not all restaurant owners are comfortable with pos technology it can be a huge importance and vital to any hotel or restaurant wanting to trade immediately after installation, therefore bringing in more customers. A good restaurant POS software will saving money on training time, stock control, payroll and ultimately wages.

The hospitality market sector can be extremely competitive and by streamlining your business can only mean one thing, failure or success. In the world of hospitality If you can’t level with your competitors you’ll slowly loose your customers through smoothly run establishments that that operates well with a POS system.

Of course, restaurants aren’t exempted from this! Having a reliable hospitality software suite is vital for succes.

While there may be times when external factors can make a difference to your success, using the right hospitality software can significantly increase your chances of success and give you the edge over your competitors.

If you are still searching for a software suite which is right for your business, make sure you look for a restaurant software suite that is robust, upgradeable, great value for money and above all easy to use.

You have to make sure that the hospitality software you purchase can be adapted to suit your needs. But if your software is inflexible and incapable of adapting to meet your needs, it can cause a lot problems in the long run.

A retail POS business software should be easy to install and use, intuitive and doesn’t even need days of training; make sure it’s fully modular, as well as flexible and upgradeable in order to grow with your business. Additionally, you need to look for restaurant software that will run on your computer systems.

If you’re planning to operate with multiple tills you need a good backup system for safety, a reliable system that will make copies of your master data file so that you will have copies of it in sa safe place in case of system crashes. It is also important to make sure that the restaurant POS you’re going to use allows multiple hardware configuration, payroll integration and data export to sage or quick-books. Mostly, some business owners will have at one time or another used a computer running on a windows operating system, because many of the professional scalable POS and hospitality software solutions were written specifically [with windows in mind.

As a final consideration, your POS software needs to be fast and user-friendly, for both you and your customers convenience.

Most good restaurants are extremely busy during peak times and need a restaurant POS system that will work quickly and not freeze or crash during constant use. A good old POS software may come expensive, but it does help you to ensure that your business runs smoothly allowing you to concentrate on other areas of your business.

Support is one of the main priorities of any business, so you better make sure you have the option of phone or online chat support similar to yahoo and msn messenger this will be an optional extra with any good POS software provider and worth its weight in gold if your systems go down and you are unable to trade.

Don’t forget, software developers know far more about the system than anyone. An overlooked point that many clients have regretted from my experience, make sure that whoever you purchase the software from can offer after- hours support should you need it, also a company in the same time zone is a very useful commodity.

With over 20 years working in the restaurant POS industry, the author of this article is the Customer Relations Vice President at POS-For-Restaurants.com, an online information service that helps restaurants through out US by giving competitive bids for any type of hardware, software or a complete restaurant point of sale system.

Check them out at POS-For-Restaurants.com

In order to manage food costs effectively, an operator will need to monitor portion sizes, prevent theft, watch waste and order simultaneously.

An inventory software will help you identify exactly when your food costs are out of line. Using inventory control software will typically save you 1 to 2 percent of sales, and might save you much more. And it is savings that drops straight to your bottom line as profit.

A POS-based inventory control system operators can spot and solve food cost difficulties that might not become noticeable by simply focusing on portion control. And when your employees know that the system is carefully keeping track, it stop waste as well as theft.

A single restaurateur will be able to realize this lesson, when it comes to food cost problems, at least a week of using an inventory control software.

In his restaurant, he was portion controlling, yield testing and performing physical inventory, but it wasn’t until he uses an inventory software where he finds out his inventory was out by exactly 20 pounds of blue marlin every week; coincidentally, it’s the same weight as a box. Upon knowing, it was relatively that easy to pinpoint the source of the problem: one of the prep cooks was stashing a box of goodies every Friday night.

Boosting the bottom line

In a typical restaurant point of sale inventory control program, the operator sets up the software by first entering their recipes and product costs. The system then can track ideal usage based on those recipes and the restaurant’s actual sales.

The inventory control software can aslo track product usage in situations where some orders is not in line with the standard recipe. The operator can then do a physical inventory and generate reports comparing it with the calculated ideal usage to check their differences. The software can also be set up to track as many items as the operator chooses.

Mostly in restaurants, their top 10 items 80 percent of their food cost problem. And you can schedule nightly counts of key items and weekly or even monthly counts of some other items.

With just one item, over-portioning by 1 ounce per order may cost a restaurant hundreds of dollars a month. If you eliminate over-portioning on 100 orders per day for 30 days on a .67 per pound of a single item, could add up to more than 0.00 in savings or 00.00 in a year!

Reduce waste and free up cash for other things! So you better have a good which can help an operator reduce the amount of stock they keep on hand. Carrying too much inventory can cause a loss of between 2 percent and 5 percent on an average operator’s profit-and-loss statement.

We’ve assisted a client before who’s menu is fairly extensive and had lots of work for setting up, but by helping them program correctly, we were able to drop their food cost by 2 to 4 percent – it’s a big plus for their bottom line profits.

