Whether you are an independent restauranteur or the manager of a particular location within a larger franchise or organization of restaurants, you face many of the same challenges. These include, but are not limited to, tracking the seating of patrons, ensuring prompt service, providing complete accuracy in order receipt and delivery and—of course—trouble free payment processes. The thought of tracking of all these items can be overwhelming to some but fortunately today there are many restaurant software programs that dramatically streamline the management of these key functions in the daily life of any restaurant.
One of the features of many programs today is the ability to quickly and easily build menus. This can be very beneficial if you alter your menu regularly for seasonal or other reasons. Order entry is then a logical next step and function to be added. For restaurants with multiple terminals, the ability to have more than one employee entering information into the program at the same time without errors is a must. This is akin to Sharepoint or other technology available for corporate uses today. Restaurant software can completely change the way you do business in your restaurant on a daily basis.
Here is one of the biggest challenges for many restaurants—the large party wanting to have separate checks. No longer is this the logistical nightmare that it once was. Today’s technology allows your staff to sort multiple tickets and then print delivery information and receipts as well as to even assign tips to multiple checks from the same table or party.
Reporting is another area of great benefit with today’s restaurant software programs. You can get regular reports on anything from payroll to job perfomance, daily and weekly sales to overhead and more. The ability to export reports into other programs such as Excel for further manipulation make this feature even more compelling to today’s businesses. If your restaurant has a separate bar area or a catering or special functions area, you would also find programs that can track sales and costs for those portions of your business separately from the main restaurant. This is a huge asset for you and helps you to determine where the majority of your business is coming from and to therefore determine where to continue to put your efforts into for further growth or changes.
Technology today can go a long way toward helping many businesses and restaurants are no exeption to that. With some automation, you are freed up to focus on what is truly important to your business—the customers (and, of course, the food).
When you need to increase your overall efficiencies, look for Rendezvous. It can help you streamline processes and also provide valuable reports and insight that can drive business decisions.
