The Ultimate Guide to Choosing Ordering Software for Your Restaurant
Introduction
Restaurants are typically busy all year round, and during the holiday seasons, the number of guests significantly increases adding to the mayhem. An excellent example of the season where restaurants experience their greatest surge in traffic is in December.
The season experiences a massive boost in the number of customer demands. As a result, supervisors may find it difficult to manage orders, resulting in over-ordering and under-ordering, which is not suitable for your restaurant. Your expenses will increase and ultimately have a negative impact on the business.
You have to make sure that you are maintaining an optimal level of stock. One of the best ways to achieve this objective is by utilizing ordering management software for your restaurant.
One delayed package delivery or misplaced item can break or make the overall experience of your restaurant. As a restaurant manager, you have to make sure that you fill and send the orders with urgency and accuracy. The only thing that will make a difference in such a situation is a reputable order management system.
The most important thing is to get software that will add value to your brand.
It is crucial to understand all of the added benefits that such software brings to your restaurant. We will discuss the qualities of a good ordering software for your restaurant.
Better Oversight of Your Inventory
One of the benefits that order management software brings to your restaurant is that it enhances the oversight of inventory. With the right solution in place, restaurant supervisors will make sure that all orders are fulfilled rightfully and shipped within the right timeframe.
If you own a restaurant, you have to maintain an accurate record of the quantities that you receive. This information will help you determine the exact amount of inventory that you have on-hand. With a reliable ordering tool in place, you will be able to receive and manage all orders accurately.
If you order any item and it is missing or damaged, you can adjust the quantities and send a credit memo to the supplier. Therefore, the restaurant ordering system will make sure that you are up to date with everything that is taking place in your restaurant.
The tool will make sure that you maintain optimal inventory all the time and avoid over-ordering. Customers appreciate fresh produce and food in general, so when you order in excess, you compromise meeting these expectations.
Deliverables That are a Must
1. Real-Time Management of Your Orders
The best order management tool will organize your orders according to status. It will help you manage your orders in the easiest way possible. You can get a history orders page that uses a broad range of filters to help you effortlessly navigate to a particular order.
You can view the expected delivery date for the orders that are in transit from the mobile phone. It is one of the features that restaurant supervisors will not want to miss when ordering software. The system will help you organize your orders, and you can access all of your invoices in a single place.
2. Order Accuracy That Leads to Cost Reduction
A boost in the accuracy of the order will help you save on your restaurant costs considerably. According to David Essex, TechTarget contributor, the reduction of the expenses can extend to both labor expenses and inventory.
As a result, it will help you reduce the cost of food, helping your restaurant gain a competitive advantage against competitors.
The right ordering tool combines the ingredient utilization, sales data, on-hand inventory, and the delivery calendars from the supplier to enhance the accuracy of the ordering system. You can adjust the receiving quantities to make sure that you always have the correct on-hand quantities.
The tool can also help create customized order guides and combine the items that come from various suppliers to help send several purchase orders with a single click.
The ordering tool should also help you monitor all of your expenditures, as well as set budgets. Therefore, you will eliminate the risk of spending more than what is needed. The dashboard will show you the sum of your weekly orders, the number of product orders, and the number of suppliers.
You can also navigate through the history of orders and get a breakdown of all of them.
3. Real-Time Order Status That Will Lead to Excellent Customer Service
Order management software provides real-time updates on the status of all incoming orders and current inventory, keeping the menu up-to-date and avoiding a shortage in popular dishes.
This increases the level of customer service and enhances the overall experience for your customers.
4. Pricing Visibility
If you own a restaurant, the ordering software has a critical role to play when it comes to pricing visibility. You may not notice some price increases because they take place over an extended period.
With the right ordering system in place, you will hold your suppliers accountable.
The good thing about these systems is that they allow restaurant managers to see the pricing trends of all the ingredients that they purchase. You can go back through the history of buying the products and see how the prices change over time.
With this information, you will be able to choose those suppliers who offer the best prices.