So if you have a restaurant POS system or are contemplating a purchase make sure you understand the additional profits that you can acquire and the “how to’s” by learning and using the inventory module of the system as you should be.

The author of this article is the VP of Customer Relations at POS-Fof-Restaurants.com with over 20 years experience in restaurant point of sale (POS) helping restaurants nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits.

To learn on how our national POS network of restaurant point of sale experts can help your business achieve greater success in these difficult economic times, visit POS-For-Restaurants.com.

Click here for a video that explains the risk of non-PCI compliance

PCI and Credit Card Security Background

Restaurants and their customers have long been enjoying the convenience they get on credit and debit cards for many years. However, given the sky high cost and frequency of credit fraud, major card brands such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and JCB have taken steps to safeguard all stakeholders.

IBM was the one who invented the mag stripe on credit cards in 1968 and became the industry standard. Given that the track data on the mag stripe can easily be read and duplicated, the card brands, with the set of standards that the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council has built, it clearly stated the first directive: ‘Don’t store track data.’

The Standards of PCI

The PCI Security Standards Council has taken a three-pronged approach to protecting consumers, banks and merchants/restaurateurs:

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard or PCI DSS ? involves all entities that store, process, or transmit cardholder data (Merchants, restaurateurs, service providers, processors, etc.)

Compliance Deadline: January 2007 (deadlines are long passed)

What it Means – Restaurateurs, regardless of the size, must all complete and submit a PCI Self-Assessment Questionnaire to their Acquiring Bank every year.

• PA?DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) ? involves all applications used to store, process, or transmit cardholder data as part of authorization or settlement. (Point-of-Sales (POS) application developers)

Deadlines for Compliance:

Oct. 1, 2008 ? Only the software that is compliant with the new payment application security standards must be used by agents, merchants and payment processors.

Oct. 1, 2009 ? All merchants will be required to start terminating the use of any non-compliant payment applications that they might still have in their environments.

July 1, 2010 ? Mandatory use of only the payment applications that complies with the new standards.

Which Means – If, after the deadline, a merchant/restaurateur is not running a PA DSS-validated application, they will automatically fail their PCI assessment and could possibly lose their ability to accept credit cards.

• Pin Entry Devices (PED) Standard – includes all PEDs and it aims to ensure that the cardholder’s personal identification number or PIN, including any sensitive information are protected consistently at a PIN acceptance device, like your resident keys.

Deadline for Compliance:

Jan. 1, 2004 ? To all newly purchased Point of Sale (POS) PIN Entry Devices should pass testing by a Visa recognized laboratory and approved by Visa.

July 1, 2010 ? Mandates that every Point of Sale (POS) PEDs must pass and get approved by PCI SSC from one of its recognized laboratories.

Which Means ? All Merchants/restaurant owners will have two years to replace older, un-approved PEDs.

Payment Card Industry (PCI) Do’s

• Do routine vulnerability scans of your systems.

• You must do a security awareness training for your employees.

• Make system access audits.

• Monitor your system activity logs.

• Separated employees must have their access privileges removed.

• Install software patches for your system.

• Any threats should be taken seriously – have an incident response plan in place.

The Don’ts of Payment Card Industry (PCI)

• Refrain your self from storing or archiving whole credit card numbers.

• Transmitting credit card data unencrypted should not be practiced.

• PCI is not about making you compliant with these standards – it’s all about protecting your business and your customers.

What Restaurateurs Get From PCI

Given consumers’ expectation of omnipresent acceptance of using plastics, a restaurateur’s validation that they are protecting their customer’s personal information is good for business:

Business Reputation / Image

For a highly competitive business – a restaurateur does not want to be named in the media as the place were card data was stolen.

Protects Your Credit / Debit Card Payments Acceptance Ability – failure to comply and/or a breach can risk a merchants’/restaurateur’s ability to accept credit/debit payments. In many cases, credit/debit payments account for 80% to 90% of transactions. Losing your store’s ability to accept credit cards can reduce your customers.

The Effects of State Privacy Laws

A breach that discloses personal credit card information in one of the 40+ States with privacy laws may experience double impact on the side of the restaurateur. Being off-side with the Payment Card Industry will result in fines and lawsuit costs. Being off-side with State Privacy Laws is a crime with potentially more serious penalties.

Compliance / Security Strategy

• Ensure you are using a PA?DSS or PABP validated POS system

• Make sure you’re using an approved PED

• Arrange for regular security awareness training for your staff, especially your supervisors

• Conducting a background check on all employees with administrative access to your system is a must

• Have a ‘Confidentiality Agreement’ contract with your staff

• Carefully and accurately complete the PCI Self Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) – if you are not sure – ask

• If you notice gaps in the PCI compliance, develop a realistic plan to correct them

• Maintain mature controls to sustain compliance

• Access controls

• Dual factor for system and device management

• Strong passwords and secure password storage

• Regularly monitor system activities for possible attacks as well as record evidences

• Control wireless access points

• Always maintain a secure configuration

• Segment networks

• Maintain an Incident Response Plan and Test It

• Test and audit the cardholder environment carefully

It may be a daunting task the first time but when everything else is in place, an ongoing PCI compliance is not an expensive work. It is good business practice to protect the sensitive information that your customers entrust with you.

