In the spring of 2018, 660,755 restaurants across the United States were counted by Statista. Among these restaurants are quick-service restaurants and full-service restaurants.  Though fast food powerhouses have the most units (because of franchising), independent restaurants still trump over them. 

When it comes to income generated, quick-service restaurants gained US$299.6 billion. Meanwhile, full-service restaurants were forecasted to take in US$263 billion. These numbers are according to separate reports also published by Statista. 

These numbers are the least surprising, considering that Americans are using 48% percent of their food budget towards eating out in 2019, a far cry from the 25% that was noted in 1955.

But what do these figures have to do with you? The income generated by the restaurant industry, as well as your own, could be higher. There are numerous factors that affect these. However, you can mitigate issues and even enhance your restaurant’s performance when you rely on helpful tools, such as a restaurant management platform.

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There are a wide variety of advantages of restaurant management system that you can gain. Below are only a few of them. 

1. Cut Down Food Wastage

When people eat at restaurants, there are times when they are unable to consume the food on their plates to the last bite. This contributes to global food wastage, which amounts to around 1.3 billion tonnes and to US$990 billion in losses. This is according to the food lost and waste reduction findings of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 

Not only are these figures harmful to the environment, but they are also a cause for concern to restaurants and hospitality businesses. After all, food wastage is equivalent to a reduction in profits. 

But you can remedy this easily when you have better control over the amounts of ingredients you use and the amounts of food you serve. This is possible when you have a restaurant management system. That is because such a platform can help you see which menu items are most popular and focus on those to avoid wasting the ingredients of less in-demand food items.

This way, you can focus your ingredient purchasing towards favorite menu items to prevent other food resources from being unusable. 

2. Streamline Order Management

When there is a steady stream of orders, it can be confusing and difficult for chefs, cooks, and servers to keep up. If they cannot cook foods in the exact order, it can spell trouble for the restaurant because customers are likely to become impatient and will leave the premises or will make a demand. In any case, it will be a loss to the restaurant.

Nevertheless, your food and hospitality business can overcome this challenge using restaurant management software. Applications like this let you oversee orders and their fulfillment. This way, you can see which table gets to have a food item first. This can also help the chefs and the cooks to prepare similar foods together for efficiency. 

And to avoid disorientation, they can remove an order from the active window so that they could focus only on yet unfulfilled orders. Thus, your kitchen team can work faster to ensure the satisfaction of diners. 

3. Support Multiple Payment Methods

Customers have their most preferred payment methods and some times, it is not cash. If your food and hospitality business only accepts cash, it can lead to you losing potential diners. Fortunately, you can find multiple-payment processing method among restaurant management system features. 

When you have this capability, you can cater to a wider customer base. This is because things will be more convenient for them when they can use their debit or credit cards. It also helps to support proximity mobile payment applications since this gives diners more security. 

4. Oversee Delivery Partners’ Performance

It can be arduous to organize delivery partners and vehicle owners and monitor their performances when you’re only relying on spreadsheets, timecards, or something similar. But with the help of a restaurant management application, you can make sure that orders for delivery are distributed equitably. It can also assist you in the task dissemination when you are aware of the availability of vehicles. This way, you can give more orders to a person who is ready to go yet a bit far from the destination rather than someone who is near but unavailable. 

As a result, you can keep customers satisfied with your prompt order delivery, which would persuade them to do business with you again. 

5. Get Access to Marketing Tools

Despite being designed for the kitchen and the dining area mostly, a restaurant management solution could also have even basic marketing tools such as promo codes and discounts. These can let you increase your customer acquisition rate since potential diners would want to take you up on your limited-time offers. 

You can even create a code or provide a discount for repeat customers to persuade them to buy food from your premises or dine at your restaurant repeatedly. It would also help if you can complement this with a customer management module, which allows you to understand the wants and dislikes of your patrons. By learning more about them, you can serve them better and boost their loyalty towards your restaurant. 

6. Generate In-depth & Accurate Reports

A good and reliable restaurant management solution would have reporting tools. If your preferred platform has a reporting module, then you can utilize it to understand the performance of your business. With this, you can take a look at the popular items in your restaurant, when the peak hours of your business are, and which location has the most diners overall. 

These comprehensive and accurate reports are beneficial when you want to grow your business further. You can even use the insights you gain for a seasonal menu to spice up your restaurant’s offerings. But what you can do with the reports are not limited these. You can discover more uses for them as you uncover more insights. 

7. Set Up For Growth

Even if you start your restaurant business small, it is not going to stay that way always. That is why you should choose a system that would grow with you as well. Some features that can help you with your expansion is multi-currency support, multi-language interface, and multi-restaurant management. If you have these tools early, then you won’t need to interrupt your operations to implement these later. 

Using Technology for the Benefit of Your Restaurant

Technology use abounds, and restaurants all over the country are relying on them increasingly for different purposes. You can follow suit, too, to enhance your operations. As mentioned earlier, just because your food and beverage business started out small, it doesn’t mean that it will never grow. You only need to arm yourself with the right set of tools, which you can use to help you manage your restaurant in all aspects. 

The best thing would be a restaurant management system that is flexible and can adapt to your needs. Especially when you want to open new locations and offer other services like delivery. You may even want to empower your customers to order online from your website or from an app! And when you provide them an interface solely for their use, you can increase their loyalty to your business and their consumption of your food and drink items. If you have a platform that has features that can support your ambitions for your restaurant, then you can drive towards growth fearlessly at any time. 

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And when the time comes, you may even want to consider selling your small business for retirement. In case that happens, you can be confident that you can get good value because you have managed it well.