5. Prevent Errors
Most ordering tools have real-time alerts that will help you prevent errors. Ordering too much inventory or running short of an ingredient will have a negative impact and both scenarios will hurt your business.
Advanced ordering software will give you alerts in such instances and prevent these types of outcomes from occurring. You can configure the system to alert whenever inventory is reaching lower limits, so you will receive a notification once you start running low on a particular ingredient.
Also, supervisors can set alerts that prevent them from ordering an amount that is higher than what they need.
With all these benefits, it is clear that ordering software is a valuable asset to any restaurant. Choosing the right solution will help you to gain a competitive advantage in the market.
How to Choose the Right Ordering Software for Your Restaurant
The market has several players who can develop marketing software for your restaurant. However, not all of them can exceed expectations or are even capable of meeting expectations. Therefore, you have to be extremely careful when shopping for ordering software for your restaurant. Managing inventory no longer needs to be completed through logbooks and spreadsheets.
Managing inventory on paper will invite costly errors and mistakes that hinder the profitability and growth of your restaurant.
The environment we are operating in is highly competitive. You will be exposing your restaurant to risk by storing your inventory data on shared spreadsheets. The good thing is that there is software available for the development of companies to face these challenges and ultimately lead to prosperity. With a long list of suppliers, it can be hard to choose a brand that blends with the functionality of your brand.
You need to get a tool that will bring real value addition to your business. It is good to look for a vendor who can customize the software to your unique business needs.
Here are some key features that will help you choose the right ordering system for your restaurant
1. Real-Time Visibility of Order Status and Stock Levels
The speed of the modern restaurant business is high, and you need real-time visibility or each order's delivery status, as well as in-house stock levels. Critically evaluate how the system you are buying works. Questions that should be addressed are
- Will the users get all the information from one place or multiple systems?
- Is the system accurate?
- Does it pull data in real-time?
- Do you enter data manually?
If you don't have real-time information about your stock, you will use guesswork to make crucial decisions in your restaurant. You will struggle with out-of-stock inventory, late shipments, overstocking in your restaurant.
It can lead to losses and poor customer experiences in your business. Make sure that the software you choose has real-time visibility features for both order status and stock levels.
2. Flexibility to Support Future Needs in Your Restaurant
Some ordering solutions are not flexible enough to support modern businesses. The system should allow you to create new functionalities when your restaurant business needs change. Also, it should allow you to use unique SKUs to create variations of the same product.
Your inventory data should be linked to manageable product families to help you source products. Besides, you should be in a position to generate unique batch and serial numbers for your products.
Custom tools or those that don't operate on pure-play management of inventory will force you to look for the supplier to make the necessary changes. It will be costly, inefficient, and limit future updates.
3. The Reporting System Should Support Business Decisions
A restaurant needs a system that will help managers generate timely and accurate reports. It should help you create better business decisions, and it should help you review the timing and schedule of your reports.
It is good to go for automated reports that you can access whenever you need them. Real-time reports are better than waiting for EOD ones.
Once you know your reporting requirements, check what the ordering system has to offer. Some developers will limit the access to reports until you pay more for more modules.
4. Enter Price Integrations
System connectivity of integration is crucial for any modern restaurant ordering system. It is the most problematic and weakest feature in most systems. Evaluate the needs you have for system integration and assess what the solution offers. It should help you eliminate the use of manual data entry as much as possible.
Integrations should pull and organize product data to help you eliminate errors and save time. However, some of your current system integrations may not meet your future needs.
A sound system will offer the Application Programming Interface (API) functionality. Once you configure the system's API, it will be able to support your integration paths. It will eliminate expensive custom integrations and save your money and time in the future.
It is crucial to have an ordering software for your restaurant. Making the right choice will help you to enhance your customer service and profitability.
The system will help you reduce the food cost in your restaurant, while also maintains top quality products. Make sure you do your homework and choose a solution that is a perfect match for your restaurant.
Must-Read Content
