Groupon has been expanding its footprint beyond daily deals for some time, and today the company is doubling down on its investment in its restaurant point-of-sale system Breadcrumb with a new app designed to bring live sales data to the iPhone. With Breadcrumb Live, the company is offering restaurant owners the ability to pull up sales information, check counts, performance trends and other analytics, even when they’re away from their business.
Restaurant deals had been a popular category on Groupon, which led the company to develop specific solutions for the industry, taking on challengers like Square, PayPal, Revel Systems and others trying to generate traction for their own products and services at point-of-sale.
It’s unclear how successful Groupon’s Breadcrumb platform has been, however, since the company doesn’t disclose how many customers it has or what portion of Groupon’s overall business Breadcrumb today represents. But Groupon continues to make moves in this space indicating, at least, that it still believes its merchant platform has room to grow.
The company launched its iPad-based POS app Breadcrumb POS in May 2013, followed by its own tablet-based cash register solution last year.
Now with Breadcrumb Live, Groupon is extending the functionality of its Breadcrumb Pro platform to mobile phones. The app itself is free, but requires business owners to subscribe to the Breadcrumb Pro service on a monthly basis with plans that start at $99 per month for 1 iPad and go up to $399 per month for up to 10 iPads. The idea is that a restaurant, bar or club owner can purchase this system to allow staff to manage tables, customize menus, handle checks, set schedules, track tips and keep tabs on the business in general from any web browser or iPad.
BreadCrumb Live, meanwhile, is about bring the business’s key data and trends to the iPhone, offering details like total net sales, average check size, top categories, revenue trends, traffic and customer trends, number of guests, data on comps and voids, and more.
The new app was introduced today at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago and works on iPhones running iOS 8 or higher. The app also requires that users have administrator-level access to the business’s HQ.Breadcrumb.com website, and know their email and password associated with that account. In other words, it’s largely designed for the owner or manager who needs to stay on top of the business at any time, even when he or she is away from the venue itself.
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