We had an interview with Mr. Sebastian Carranza, owner of La Formula Café and Servicentro Cabañas located in Guatemala, who was looking for ways to facilitate the management of his two businesses and found a great ally in Loyverse.

How long have you been using Loyverse? And what made you choose Loyverse's point of sale and system?

I have been using Loyverse for 6 months for two types of business, one is a restaurant and the other is a gas station. I was trying to manage all the inventory, recipes, sales, and expenses in Excel and it was getting complicated because the two businesses handled a lot of things, for example for the recipes, I had to do a lot of formulas, so I started searching on the internet for inventory systems and I found Loyverse. When I found it, I created the account and registered the gas station store first, and I found it to be a very good system, it had all the tools I needed at that time.

Regarding your overall experience, how would you rate the ease of use of Loyverse?

The interface of the application is quite user-friendly, I think it has what we need to keep control of the business, and it is very easy to use. It was also explained to the employees, and they quickly understood how to use it, therefore I think it is quite understandable and easy to use.

Since you have different profiles for your employees, could you tell us what was the main reason for subscribing to this add-on? 

I use employee profiles because they don't have access to the back office and they have access to record sales and expenses for each shift without the need to access more extensive information about the business.

How have Loyverse's features helped you optimize your restaurant's operations?

Mainly with the orders, it was something that we did manually and we took the orders on paper and at the end of the day, it was very difficult for us to balance the sales. With Loyverse, we just take the orders and there is no need to keep any paper that can get lost or thrown away. At the end of the day we have the results of the day's sales and all the information is in the reports. I don't waste time counting each order or doing the math.

The prices are also defined in the system, the employees don't need to know and memorize them, at the time of charging it makes it much easier to charge the customer and even when they start ordering in a group and at the end they want to split the bill, it is very easy to split those bills either by item or by the amount of money, without the staff needs to do manual calculations.

Are there any specific features of Loyvers that have been particularly helpful to your restaurant?

Yes, the Open Tickets and the KDS application have helped us to speed up our order preparation time. For example, in the past, the waiter would manually take the order and if he had two more tables to serve, he had to choose between serving the next table or delivering the order to the kitchen for them to start preparing the order. In both cases, the order was delayed. Today, with Loyverse's point-of-sale system, the order is automatically saved and sent to the kitchen screen. The waiter can quickly go to the next table or do some cleaning without going to the kitchen to bring the information.

In terms of the reports available in Loyverse. How valuable is this data in understanding the performance of your restaurant? Have you used it to make any pricing decisions in your business?

Yes, all the sales reports, the fact that we can review them depending on the categories the report by item allows us to see which are the best-selling items and thus we can create our purchase orders to suppliers. With this information, we can know which are the items we need to buy more and also know which are the ones that are not sold very often so that we do not buy them so much and so they do not lose their validity. This way, we optimize our purchases and expenses as well.

You mentioned that you manage your two stores on the Loyverse account. How has Loyverse helped you with this organization?

The restaurant is separated as another store in order to be able to separate the sales of one store from the other because in the beginning, all the items appeared automatically in the POS. In order to be able to separate the goods and sales of each point of sale, we created two stores since they are two different environments.

Would you like to leave a message for entrepreneurs who are just starting up?

I think that as an entrepreneur, the important thing is that the business is profitable. Profitability is obtained from what you sell and what you buy, so it is something that must be controlled in the business. Loyverse gives us tools so that we can have this control of all these administrative processes of the business, have that clarity of the numbers, good control of sales, and with the Loyverse reports, it is quite easy to see the reports by month and also understand the trends of different periods of the year and at the end of the year to identify the sales seasons where sales go up and understand that in every business there are ups and downs so it is important to know this information for your business to always be growing.