Best Apps for Restaurant Owners
Wednesday August 10, 2016
by Rich Lansdale
Best Apps for Restaurant Owners
There is a lot more to running a successful restaurant than providing customers with delicious food. Effective time management is a skill that every restaurant owner and manager needs to have in order to keep things operating smoothly. Whether you have a good grasp on managing your time or you are still looking for ways to improve, there are plenty of apps that can help you manage your business. Following are a few of the best apps for restaurant owners:
NoWait
Hopefully, your restaurant is successful enough to have experienced a particularly busy period that forced you to put people on a wait list. The NoWait app is a waitlist management tool that manages your server rotation and seating. No longer will your hostesses be taking names and writing them down. This app provides a one tap guest notification and two way messaging for easy communication.
The secret behind the NoWait app is its quoted wait algorithm that learns from each individual business so that it can predict wait times twice as accurately as hostesses. It also gives private verified guest feedback from specific tables so that you can see what your customers thought of their dining experience.
When managing your restaurant through Excel spreadsheets isn’t quite doing it for you, CrunchTime may be the solution. This back office system can take all of your restaurants data—from inventory to labor management—and turn it into actionable marketing strategies. This is a great app for restaurants looking to expand and needing to improve their business processes in order to accomplish their goals.
CrunchTime has dashboards that show operators important business information and sends them alerts when the restaurant’s efficiency is declining. It also makes it easier to track spending by identifying anything from fraudulent activities to high cost ingredients. By eliminating wasteful spending, you can purchase those Hobart mixer parts you’ve been meaning to purchase.
Lavu
These days, your growing restaurant needs a forward-thinking point of sale system if you want to stay competitive. Your solution? Lavu’s iPad POS system. Whether your business is a traditional restaurant, an up-and-coming food truck, or a trendy new bar, Lavu’s point of sale technology has what it takes to help your team better manage operations and serve customers.
Using Lavu’s unique tablet-based POS software, your restaurant can completely customize its POS experience. Not only that, but Lavu’s software serves as a truly integrated POS system, meaning you’ll have access to a host of staff management, inventory tracking, and KMS features. Because Lavu’s iPad POS operates on a familiar interface, you’ll never again have to worry about arduously training new employees. Even better, Lavu will work with your business to create a system that’s unique not just to your sector of the food service industry, but to your business itself.
Yelp
With nearly 90 percent of people turning to online reviews to help them decide what to buy or where to eat, it is critical that restaurant owners keep tabs on their business’s page. Yelp is one resource that many diners use to make a decision on where to eat and is the place for them to leave feedback on their dining experience. In order to effectively manage your Yelp reviews, the Yelp app for business owners is extremely helpful.
The Yelp app provides business owners with real-time mobile notifications so that they can read and respond to reviews and messages quickly. It also gives you important visitor engagement data such as your customer leads and user views. When your restaurant’s reputation is closely tied to its success, this app is a must-have for connecting with your customers.
Wunderlist aka Microsoft To Do
Note: Wunderlist App is now the Microsoft To-Do App. It can be tough to keep track of different schedules and what you need to tackle next on your to-do list. With the Microsoft To-Do app, you can get everything in sync easily and boost your productivity in the process. This app not only lets you set tasks and attach notes to them, but it also lets you set sub-tasks and recurring tasks as well.
Microsoft To-Do also allows you to set reminders for yourself so that you never forget to order those Oliver Bread Slicer Blades for your bread slicer again. It also lets you collaborate with others so that employees can add things to the list if they notice items that need replacing. You can access Microsoft To-Do from anywhere, and anything you create on the app can be printed out for your entire staff.
Key Ingredient
This app is no longer available, but here is the previous info about it.
Need a little food inspiration? The Key Ingredient app is perfect for those who are looking for something new to add to the menu. This app has over 1.5 million recipes and streams them to your phone with photos of mouth-watering food items to browse through. You can save these recipes to your favorites so that you can find them later and give your chef a look to see what they think. If your restaurant serves a specific niche, the app lets you browse by cuisine so that you can find a recipe that is suited to your restaurant.
Touchbistro is a point of sale solution designed specifically for the food business. User-friendly and cost-effective, this app will please both large and small restaurant owners with its ability to take orders and payments ahead of time, allowing businesses to maximize their efficiency. It also makes it easy for your staff to split bills, join seats, manage orders, and more by simply swiping their finger.
Other features this app has include tracking inventory, editing menu items, and creating personalized staff profiles, and the ability to access real-time insights from your restaurant data. This POS app has everything that busy restaurant owners need to make their business a success.
Make managing your employee hours easy, with the Zip Time Clock app, which helps you track and control your employee’s time. Not only is this app affordable, but it will pay for itself and then some, in the long run, by keeping business owners aware of potential labor law violations and tracking how closely employees stick to their schedules.
If you have even the slightest worry about employees clocking in for others and being dishonest about the time they have worked, this app is a must-have. It uses cloud-based convenience and geo-tech to let you know exactly where employees are when they clock in. In addition, it makes payroll processing simple by helping you collect and finalize your payroll hours.
Use Apps to Boost Your Restaurant’s Efficiency
If you aren’t utilizing technology to help boost your restaurant’s efficiency, you could be losing a lot of money in the process. Better customer service, reducing wasteful spending, and more effectively managing your time are things that your restaurant stands to gain when using these apps. If you are looking to get ahead of the competition and make things run more smoothly at your restaurant, it’s time to seriously consider these apps as a way to do so.
