Breakdown: Restaurant Spending

The latest reports highlight key restaurant spending habits. Restaurants report spending nearly 35-percent of technology budgets on point of sale (POS) solutions. An additional 25-percent is spent on back-office technology, such as computers and bill payment software. Overall, most IT budgets were primarily focused on hardware at 24-percent, while the remaining focused on software components at 22-pecent. External service providers increased from 10-percent in 2011 to 15-percent in 2013. This rise is likely associated with restaurants’ current trends for outsourcing payroll, technology, etc.

With a nearly equal split between back-office and front-end services, the latter technology scored nearly 31-percent for enhancing guests’ overall experiences and services. Restaurants were also willing to allocate an additional 29-percent for more secure technology.

The second challenge that is facing restaurants is insufficient, inadequate technology, which rated at 20-percent. Guests’ expectations being adequately met came in at 16-percent, a decrease in internal talent at 14-percent and restaurants that didn’t utilize modern technology at 10-percent.

An interesting finding from this study showed that there was a significant disconnect between what restaurants use and what staff consider important. For example, the front-end of restaurants don’t generally use, but place high importance on barcode scanners, biometrics fingerprint readers, social media integration with POS systems, online restaurant tablet ordering integration, mobile device bill pay and tableside payment. The back-end of restaurants actually saw the most significant increase in technology, with 45-percent of employees regular using these techniques and a high rating of 68-percent.

Within the next four years, it is anticipated that nearly two-thirds of restaurants will replace obsolete cash register systems with mobile systems. Statistics highlight:

Nearly 51% of web ordering and payments will be conducted using online POS kiosk software. This number is up from 39% in 2012.
48% of POS systems will be mobile phone based, which is up from 37% in 2012.
Restaurant tablet menus for ordering and payments will increase from 32% to 40%.
Cloud computing software will increase from 18% to 36%.

This study’s results clearly show that tablets for restaurant menus and mobile POS systems are the wave of the future for modern restaurants. ArmorActive offers a Galaxy tablet enclosure, Kindle Fire kiosk, Android tablet kiosk enclosure and an iPad POS system for restaurants.