There are many components to running a restaurant besides making food and serving it to your wonderful guests. We’ve done some research and pulled the best apps to help owners, managers, and all staff work in a more smoothly run restaurant.
Management Help:
Between managing inventory, making employee schedules, budgeting, and tracking the data from those aspects, one might need a great system.
This is an app that offers templates to track inventory, budgets, and staff schedules. It also creates graphic reports at the tips of your fingers. This app has the ability to be exported into an Excel spread sheet and is cloud based letting the owner bring up the data always up-to-date and on multiple devices.
Creating schedules can be one of the most complicated tasks of restaurant management. You have everything set then someone comes up with a shift they can’t make it to. This app allows staff to easily swap shifts and offers direct messaging to each employee.
POS System and Loyalty Programs-
Of course you could always go old school typing in each menu item price, but these apps offer efficient, user-friendly systems to give workers as well as customers the greatest experience possible. Loyalty programs are also on the rise. Many restaurants still offer cards, but apps are more easily accessible and more fun for a customer to use and see how their loyalty to the business is affecting them.
An iPad based POS system, Revel is one of the greatest. It offers ease of seating, ordering and serving, PLUS catering to the financials of the business. With bill-splitting features, individual employee logins, and social media integration, this system is everything you could want, and more.
This app integrates with your POS system to provide real-time monitoring. It monitors labor costs, sales and payments, key performance indicators and sends alerts when something out of your ordinary day pops up such as a staff member heading into overtime.
Loyalty programs are all the rage now that they are easily accessible and most people are on budgets. This app allows customers to scan codes and earn rewards every visit and the restaurant can customize rewards offerings. Belly encourages fun rewards and builds customer profiles to allow restaurants to offer the most useful prizes.
Many people are often in a rush during their lunch hour or have had a long day and want to head home quickly after work. OrderAhead is a lifesaver in that situation. This app allows the busy people to find the restaurant, order, pay, and set a pickup time at their own convenience. There is also a re-ordering feature for the regulars.
Social Media and Creative
9 times out of 10, restaurants are on social media. This includes managing multiple social media accounts and Hootsuite helps you do that as easily as possible. This app allows you to manage posting times and cross-publish posts and photos.
This app understands that not everyone is Photoshop savvy and provides photo editing and visual branding features at a user-friendly level. It is social media integrated so you can share your brand with the world.