The iPad is an excellent business tool, and we’ve seen it being used in a number of business scenarios so far — as a tool to go green, to collaborate or to increase productivity. Clearly, the iPad is helping businesses meet goals in style.

We did some poking around to see how companies are using the iPad as of late, and we observed a few recurring themes. The iPad obviously has a place in the retail environment, but we also heard from a surprising number of doctors using it to decrease operation costs.

Check out what we learned below, and let us know how you’ve seen the iPad being used in the business world in the comments.

1. Point-of-Sale System

Zinneken’s employee Joel Lashmore chats with a customer.

Mobile payment systems are redefining commerce, and so far, smartphone-related payment systems — such as Square, Intuit GoPayment, and PAYware Mobile, have been making the most ruckus. But the iPad is a contender in this space, too.

iPad-based point-of-sale (POS) systems are popping up everywhere we go. Cantabrigian waffle shop Zinneken’s, for example, uses the free iPad app ShopKeep as its POS system of choice.

Zinneken’s co-founder Nhon Ma says that the startup cost of using an iPad POS system has been low, compared with other options. “We’ve spent around $1,300 in equipment as a start-up cost — iPad 2, cash register, acrylic display, printer. Other non-iPad POS suppliers would charge you from $5,000 to $6,000 upfront,” he says. Maintenance on the system is also ideal, says Ma, as ShopKeep’s software upgrades are free, compared with traditional supplier maintenance fees of $50 to $100 per month.

Training is a breeze, too, says Ma. “In the restaurant or retail industry, employee turnover is known to be high in general. With our POS system, every new hire has been operational with the POS after just 10 minutes of explanations.” That’s no time at all, considering some of Ma’s employees have commented that previous non-iPad POS training lasted around a week.

Zinneken’s keeps its iPad in an iSkidz flippable dock so that the cashier can easily flip the iPad over for customers to sign their receipts.

Ma says there are some downsides, though. “Peripherals — such as credit card readers and [product] scanners — must be iPad-compatible. As it is fairly a new market, few options are available. And to my knowledge, only one brand of printers is compatible with ShopKeep POS — that’s Star Micronic printers … expensive but highly reliable.”

Worst of all, though, is the fact that credit card processing is impossible if the Internet is down, Ma says. He recommends using a router with a 4G USB key as a backup.

For businesses in the market, another iPad POS system worth checking out is Revel Systems.

2. Restaurant Menus & Entertainment

HubWorks brings the iPad to the table.

While some retailers and restaurants are installing iPads up front to manage sales, others are installing them right at the table.

HubWorks Interactive, an iPad solutions provider for the hospitality industry, is one company making in-store iPad ordering a reality.

With more than 800 stores, Buffalo Wild Wings is one of the largest to give at-table iPads a go.

Customers can not only order and pay on the tablets, but also update their social channels, including Twitter and Facebook. The hope, of course, is that customers will talk up the restaurant to their social graphs.

HubWorks’ new technology — offering social media entertainment at the table — is proving to increase sales by 10%, reduce customer wait times by 30% and increase repeat customer visits by 85%.

Another budding restaurant chain on the block is benefiting from in-store iPads, as well. Let’s Yo, a frozen yogurt franchise launched in October 2011 in Marlboro, New Jersey, decided to install iPads at customer tables for entertainment purposes and has had great results. The iPads are hooked up to closed-circuit TVs that allow consumers to interact with one another and post on the Let’s Yo Facebook Page. The company recently ran a Facebook contest, powered greatly by the in-store iPads, which led to a 41% increase in Facebook Likes. Not too shabby.

3. Medical Records

While we may not like to think of hospitals as businesses, they have operation costs like the rest of us. Both independent physicians and large medical groups have to figure out how to slash operational expenses.

For years now, we’ve been hearing about electronic medical records, yet I haven’t seen a single iPad, mobile device or laptop in use in any of the waiting rooms I’ve frequented. So, what’s the hold-up? Well, once again, it’s the medical world we’re talking about here — slow to adopt, highly bureaucratic and weighted down with regulations. But it can’t stay that way forever.

