7 Reasons You Need a Restaurant Management Platform
September 7, 2022
If you own or operate a restaurant, you know the challenges. From attracting new customers to maintaining a well-oiled back of house to keeping your team motivated and productive, it’s a lot. If you’re not using a restaurant management platform, you can easily get overwhelmed. Here are seven reasons to invest in a restaurant management system that saves time, helps grow your business, and reduces stress on your staff.
#1: It Helps You Stay on Top of Operations Results in Real Time
It’s difficult to manage your restaurant without good data. Keep track of your daily or monthly KPIs—or a custom time period—at one or more locations and do it in real time. QSRSoft Reports is a cloud-based data and analytics solution that helps you measure your most important metrics so you can track, analyze, and grow your business faster. Your real-time reports are accessible on any device through our secure network that lets you seamlessly integrate your point of sale (POS) and other data for transparent data wherever and whenever you need it. Need to track how your monthly or quarterly sales are doing? Want to compare your KPIs at different locations? Curious to see how successful your latest promotion was? Do it all with QSRSoft Reports.
#2: It Keeps Data Accessible to Better Grow Your Business
If you are like many restaurants, you have many different systems and data elements. To grow your business, you need your important data combined and at your fingertips. This allows you to analyze how you’re budgeting your time and money, where you can improve, and when you can expect to reach your business goals. Reports links all your key data systems so you can watch that data in real time. Use Reports to identify trends, rush times, marketing response, and other key figures. The dashboard is completely customizable to how you like to see your data. Choose the metrics you want to see, and how you want to see them. Select the columns, data, and even graphs so your data is easy to understand at a glance.
#3: It Streamlines Your Business Workflows
Process is critical to ensuring your restaurant runs well. Are manual processes eating away at your time and productivity? Are you still completing shift checklists, creating employee schedules, and completing food safety processes manually? If so, you’re wasting hours of time, hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars, and risking inaccurate data due to human error. What if you could digitize and automate your processes so that you and your staff can focus on what’s most important: your customers. The QSRSoft Forms solution automates time-wasting, tedious tasks like keeping track of employee tasks, restaurant checklists, food safety, and so much more. Digitize any process, even creating an alert to let you know when you or your staff need to take action. You can even tie it into our Reports solution, so you can create customized reports with the data you need. Say goodbye to pen and paper and hello to a more efficient operation.
#4: It Simplifies Scheduling and Makes Employees More Efficient
According to Fast Casual, scheduling software is one of the top technologies transforming the restaurant industry. Their research has found that it has even reduced restaurant labor costs by 2% or more. So, what, exactly, does a scheduling software do? It takes care of it all—projecting your future sales, creating schedules, accounting for shift changes, tracking employee availability, monitoring sales budgets, handling PTO requests, and minimizing overtime. In short, it does what restaurant managers don’t have time to do (but are forced to): handle, and react to, things like changes in scheduling, shift changes, and tracking time cards. The QSRSoft Workforce Management solution includes an AI-powered schedule generator that helps you predict how many shifts you’ll need, which staff to schedule when, and more—based on your data. Fill more of your shifts by automatically allowing employees to cover shifts in your other locations, resulting in fewer short-staffed days and last-minute shift changes.
#5: It Stops Money and Food Waste with Good Inventory Management
It’s true: you’re only as good as your staff. But we would add a caveat to this phrase: You’re also only as good as your inventory. Running out of a key product, or overspending on food stock that will spoil (and spoil your budget) is brutal, but it’s an unfortunate part of the restaurant industry. That is, unless you have a good inventory management system that tracks what’s on your shelves at all times, alerts you to when you need to re-order, and does it all in real time. The QSRSoft Cash & Inventory system takes over manual paper-based inventory counting with an automated process that links to your POS and other software systems, giving you a real-time running tally of everything you have, what you’re running low on, and what you need to order soon. This digital system helps you avoid over and under-ordering and keeps you on budget while ensuring you have what you need for your daily and promotional sales.
#6: It Helps Prevent Costly Equipment Repairs and Minimizes Downtime
The average restaurateur spends between $500 and $2,500 each month on equipment repairs. Everything from the point of sale to the ovens to the espresso machines can be the culprit—and that’s not even considering what restaurants with multiple locations are spending, or the sales lost during downtime. Depending on the machine, the amount of downtime, and the time of day (rush or slow), this could mean hundreds if not thousands of dollars in lost revenue. And that’s not all you’re losing—you’re losing brand trust and your employees’ patience (after all, they’re the ones who must deal with disgruntled customers!) What is the cause? The simple answer: lack of proper preventative maintenance and data-driven reinvestment planning.
How can you prevent costly equipment repairs? Simple acts like keeping the condenser coils clean on a freezer or cleaning out the grinds in an espresso machine can mean the difference between a machine that needs repair every month and one that hardly ever breaks down—and has a years-longer lifespan. QSRSoft’s Equipment Management Solution brings all of your equipment maintenance tasks into one, digitized, automated place that alerts you when a preventive maintenance task needs to be completed. Assign tasks to each staff member, and once they complete a task, they simply check it off in the software, giving you a clear maintenance record and keeping everyone accountable. This solution helps you digitize your PM tasks for freezers, coolers, ovens, air conditioners—anything you need, and across multiple locations.
#7: It Helps You Increase Employee Engagement
Studies show that engaged employees perform 20% better than less engaged team members and result in 59% less turnover. How do you engage your employees? A combination of communication, recognition, and motivation. QSRSoft TV is a workplace digital engagement system that incorporates all three factors. It creates a digital huddle board that increases competition between your locations and team members, motivating them through clear KPIs and gamified challenges that make work fun. When they do achieve a goal, QSRSoft TV helps you reward your employees with public recognition. It also keeps everyone on the same page with consistent communication, including company-wide announcements, important safety reminders, up-to-date staff schedules, and more. And it helps you celebrate your employees—from crushing a KPI to acknowledging a birthday, anniversary, or other special events.
Learn more about QSRSoft’s restaurant management solutions, and request a demo today.