Have you ever been to the store to buy toothpaste and found yourself faced with what seems like 500 different options? It can be a frustrating experience when you’re comparing products, and suddenly a quick errand turns into 20 minutes of comparing brands in-aisle. Needless to say, more options is not always better.

The same applies to restaurants. Although customers want choices, too many menu options can make ordering an overwhelming experience (Does anyone else study the menu online before dining out to avoid this stress?).

In fact, research from Bournemouth University found that there is an optimal number of items to have on your menu. For quick-serve restaurants, customers prefer 6 items per category. For a more upscale dining experience, customers prefer 7 choices of starters and desserts, and 10 choices for entrées.

Aside from wanting to make it simple and stress-free for customers to place orders, there are financial and operational benefits to streamlining your menu. For starters, it’ll be much easier to manage your inventory. Having fewer menu items means you’ll have fewer recipes to follow and a shorter ingredients list. You’ll also be able to reduce potential food waste and meal prep time, which translates to savings for your business.

But, how do you decide which dishes won’t make the cut for your upgraded menu? (Hint: your point-of-sale can help)

If you run a small restaurant business, the talech POS app and a smart terminal (like Poynt) will be your best friend. It has tons of features that make it simple to manage your business from front-of-house to back-of-house.

Here’s a quick summary of things it can help you with:

• Accepting payments
• Managing promotions and discounts
• Taking orders and sending them to kitchen printers
• Easily splitting payments between customers
• Managing employee schedules and clock-ins
• Managing inventory
• Monitoring sales performance

Check out how talech streamlines your restaurant operations for more information about the talech app.

Poynt also offers some free restaurant management apps, and if you’re happy with your current restaurant management software, chances are the app is available on Poynt as well.

When it comes to simplifying your menu, there’s 3 key features you’ll want to look at.

Insights and Reporting

Gaining insights into your menu item performance is the first step to simplifying your menu. Obviously, you don’t want to cut a customer favourite and have a bunch of angry customers petitioning the return of beet gnocchi.

But, if there are a few items that aren’t earning their place on your menu, consider eliminating them. Alternatively, if you notice that certain items only do well during the summer or winter, consider creating seasonal specials separate from your core menu.

You’ll be able to see this information with the PMIX and top sellers reports. The talech reporting and insights features will also let you compare performance across locations, servers, and times of day, so you can optimize other aspects of your business.

Too busy to check these reports? You can easily schedule automatic email reports to stay on top of all the metrics that matter to your business.

Inventory Management

Once you revamp your menu to include the optimal number of customer favourites, you’ll need to adjust your usual inventory ordering. To ensure that your kitchen stays stocked, talech has some great inventory management and tracking features. For example, the low-inventory alerts notify you via email if you’re running low on stock. You can also create and email your orders to your suppliers right from the talech app.

Customer Feedback

Finally, don’t forget to consider customer feedback. If you’re using a smart terminal, you’ll be able to easily send out text or email receipts that prompt customers for feedback. You might get some valuable insights so you can improve your menu, service, or ambience. Just don’t forget to respond to their reviews.

To learn more about smart terminals and how they can help you run your restaurant, check out how Dos Tacos uses their POS to improve their customer service.