📊 Best Practices for Configuring Alert Thresholds

Setting up alerts is easy, but tuning them to be effective requires a bit of strategy. If you set thresholds too low, managers will suffer from "alert fatigue" and stop checking their phones. If set too high, you might miss critical issues.

Here are some recommended strategies for configuring your trigger values in NX POS. 🚀

1. Avoiding "Alert Fatigue" 🔕

The goal of an alert is to drive action, not just to inform. When configuring count-based alerts (like Discount Count or Void Count), ask yourself: "Do I need to know about the first one, or just the fifth one?"

Recommendation: Avoid setting the Trigger Value to 1 for common events like Voids or Discounts.
Strategy: Check your end-of-day reports to find the average number of voids per shift. Set your alert trigger slightly above that average. This ensures you are only notified when a shift is becoming "abnormal."

2. Loss Prevention & Security 🛡️

For alerts related to theft or training issues, you want to catch trends before they become expensive.

Cumulative Void & Discount Dollars

Instead of tracking every single void, track the total impact on the drawer.

Strategy: Set the Cumulative Void Dollars trigger to the price of your average entrée times three (e.g., if an entrée is $20, set the alert to $60). If a single server voids three entrées' worth of food in one shift, a manager should probably have a conversation with them.

Void Percent of Sales

This is often the most accurate metric for loss prevention because it scales with volume.

Strategy: A typical healthy void percentage is often between 2-4%. Setting an alert for Void Percent Of Sales at 5% or 6% allows you to catch shifts that are statistically significantly different from the norm.

3. Controlling Labor Costs ⏱️

Labor alerts are actionable in real-time. If you get an overtime alert, you can cut that employee immediately to save money.

Employee Enter Overtime

Trigger Value: This event often triggers based on the system's overtime rules (e.g., 40 hours).
Send Condition: Set this to Any time.
Why: You need to know the exact moment an employee crosses into overtime so you can make a decision to clock them out or approve the extra cost.

Labor Percent

Strategy: Set this slightly above your target KPI. If your goal is to keep Labor under 25%, set the alert to 28%. This gives you a "warning buffer" to cut staff before the day ends.

4. Celebrating Wins 🎉

Not all alerts have to be negative! Use Net Sales Dollars to boost morale or keep owners informed of success.

Strategy: Set a Net Sales Dollars alert for your "Break Even" point and another for a "Record Day" goal.
Example: If a good Friday night is $5,000, set an Alert for $5,000 with a text message that says "Great job team!" (if the system supports custom messages) or simply use the notification as a cue to send a group text to the staff.