Point of Sale (POS)

Connect with Fourth to super-size your POS solution's benefits.

Go beyond transaction management

Your POS solution is at the front and center of any hospitality business, powering your customer's transactions. And by adding additional data and functionality, you can further cement your solution in the daily business of your customers. That's where Fourth comes in — we help customers across their operations; including recipe and menu engineering, stock and purchasing management, workforce management, and data analysis. And much of this valuable data is available through our APIs.
The possible connections between Fourth and a POS provider, described below.

By integrating with Fourth, your solution extends beyond everyday transaction management into an end-to-end hospitality solution, providing:

  1. Accurate, up-to-date sales transactional item
  2. Time and attendance clocking & tracking 
  3. Published employee schedules
  4. Employee information
  5. Accurate, up-to-date menu and recipe information, with allergens and nutrition content

And of course, your solution can send back to Fourth the full remit of payment data you collect, such as discounts, void types or cost analysis — as well as workforce and productivity data, such as time to prep or time to customer; and much more.

Workflow

Diagram showing different API calls made by a POS solution during a day.

The daily workflow breaks down into three steps:

  1. At the start of the day the POS solution retrieve from Fourth the:
    • Most recently published schedule
    • Employee information
    • Sales items or recipe and menu information
    This data is sent to the POS sites so that they start the day with the most up-to-date data available.
     
  2. As the day progresses, the POS sites send Fourth the time and attendance for each employee as they clock in and out.
     
  3. Finally, at the close of day the POS sites send Fourth the sales transaction data for the day. Among other things, this data updates stock information, informs labor forecasts and is used in sale analysis.

 

By integrating with Fourth, your POS solution extends beyond everyday transaction management into an end-to-end hospitality solution.

Integrations

POS sales transactions

At the heart of POS partnerships is our POS Gateway. This integration enables your system to send through complete sales data for each menu and retail item at the close of each day. Fourth is able to use this data to then:

  • Provide customers full analytics of their sales
  • Adjust stock and purchasing systems
  • Forecast future labour needs

POS Gateway

Recipes and menus (for restaurants)

Our recipe and menu integration enables you to easily automate recipe creation in your POS. When a customer creates a recipe in Fourth, it becomes immediately available through the API. The data provided includes everything you might want, such as categorization, costs and tax, allergens, and nutritional information. All that is needed is a once-a-day request from your POS system for the latest information.

Recipe & Menu Engineering Export API

Recipes and retail sales items (for hotels)

If your customer is using Adaco — our hotel solution — then the Adaco Sales Item API is your go-to for adding these items into your POS. The customer adds recipe and retail items (such as garments) in Fourth, which are then immediately available through the API. The data available covers everything you need in your POS system; whether it's the allergen information for a recipe or the fabric color for a t-shirt. Your system just needs to update its database with the latest information each day using an API request.

Adaco Sales Item API

Employee management

An integration to Fourth's Workforce Management solution takes the difficulty out of managing a constantly changing workforce. Your POS system regularly imports employee data from Fourth via the UK Employee API, including information such as an employee's role, access rights, staff groups, titles, pay rates, and more. This ensures that our mutual customers no longer need to manually re-enter data across systems as employees enter and leave the workplace. Meanwhile, the sales data you send back to Fourth is further enriched with relevant employee data.

UK Employee API

Time and attendance

If your POS system provides timekeeping, then integrate with our Time & Attendance API. Each employee clocks in and out through the POS system. At timed intervals — generally daily — your system sends Fourth this data via our API. Using this data we update our workforce management and payroll, any customer-integrated HR systems, and include the data in our analytics.

Time & Attendance API

Published schedules

Make your POS system the go-to information hub by providing schedule information for staff in-store. With a Schedules API integration, your POS system sends a request daily for the most recent schedules available from Fourth, which you can then make available onscreen.

Schedules API

Next steps


If you have an existing mutual customer who has asked for a Fourth integration, please work with the Fourth Professional Services team member assigned to the customer and project. They can advise you as to which APIs best suit your business and customer requirements. Your mutual customer can provide their contact details.

If we do not yet have a mutual customer, please contact the Fourth Partnerships Team to find out more about partnering and on-boarding.


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