Running a restaurant successfully can be extremely challenging. You must attract customers, serve them appropriately, and leave them with good experiences. You can generate much revenue only after doing all these correctly. One thing that can help here is technology, a restaurant management app, to be specific.
A restaurant management app can have various features that can help you streamline operations and generate revenue. In this article, we will go through how a restaurant management app can help you generate more revenue.
Streamlined Reservations and Table Management
A restaurant management app can help streamline reservations in the following ways:
- Reserve tables in advance. With a restaurant management app, you can schedule reservations and block off tables for specific times. This way, you can ensure your guests are seated quickly and easily. A recent survey shows that reservation searches have increased by 107% in 2022 compared to 2021 in the US. This means most people reserve their seats for better experiences. With a restaurant management app, you can offer this experience to the customers.
- Check-in customers quickly with the restaurant management app’s mobile check-in feature. This feature allows guests to check themselves in at their table from their phones before they arrive at the restaurant. This saves your employees and guests time during busy periods when things get chaotic, which means fewer errors.
- Optimize table allocation based on historical data collected over time using an analytics feature within these software products. This helps ensure maximum profitability since wait times stay low while customer satisfaction remains high.
Inventory Management and Cost Control
A restaurant management app usually has features to track and manage inventory. Thus, you can track the ingredients used to prepare each dish. This will help minimize food waste and ensure your menu items are always fresh.
Here’s how a restaurant management app can help with inventory management and cost savings:
- Real-time inventory tracking: Restaurant management apps allow you to track your inventory in real-time. When ingredients are used in dishes, they are deducted from the inventory automatically. This prevents over-ordering or under-ordering, helping you maintain optimal stock levels and reduce food waste.
- Inventory alerts: Many apps can set up automatic alerts when certain inventory items reach a low level. This ensures you can reorder ingredients promptly, preventing stockouts and maintaining menu consistency.
- Cost analysis: These apps can provide detailed cost analysis for each menu item. You can see the ingredients used in a dish, labor costs, and overheads. This helps you identify which items are the most profitable and which may need pricing adjustments.
- Recipe management: Restaurant management apps often include recipe management tools. This allows you to standardize recipes, ensuring the same ingredients are used consistently, reducing variation in taste and portion sizes.
- Budgeting and forecasting: Some apps offer budgeting and forecasting features. You can set financial targets and track your progress over time, helping you stay on top of costs and revenue.
- Employee accountability: With integrated employee management features, you can assign responsibilities to staff members, such as inventory counts and ordering.
Staff Scheduling and Performance Tracking
One of the most important aspects of running a restaurant is staff scheduling. Hence, many businesses are using it worldwide, leading to a growth in the staff scheduling software market. Data shows that it was valued at 412.36 million in 2022 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 14.74% until 2028.
You want to ensure that your employees work at the correct times, for the right amount of hours, and in the right places. This can be difficult when you have many things on your plate as a manager.
Thankfully, restaurant management apps can make this process much easier by giving you access to your employees’ information. According to CheddrSuite, such a solution can allow you to quickly create and modify employee schedules. It can also notify employees about any changes in their shifts so that nothing slips through the cracks.
There are also performance-tracking tools built into most restaurant management apps. These allow managers and owners to see which employees perform well. They can also track where employees need extra training, coaching, etc. This can help everyone focus on what matters most: boosting profits.
Menu Engineering and Marketing
Menu engineering is a process that helps you to optimize your menu. It involves analyzing the profitability of each item on your menu and tailoring offerings based on customer preferences.
It’s important to consider how much money each dish earns for your restaurant and its popularity among customers before making any changes or additions. If an item isn’t selling well and it’s taking up space on your menu board, it can be removed from rotation so that other options have room for growth.
You can also try lowering prices if an item isn’t popular enough. Some diners may enjoy trying something new if they feel like they’re getting a deal.
Menu engineering helps restaurants maximize profits by offering them tools like:
- Menu analysis: Examining the profitability and popularity of each menu item by analyzing sales data. This can involve looking at historical sales data, customer feedback, and cost of goods sold (COGS) for each item.
- Menu item categorization: Classifying menu items such as “stars,” “plowhorses,” “puzzles,” and “dogs.” This categorization is based on their profitability and popularity.
- Stars: High profitability and popularity.
- Plowhorses: High popularity but low profitability.
- Puzzles: Low popularity but high profitability.
- Dogs: Low popularity and low profitability.
- Pricing strategies: Adjusting menu item prices based on their category. For example, increasing costs for popular items with higher profit margins and reducing costs for less popular items to boost sales.
- Menu design and layout: Using design techniques to draw attention to high-profit items or strategically placing them on the menu to increase sales. This may involve highlighting, using visuals, or placing profitable items in prime positions on the menu.
- Engineering new dishes: Creating new menu items that appeal to customers and have higher profit margins. This can involve using cost-effective ingredients or repurposing existing components in creative ways.
- Menu psychology: Leveraging psychological principles to influence customer choices, like using descriptive language to make items sound more appealing.
- Cost control: Continuously monitoring and controlling food costs, portion sizes, and ingredient quality to maintain profitability while delivering value to customers.
- Menu training for staff: Ensuring restaurant staff are knowledgeable about the menu, can make recommendations, and use suggestive selling techniques effectively.
- Technology integration: Using point-of-sale (POS) systems and restaurant management software to track sales data, analyze trends, and make real-time menu adjustments.
Customer Feedback and Reviews
Customer feedback is an essential part of maintaining a successful restaurant. It’s the only way to know how well your business is doing and how it could be improved.
To get customer feedback, you must ensure customers know they can leave reviews on the app or website of your restaurant. This will help guide decisions about how best to run things in the future.
Moreover, it will also help attract more customers, which will directly impact your revenue. A recent report from BrightLocal shows that 98% of people read reviews of local businesses, including restaurants. You can attract these customers if your restaurant has positive reviews online.
Analytics and Reporting
Analytics and reporting are two of the most powerful features of a restaurant management app. Analytics allow you to see what’s working, what isn’t, and where you can make changes to increase your revenue. It will enable you to measure the success of marketing campaigns or identify trends that can help inform future decisions.
The best part? You don’t even need to hire an analyst or data scientist. You can access all the necessary information with a few clicks in your restaurant management app dashboard. You can find everything from how customers interact with your business to how they could spend more money.
Choosing the Right Restaurant Management App
Choosing the right restaurant management app can be daunting, especially if you are unfamiliar with all the different features and functions each offers. There are many things to consider when choosing an app, including:
- Reputation: You want to select an app with a good industry reputation. If not, it has been around for a while and had time to establish itself as a trusted brand.
- Support: Does the company offer support services? Does their customer service team respond quickly when issues arise? How do they handle complaints from customers or employees?
- Ease of use: How easy is it for staff members at all levels to use this tool daily without issues? It should also be easy for them to learn how everything works so everyone can get up to speed quickly.
Conclusion
The restaurant industry is a competitive one, but it doesn’t have to be an expensive one. Using a restaurant management app can save time and money while improving your customer experience. It can also enable you to implement strategies that can help generate more revenue from your restaurant business.