Maximizing restaurant margin in a time of rising costs is a challenge. The good news is that technologies, like a kitchen display system (KDS), online ordering, order-and-pay-at-the-table, integrated loyalty, and dual pricing can help. These technologies save time, reduce errors and waste, and can even eliminate some of the costs you currently pay.
Holding onto restaurant margin is getting harder and harder, even if you carefully manage your business with a restaurant POS system. Costs are rising in every category. The USDA reports that food prices rose faster than overall inflation (2.9%), with food-away-from-home costing 3.9% more in August 2025 than in August 2024. Then there’s labor and overhead.
The National Restaurant Association (NRA) reports labor costs have increased by 35% in the last five years, and overhead, including leases, supplies, utilities, and repairs, adds up to an average of about 29% of sales. With pre-tax restaurant margin at only about 3% to 5%, these increases can sink even a highly popular restaurant.
Now for the good news: Innovators have developed technologies to help you control your costs and give restaurant margins a boost.
5 Solutions for Holding onto Restaurant Margin
The following five technologies can help you streamline workflows and your bottom line. They cover all parts of restaurant operations, from displaying orders in the kitchen, taking orders, engaging customers, and taking payments. And they can all positively impact restaurant margins.
KDS
A kitchen display system (KDS) can be a big cost-saving tool for quick service restaurants (QSRs) and other business models. It lets counter workers or servers enter orders and have them appear at the right food prep stations in an instant. It saves time, which can help with employee productivity and labor costs. Restaurant operations may even be able to eliminate the expeditor role with food prepared the way the customer directs and labeled so it gets to the right people waiting for it in the right places. Furthermore, when items are prepared the way customers want and they’re delivered on time to the right people, there’s less food waste, which is another way to help control costs. More efficiency, more accuracy, and less wasted time and stock all add up to a more profitable restaurant.
Online Ordering
Online ordering helps to build revenues, but the costs of taking orders online can wipe out profits. You have two ways to hold onto more of your money:
- If you work with a third-party online ordering platform, integrate so orders come directly to your point of sale (POS) system, you don’t need an employee to rekey orders. It saves time, increases order accuracy, and helps decrease food waste.
- You can also accept orders directly on your website with an online ordering solution, so you don’t have to pay fees to a third party.
If you’re like a lot of restaurants, you added online ordering in a rush at the beginning of the decade to keep doing business when dining rooms shut down. It’s high time to adjust and make online ordering give your businesses real benefits that help you grow revenues and hold onto your restaurant margin.
Order and Pay at the Table
If you offer table service, you can improve restaurant margin with an order- and pay-at-the-table solution. Servers using a mobile device to take tableside orders and tableside payments save them time and steps to walk to a terminal. Because they are entering orders immediately and can ask customers questions to clarify what they want, order- and pay-at-the-table systems help prevent mistakes. It’s great news for your restaurant and your bottom line because you can see more revenue and more margin. Order- and pay-at-the-table can also mean happier customers who enjoy prompt service with a personal touch, encouraging them to return to spend more at your restaurant in the future.
Integrated Loyalty
You probably have a loyalty rewards program. If you don’t, you need to. The NRA reports that 78% of customers are more likely to visit a restaurant where they can earn points, even if the restaurant location is out of their way. But a standalone restaurant loyalty software solution often has an extra cost. A more budget-friendly option is to use POS software with a loyalty rewards program included at no extra charge. You can offer a “digital punch card,” letting customers earn points based on the items they purchase or the number of visits. Integrated loyalty makes transactions easier and convenient for customers and gives them an incentive to come back. And you can offer it at no extra charge by using the features of the right POS system.
Dual Pricing
This technology lets you save money outright on payment processing fees. Dual pricing gives your customers the choice to pay a card price or a base price for using cash. You aren’t paying more for processing because you pass those costs along to the customer. It’s important for you to comply with dual pricing rules and regulations, like including both prices on signage and clearly showing the price that customers pay on receipts. But when you offer dual pricing compliantly, you can save hundreds each month on fees for accepting payment cards.
Where to Find the Tech Tools You Need
If using these technologies to improve restaurant operations and increase restaurant margin, but it seems complicated to figure out how to make them work for your business, we can help. Reflection POS offers all these tools, from KDS and online ordering to order-and-pay-at-the-table, integrated loyalty, and dual pricing, all in one easy-to-use, reliable, secure system.
Contact us to connect with a local Reflection POS expert to talk about the challenges you are facing with restaurant operations in a time of rising costs and how our software will help you improve margin.
