Hello there,
I am wondering if any of you have found an efficient way to track the tastings within the POS system that is simple, easy and effective. Currently we use the button feature as if the tastings and comped tastings are products. This poses multiple problems when checking the guest out. If our goal is to track tastings and which tastings were comped because of bottle purchases or Wine Club member benefits, we have to put that product into the transaction in order to pull a report that reflects these āsalesā.
For example; 2 guests come in and one wants to do the Reserve Flight and the other, the Specialty Flight. Currently both flights are $X.00 but are eligible to be waived with a bottle purchase. My staff does not know if the customers will purchase at the end of their tastings so, they āstart a tableā and input the tastings and then āhold the tableā. When the guests are ready to check out, my staff āresumes the tableā and proceeds to check the guests out. In this scenario, the guests want to buy bottles of wine to offset the cost of the tasting. Now, we still want to record which tastings were performed, so in this situation my staff has to delete the tasting buttons with an amount attached to them and replace them with two different buttons, a ācomped reserve tastingā button and a ācomped specialty tastingā button. Both of these buttons have a $0.00 amount and appear as a different line item in a report. Now, my staff needs to charge for the bottles the customer wants to purchase.
My question is, has anyone found a better, more streamline way to track activity at the tasting room without having so many clicks to get through at the checkout stage of the tasting?
Avalon
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Great question, Avalon, Iāll be watching for any others answers, but this is the way that we do it. This way we know how many ātastersā we have in all as well as being able to run reports to see which are industry tastings, complimentary tastings and wine club complimentary tastings. If someone joins the club, the process that you explain is done to change from a paid tasting to a āclubā tasting with zero value.
We do have one promo that will comp two tastings if the person purchases 6 bottles or more. I am not sure that it works perfectly. I need to check it again to see if it can be improved. Currently a flag does pop up to remind the server of the ācouponā, the coupon has to be applied manually by the server, and the coupon will not work if there are 3 or more paid tastings in the cart.
We do have a POS catagory with tastings all together to speed looking for those āmarkersā such as our āTOCKā reservation markers to make sure that prepaid tastings are accounted for as well.
But I would be eager to hear others answers.
Blessings, Betty
Our solution to this problem is to not ring up anything until the guest is ready to ācheck outā. We then ring up the transaction already knowing if the guest is buying bottles or not. We track tastings by having a POS product for the regular paid tasting fee, a product for a reserve tasting fee, a POS product with $0 as the cost for comp tastings (used only for wine club members or industry), and a POS product wi th a $0 for waived tastings (used only when someone buys the required number of bottles to waive their tasting fee). This works well for us.
If you want to continue to use a system where staff enter products in advance and then āholdā the ticket until closeout, an easier way to do the would be to make a coupon code called CLUB COMP and have that coupon match the price of the tasting flights and then create a second coupon code called WAIVED TASTING with a value equal to your tasting fee. This way your staff would not need to delete the original tasting fees, but the guest would see the value of their purchase or club membership by seeing the fees taken off the bill at the bottom. Just food (or wine) for thought ā¦
