Like all the equipment in your restaurant, your point of sale system needs regular maintenance to ensure the longest possible lifespan. A POS outage on a busy Friday night is every restaurant manager’s nightmare.
By following this simple maintenance schedule, you can keep your POS (and restaurant) running smoothly.
POS Maintenance Schedule
Daily:- At the end of the night, wipe down your POS terminals to prevent the accumulation of dirt and grease. For touchscreens, use an ammonia-free glass cleaner on a soft cloth.
- Check for damage. On a busy day, damage may go unnoticed or forgotten, leaving you in trouble the next day. By inspecting your hardware regularly, you can detect obvious damage and arrange repair before it causes problems.
- Back up your data. If you use SpeedLine, your POS database is backed up to your secondary server every minute by default. Supplement on-site HotBackups with regular off-site backups of the database containing your valuable sales and customer information to removable media like a USB drive or to secure cloud storage such as Google Drive.
- Restart your POS terminals regularly. Restarting your computers can help prevent data corruption, and may speed up performance.
- Check for software updates. Make sure you routinely update your Windows operating system, POS software, and card processing software. This is critical for all systems that hold customer information to maintain PCI compliance. SpeedLine customer? Subscribe to Support Advisories for notifications when critical updates and new releases are available.
- Like your home, your POS terminals benefit from a deep cleaning twice a year—especially if you are using computers with fans inside. Dust can accumulate inside your computer and lead to overheating or other system problems. Taking care to ground yourself first to avoid damage from static electricity, use canned air (available at any office supply store) to blast dirt away from your system’s cooling fan (if it has one) and components. Mark Turangan of Posiflex gave us some tips in POS Maintenance: Extend the Life of Your POS Terminal.
- Your staff use the POS all day, so it is important that they use it properly. Schedule refresher courses for your staff to ensure they are using the system correctly.
What other regular maintenance do you perform on your POS? Share any tips in the comments.
