4 tips to optimize your restaurant management

Renting or buying premises, taking over a business, equipment, inventory, standards and regulations - opening a restaurant can be a daunting task. The restaurateur has to wear a multitude of hats to ensure the smooth running of his restaurant: relations with suppliers, stock forecasting, management of reservations and payroll, and so on.  

To simplify life and optimize restaurant management, restaurateurs have embarked on their digital transformation. A few years ago, certain tools seemed superfluous, but the health crisis accelerated the process and restaurants reopened their doors, turning to digital solutions to simplify their daily lives and accelerate business growth.

How can you successfully meet the challenge of optimizing your facility? We take a closer look.

Invest in a multi-function cash register software

Cash registers have undergone a veritable revolution in recent years. Once limited to customer payment, they now offer a range of additional functions, making them a valuable ally in restaurant management.

Investing in modern, high-performance cash register software is now the best way to optimize restaurant management and save time.

Cash register software such as Zelty, SumUp and Lightspeed have gone far beyond the single cash register to enable you to manage table reservations, track sales precisely and centralize orders across all channels (on the counter and at touch terminals, takeaway, delivery, etc.).

Streamline relations with suppliers

Every restaurateur deals on a daily basis with dozens of suppliers responsible for providing their restaurant with raw materials. When you know that a restaurant's gross margin is directly impacted by the purchase of raw materials, anticipating sales fluctuations and establishing a relationship of trust with your suppliers is the best way to gain leverage in price negotiations. This relationship requires effective invoice management. Get into the habit of centralizing them and tracking due dates by scheduling reminders, for example. Solutions such as Inpulse or Choco exist today to centralize and anticipate your orders, manage your relations with suppliers and simplify product delivery.

Manage your staff for better restaurant management

If you don't manage your teams properly, you'll end up with an unoptimized payroll and additional costs. And yet, depending on the size of your restaurant, synchronizing your staff's schedules can quickly become a real headache.

Optimizing staff management also means simplifying the day-to-day life of your employees, and building their loyalty. In the midst of a staff shortage in the restaurant and catering sector (between 200,000 and 300,000 positions are currently vacant in this sector), hiring staff and making them want to stay is a crucial issue. With this in mind, motivation is a key factor in your restaurant's appeal. Offering simple scheduling, digital time clocks and payroll management is the answer both to administrative headaches and to more pleasant planning for employees. Snapshift and Skello, both specialists in HR management, will be your best allies!

Optimize order taking

Faced with rushes of customers and a shortage of staff, it's becoming increasingly difficult to ensure the smooth running of your restaurant and optimum order-taking. Yet this is a prerequisite for the smooth running of your restaurant, and for building customer loyalty. The health crisis has made the challenge of offering both physical proximity to customers and an increasingly popular digital offering even more obvious. Designing your restaurant to optimize rush periods has become a key factor in boosting your restaurant's growth. Restaurants are increasingly committed to omnichannel sales, i.e. sales via different channels such as on-site, takeaway and delivery. Delivery drivers are always crowding in front of the restaurant waiting for orders, which can be a nuisance for your on-site clientele. Don't hesitate to set up signage indicating a waiting point.

At lunchtime, there's an endless line of customers waiting to order at the counter, and you're worried about losing the impatient ones? Tabesto order kiosks with integrated payment allow you to relieve counter congestion by creating different order points and freeing up your staff for tasks more related to ordering and less to cashiering.

Other solutions exist to optimize the management of your restaurant from the moment it opens and once it's open, so don't hesitate to contact us to discuss them!

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