Saving Money Using Technology in Your Restaurant

Technology undoubtedly has its place in almost every facet of our lives, both professional and personal. If you own a restaurant, technology can definitely be a saving grace in more ways than one. In fact, there are several ways whereby technology can save restaurants, and restaurant owners, a significant amount of money:

• Inventory; there are different applications, software programmes and technology platforms which can facilitate inventory management and automate these processes. These applications can streamline these methods, which can lower the cost, just by reducing the time it takes. These applications and technology can also help identify errors, issues or flaws in the processes, including gaps or issues with inventory, which can also help reduce costs.
• Purchase and procurement; managing your orders to various suppliers through different applications can help reduce costs in several ways including:
• Freeing up undoubtedly valuable staff and management time to spend on other areas of the business and as we know, time is money.
• Identifying cost savings opportunities by using different suppliers and access to information allowing for more powerful negotiations.
• Identifying discrepancies in orders and in invoices.
• Reducing cost on equipment; by leveraging recycled or previously used equipment such as a second hand macbook reduces the money you have to spend on equipment and technology for your office and management staff.
• Communicating with staff; you can reduce the money spent on staffing your restaurant by leveraging technology to create efficient schedules, and to manage the time spent on creating and managing schedules and staffing.
• Marketing; social media accounts are one of the most cost-effective ways to market your restaurant and to reach your target audiences. You can leverage the power of social media to communicate specials, events, menu changes and other important messages.
• Market research; leveraging technology to compare, look at and understand what competitors are doing can help save money wasted on useless, or non-value added activities and allows you to stay on trend and understand your target demographics better.
• Financial management; using technology to balance, manage and keep up to date in your books can help make the process fast, more accurate and efficient. This can also help to identify cost-saving opportunities on everything from labour to ingredients more quickly.
• Managing waste; you can even use technology to monitor and reduce food waste. By tracking the food which is wasted, you can quickly identify issues and trends and understand what you can personally do to reduce the amount of waste that your restaurant is producing.
• Theft reduction; advanced technology creates high performance and highly effective alarm and security systems. This can include cameras, facial recognition and a lot of enhanced protection against theft or burglars.