Questions?

You can visit www.POS-For-Restaurants.com anytime for more information or advice about this topic, a Restaurant POS professional serving your area will address your concerns.

The author of this article writes for POS-For-Restaurants.com – a VP of Customer Relations with over 20 years experience in the restaurant point of sale industry.

A leading provider of advanced, open-standard contactless chip technologies, Contactless and a global leader in electronic commerce and payment processing services, First Data, have announced that they made a three-year agreement into developing contactless payment stickers that will be marketed by First Data as GO-Tag products. On the agreement, INSIDE is to supply the MicroPass payment sticker prelams only to First Data-qualified card manufacturers for production.

The agreement helps leverage the core technology from INSIDE Contactless and the issuing and transaction processing power of First Data. First Data will be marketing and distributing GO-Tag products to financial institutions, major U.S. merchants, and other distribution channels in a variety of form factors.

According to the general manager of Mobile Commerce and Point of Sale Solutions for First Data, the GO-Tag Solution represents an important measure in the evolution from today’s plastic cards and fobs, offering a bridge to the future of mobile payments. “Our partnership with INSIDE Contactless enables us to offer consumers an opportunity to turn just about any personal item, from a mobile phone to an employee ID badge, into a payment device.”

As the executive vice president of payments for INSIDE Contactless, Charles Walton says “This agreement highlights the versatility of our MicroPass platform to support a variety of contactless payment applications and form factors, including stickers” stickers, that highlights the agreement].

Consider updating your restaurant POS system to Contactless credit card acceptance in the near future as this technology becomes more common in the marketplace. And we all know that customer service is all about the speed and fast transaction to a restaurant point of sale terminal, the better the service is the better your customer experience will reflect on the value of your services.

The author of this article is the VP of Customer Relations at POS-For-Restaurants.com with over 20 years experience helping restaurants nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits using restaurant POS systems.

To learn on how our national POS network of restaurant point of sale experts can help your business achieve greater success in these difficult economic times, visit POS-For-Restaurants.com.

Tens of thousands of restaurants is being opposed by the credit card industry for not fully protecting their diner’s credit card info from the possibility of theft, with Visa, MasterCard and financial institutions that process electronic payment over recent months are sending warning letters and holding seminars. With these moves, it forces restaurants to take additional steps to guard credit card information.

On the side of companies that process card transactions, tens of thousands of eateries are not complying with credit card industry security rules.  So every restaurant that takes plastic is required to follow a set of security regulations instituted by Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover.

Data recorded by Visa indicates that since January 2005, restaurants made up around 40 percent of incidents in which criminals gained unauthorized access to credit card information — accounting for the largest percentage of incidents for a merchant category.

Separately, there are reports from a Chicago-based data security auditor, AmbironTrustWave, for merchants that 62% of the security violations it witnessed during the prior 18 months occurred in the restaurant industry.

These violations includes various security lapses such as the poor guarding of wireless networks — which easily gives access to thieves on sensitive information just outside of the parking lot using a laptop — and lax systems that make it possible for unethical employees to grab credit card information.

Consumers often are unaware when their credit card information is in danger. Not all security breaches produced successful fraud, and mostly, merchants do not recognize these incidents unless there is a significant likelihood that a major fraud will take place or has already been identified. Also, credit card issuers don’t usually close a customer’s account unless fraud has taken place.

Restaurateurs may have a difficult time with credit card security rules, since the regulations can be difficult for smaller merchants. Hearing from the restaurant owners who thought they complied with rules, the National Restaurant Association trade group found out their systems were not functioning properly and were penalized.

Fines for restaurants that violate credit card industry rules by storing credit card data have amounted to more than 0,000 in some cases. Merchants across all categories .6 million for security violations were fined by Visa in 2006, an increase from the .4 million in fines the previous year.

Visa, which declined to provide a breakdown of merchant types, said it recently held special security briefings with several hundred restaurants, a merchant group Visa believes needs additional attention.

During the same time, the companies that process credit cards have also turned the heat on restaurants. Credit card companiesthreatened those who do not follow security regulations that they will end their services.

Credit card companies are especially worried about specialized software restaurants use, which combine such features as tabulating bills, delivering orders to the kitchen and tracking reservations. Since credit card companies cannot require software makers to abide by their security rules, they instead apply pressure to restaurants. Visa maintains a list on its Web site of software programs that meet its requirements.

But software programmers that even with the best software, restaurants could still be in heaps of trouble if they lack ample password protection or firewalls. Software companies say it is not up to them to let restaurateurs know what they must do to be in compliance with credit card rules.

The author of this article writes for POS-For-Restaurants.com, a VP of Customer Relations with over 20 years experience in restaurant point of sale system, helping restaurant owners nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits.

You may visit POS-For-Restaurants.com for more information on how our national network of restaurant point of sale experts can help your business achieve greater success in these difficult economic times.