All too easily people think that running a bar is a simple matter, but nothing could be further from the truth. Running a bar is a complex business that requires a lot of patience, skill, experience, and most of all good investment in the right kind of technologies that will help both the business side and the practical day-to-day of bar operations.

There’s a lot of amazing bar technology that has emerged in recent years, some of which have proven to be real game changers and have everyone in the industry talking. If you’re opening a bar, or have an older bar in need of updating, then there are certain technologies that you simply cannot afford to ignore.

1. A Cutting-Edge POS System

Pub POS systems aren’t exactly new, but they have been upgraded continuously over the years to become smarter than ever. Back in the day, they were built to speed up ordering and help bartenders get accurate bill totals on orders with many different drinks, not to mention inputting these orders much faster than they would be able to on older cash register systems.

Later they evolved so that managers could see how individual bartenders performed in sales, and then they provided accurate stock information, and now they have become the focal point for the entire business side of a bar, logging staff activities, transactions, stock, and they now connect with remote wireless devices carried by serving staff, too, among many other functions. Your bar can’t really function in the 21st century without a proper POS system.

2. Digital Flow Metres

When a pub is home to generous bartenders pouring for their mates and attractive customers that they like, the pub owners can stand to lose tens of thousands of dollars a year, possibly even hundreds of thousands depending on the total volume the bar deals with. Alternatively, money can be lost to less skillful or inexperienced staff who spill draft beer, for example. Digital flow metres are designed to solve all of these problems.

The flow metre will sync up with your POS system to compare the amount of alcohol sold with the amount that has flowed through the metres. If they don’t match up, then you know you have a problem!

3. Digital Ordering

In the first point, we mentioned staff using remote wireless devices to handle ordering, but these days you don’t even need to invest in these. Instead, you can let the customer do their ordering through their own device: their smartphone. At each table you can affix a QR code. The customer can scan the QR code to open a web-based app that allows them to order and pay right there on the spot.

The orders are fed straight to your POS system, which you then fill and send out to tables. Customers can order and pay in their own time, and the age of staff missing orders on tables, losing tickets and more is gone!

4. Bar Trivia Technology

Many people enjoy heading down to their local pub on a certain evening --- often a weekday night --- to enjoy the pub quiz. The traditional method of quizzing sees a quiz master reading out questions and/or displaying them on a screen, and teams writing their answers down on paper before exchanging with a neighbouring team.

This has been thoroughly updated for the modern age with digital tablets for answering, which allows scoring to be taken automatically. It speeds up the quiz, and allows bar operators to run quizzes themselves using the some 700,000+ built-in questions rather than hiring an outside host to prepare and run it.