Full-service operators and employees are constantly on the move, whether they’re helping customers on the front end or completing side work in the kitchen. Adding further complexity to a unit’s operations is the fact that every task must seemingly be completed in isolation—from checking inventory to balancing checkbooks. The sheer volume of task management systems that many restaurants have can contribute to confusion and, oftentimes, mishandling of information.
“For example, most restaurant bookkeeping involves hours of tedious manual data entry,” says Jimmy Speyer, vice president of sales at Restaurant365. “When people are working with multiple systems, it means manually combining data points which takes a lot of time and leaves more room for error.”
Juggling multiple management programs can create more problems than the individual platforms might solve, costing money, complicating the flow of information, allowing for discrepancies in reporting, and generally taking up time that team members could otherwise devote to different work.
Efficient allocation of labor is important to keeping overall operations costs—and can be factored into a restaurant’s prime cost when using an accounting software such as Restaurant365. The company’s tools give operators the option to include unburdened or burdened labor when calculating prime costs, providing a complete view of labor costs and helping to avoid surprises.
“With 90 percent of transactions happening in the store, and 99 percent of recordkeeping needed above the store, movement of data is critical,” Speyer says.
In addition, because datasets from different task managers must be incorporated manually, there is a lot of potential for inaccuracies, which can affect ordering, scheduling, and payments.
“In full service, complex scheduling needs and legal requirements lead to complications,” Speyer says. “Because labor accounts for 30 percent or more of a restaurant’s prime cost, there’s a lot of profit to be found simply by saving operators and employees time away from data entry.”
By bringing the entire accounting system into an integrated platform, services like Restaurant365 have eliminated the kind of difficult data management that many operators have become accustomed to. By implementing a single program—which consolidates banking information, operations, inventory, scheduling, and reporting—restaurants can speed up business while automating all of the data entry tasks, thereby improving both scale and profit.
“Time is money,” Speyer says. “Having a focused platform that is built to operators’ needs means they spend zero time—not just less time—trying to combine data points in order to get answers to the questions that affect their profits.”
