If your restaurant has not yet jumped into the game of using social media, 2012 is a great time to start.  Many national chains used 2011 to test strategies of using social media to connect with customers.  In this article some of those owners share their experience and what they plan to do differently.  Check it out.

Restaurants' social-media strategies in 2012

This time of the year our tech support gets a large amount of calls relating to not being able to post Payroll or Accounts Payable. The BPA software allows you to post information up to 1 year ahead of the current accounting year the software is set to. If you have not been using the general ledger in the BPA software many times this accounting period will remain unchanged. When you try to post you will see the following message.

This error is easily corrected by following these simple steps.

1) Go to Business System>General Ledger.

2) Select Change G/L Accounting Period.

3) Move the accounting period forward one month at a time until you get to the current year. In other words if it is set to 12/2010 you need to put in 1/2011 and hit enter. Enter “Y” to continue and hit enter again. Repeat these steps until you get to 1/2012.

It is important to remember that once you move your accounting period forward to the current year that you can no longer post to past years. If you are using Accounts Payable and still have payments that need to be posted to last year be sure to do so before you move all the way into 2012.

Moving the accounting period forward also affects one report that many of our customers use – the Product Activity Report. This report shows product quantities sold for each month throughout the year. When the accounting period is moved forward it updates this report to show quantities for the current year.

With the down economy many restaurant owners are making changes to keep business up.  La Pinata, a long time Business Software Solutions customer, is taking advantage of the trend towards fast casual.  Read this article on things they are doing to keep prices low and business hopping.

La Pinata» New menu, attitude » Times Record News

Summary

The number one thing that our technicians are asked once our customers have their system programmed is “How do I close out my POS System at the end of the day.” This guide will walk you through the process of running your end of day reports and closing out your BPA restaurant system. Below is a list of functions that you will want to make sure you run every day. This guide also contains optional steps for gathering additional information from the system.

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Are you considering using coupons to attract new customers to your restaurant?  Have you ever considered what types of customers this attracts and how it effects your bottom line?  Here is a great article discussing some of the issues with coupons and some alternatives to boosting business that won’t effect your bottom line.

How to Boost Restaurant Traffic Without Discounts by Karen E. Klein

One of the great features of using BPA is the ability to run your own payroll rather than using and expensive third-party company.  Below are guides that walk you through setting up the payroll module in BPA.  Following these steps you can save your company money and allow you to take control of your own payroll.

For Restaurant, Delivery, and Hotel customers:

Restaurant Payroll Setup Guide

For Touch POS customers:

Touch POS Payroll Setup Guide

If you have any additional questions regarding setting up payroll in BPA please give us a call at (801) 336-3303.

For customers with POS systems using Windows XP  or Windows 7, here are the POS Hardware Setup Guides for those systems (Note: Windows Vista coming soon).  These guides contain information to walk you through connecting hardware to your systems, adding printers, and configuring printer information in Business Plus Accounting.

For Windows XP users

Windows XP POS Hardware Setup Guide

For Windows 7 users

Windows 7 POS Hardware Setup Guide

Whether you are starting a new restaurant, or, need to replace broken equipment, finding affordable restaurant equipment can be a difficult task. The following is a list of companies that sells used restaurant equipment:

Note: Companies listed in this article are not affiliated with Business Software Solutions. This article is for reference purposes only.

Prima Restaurant Equipment

http://prima-restaurant-equipment.com/

Click on their Hot Deals button to view scratch and dent, new, and used restaurant equipment deals.

ACityDiscount Restaurant Equipment & Restaurant Supply

http://www.acitydiscount.com/used-restaurant-equipment.htm

ACityDiscount has tons of used restaurant equipment in their inventory.  They also sell used restaurant equipment through their eBay store.

Burkett Restaurant Equipment and Supplies

http://www.basequipment.com

According to their website, “Burkett Restaurant Equipment has been specializing in reconditioning used restaurant equipment since 1977.”  They also have a Deal of the Week, which highlights amazing deals on restaurant equipment.

eBay Searches

Of course, you can always perform searches on eBay for used restaurant equipment. Just be sure to check the condition of the equipment, and the seller's return and warranty policies.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=used+restaurant+equipment

Of course, if you need Used Restaurant Point of Sale equipment, check out our systems at http://www.businessoftware.com/usedrestaurantpos.

A report from the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, DC contains the following statistics about computer data loss:

A hard drive crashes every 15 sec.
1 in 5 computers suffer a fatal hard drive crash during their lifetime.
25% of lost data is due to the failure of a portable drive.
31% of PC users have lost all of their PC files to events beyond their control.
32% of data loss is caused by human error.
60% of companies that lose their data close down within 6 months of the disaster.

(source:http://www.archives.gov/preservation/conferences/papers-2003/puglia.html)

Our Tech Support department will often see users backup their BPA software only to their server computer. However, if this hard drive crashes, we have no way to recover the backup.

Our latest Business Plus Accounting update contains expanded backup functionality.  We now allow you to specify multiple backup locations for your Business Plus Accounting software.  For example, you can create a backup somewhere on your server computer, on another computer on the network, or on an external hard drive. 

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The following features have been added to the Business Plus Accounting software packages:

Restaurant Pro, Delivery Pro, and Retail Touch POS Customers

As you may know, within Business Plus Accounting, you can specify different colors of your menu items.  However, depending on the color you choose, it may be difficult to read the text on the button.  With our latest update, we now automatically change the text color on the button to black or white, depending on the button color you choose. 

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