We’ve seen a number of iPad apps on the market created to help doctors cut costs and manage data efficiently. One player in the market is DrChrono — the startup has created a cloud- and web-based electronic health record, accessible via iPad and iPhone, as well as via any Internet browser.

Along with its electronic health record platform, DrChrono also implements scheduling features, patient reminders and a billing system, making data collection and maintenance easy for doctors and their staff. Going digital benefits the patient, too — say goodbye to that chunk of papers you used to fill out in the waiting room. DrChrono enables users to create profiles that can be easily updated with future visits.

Final Thoughts

While researching the most recent innovative uses of the iPad, we came across a number of options — inventory trackers, in-flight entertainment, taxi screens, sales tools and more. These three topics stood out as the most interesting and promising, but it’s clear that the tablet is aiming to revolutionize many more industries.

While much of the payments industry’s attention is on mobile payments, mobile technology is also starting to transform the traditional retail checkout. This week, a tablet-based point-of-sale startup called ShopKeep POS launched software to keep track of employee hours and to let restaurants modify orders on the fly.

Also this week, POS terminal kingpin VeriFone Systems Inc. announced an offering that integrates its GlobalBay in-store mobile technology with Fujitsu America Inc.’s GlobalStore software. The integration will run on a variety of mobile devices and allow store personnel to check out customers anywhere in the shop. It will support alternative payments as well as digital wallets, according to the announcement.

New York City-based ShopKeep, which started in 2008 and introduced its application for the Apple Inc. iPad only 15 months ago, now has 3,000 merchant locations using its service around the country, says Sandhya Rao, vice president of marketing and sales. Most of these outlets are specialty stores, coffee shops, and dining establishments. Competitors include another startup, Revel Systems Inc., San Francisco, and NCR Corp., which markets a tablet-based POS product under the Silver name that works on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

With competition heating up, providers are rushing to add features. ShopKeep’s new so-called modifier feature lets restaurant personnel change standard menu items to suit customer orders. A customer might ask that mustard be added to a hot dog, for example, or mayonnaise not be put on a hamburger. The app keeps track of the changes for pricing purposes and sends the customized order to the kitchen to be printed out. Meanwhile, the company’s new time-clock feature lets managers enter and track employee hours on the iPad.

ShopKeep works with about 140 independent sales organizations to help generate lead for its cloud-based checkout system, says Jamil Hossain, director of partner channels. The system can process cards but also features an integration with PayPal Inc. Similar integrations with two other alternative-payment processors, Dwolla Inc. and LevelUp, are in the works.

Merchants pay $49 per month per iPad, which includes the app, unlimited access to customer service, and a transaction gateway. Merchants continue to process transactions through their existing acquirer. “We are acquirer agnostic,” says Rao. She adds that, while ShopKeep is working out a residual plan for ISOs, most are interested in working with the company to be able to offer new technology to their merchants. “We’re getting good traction even without [a financial] incentive,” says Rao.

She adds that there will probably be integrations in the near future beyond PayPal, LevelUp, and Dwolla. “We get quite a few calls from payment providers who want to be in our system, so that’s going to be a trend,” she says.

As for boarding more merchants, ShopKeep expects features like the order-modification capability, known as “modifiers,” to be especially attractive . “About half our merchants are in the coffee/quick-serve/bakery category,” Rao notes. “Because of modifiers, we expect we’ll bring in a lot more. There’s not a lot of cloud-based apps that do this real well.”

Observers say startups like ShopKeep are exploiting a durable trend in POS technology. “They’re another outfit that’s emerged to say we have a very different hardware environment than we did five or 10 years ago,” says one independent expert who asked not to be identified. “They saw an opportunity.”

ShopKeep is trying to use Apple’s iPad tablet computer and the Web to break into the mundane but lucrative market for cash register software.

The New York-based startup has raised $2.2 million in financing led by Tribeca Venture Partners and TTV Capital, as two-year-old ShopKeep hopes to expand amid competition from giants like Microsoft and promising startups like Square, which have much bigger sales and engineering forces.

The funding values the small company at slightly more than $10 million, said a person familiar with the matter.