Finding the winning formula for your restaurant business

What’s the recipe for a successful restaurant business? The concept and location, the culinary prowess of your kitchen team and the people skills of your waiting staff all play a big part in attracting and retaining clientele. Praise from the press and happy punters will also build your reputation.

But competition is intense and margins are thin. If, behind the scenes, you don’t have the right financial management systems in place, your venture will be unsustainable. You’re in the business of making food and a profit.

Can your software keep pace?

A basic finance software package may work fine for restaurant start-ups or businesses that want to stay niche. But, as you go on to open multiple locations, the software will struggle to meet the demands placed on it. It will run slowly, need a lot of manual input and fall over more frequently. It won’t have the power to scale up with your business.

This is a situation I regularly encounter in my work at Pinnacle. Growing restaurant businesses approach Pinnacle for help because they recognise the need for better management oversight. They want to improve the management and control of their business through:

• Improved monitoring. Which outlets are meeting targets and performing as expected? What is actual spend against budget?
• Sophisticated reporting. Can managers quickly and easily extract reports on the business or do they have to wait till the end of the month – by which time a blip could have escalated into a crisis? Can they share information around the business, for example with regional managers?
• Consistent performance business-wide. Are all locations performing to consistently high standards and keeping to budget? Are there any indications of under-performance?

The Sage 200 enterprise resource planning solution helps with all this and more, enabling restaurateurs across the UK to create their own special recipe for success.

Next time, I’ll look at how software that helps you to create a joined-up business is vital to keeping tight control of overheads such as staff costs.  

Sage 200 – A powerful business management solution to help your business manage its finances, sales, customer service and inventory. Available in the cloud, on-premise or hybrid, Sage 200 is ideal for businesses in the service industry offering the perfect solution to improve agility and efficiency, while providing powerful insight into business processes by bringing them together into one simple solution