Every restaurant has a back office, whether or not anyone calls it that. Someone does the cash-up, the invoices, the rota, the payroll, the VAT. The question is how many hours it takes, and how many of those hours are spent typing something that already exists somewhere else.
Where the time goes
- Re-keying till totals into a spreadsheet, then into the accounts.
- Typing supplier invoices, then checking them against statements by hand.
- Building the rota from last week's rota, then re-entering the hours into payroll.
- Chasing managers for cash-up sheets and receipts at month-end.
- Producing reports by copying numbers between systems that do not talk.
None of that is skilled work. All of it is error-prone, and all of it is done by people who would rather be running the restaurant.
What leading services do instead
Capture once. Sales come straight from the till. Invoices are photographed or emailed and read by software. Hours come from clock-ins. The number is typed by nobody.
Reconcile automatically. Supplier statements match themselves to the captured invoices, and the exceptions are the only things a person looks at. Bank and card feeds match the sales postings.
Rota from forecast. Next week's rota starts from expected sales by day part, with the wage cost showing as it is built, so the manager sees the cost before the shift is worked.
Report from one source. The weekly summary is built from the data already captured, not assembled by hand on a Monday morning.
What it is worth
The time saving is the obvious part, and it lands with managers first. The cost saving usually comes from two places: labour planned to trade rather than to habit, and supplier prices actually checked because the invoices are visible. One of our clients, Mistress of Mayfair, says Opsyte "saves us time each week" and that the change in their wage spend is "saving around £2,000 weekly". Their numbers, on their business.
How to start
Pick the single most-typed number in your business. For most restaurants it is the supplier invoice. Automate that one, measure the hours it gives back, and let the rest follow. That is roughly how HSG approaches it with every new client: Opsyte for the capture, Solutions 4 Caterers for the books, one routine instead of five.