Using Technology to Improve the Administration Process and Reduce Costs in Hospitality Operations

Many businesses look to use technology to improve their operation and front of house processes. Implementing stock control systems through their Point of Sale system and providing staff with Hand Held terminals to take guest orders faster and improve customer service. But what many hospitality business do not realise is that there are real savings and improvements in using technology to improve administration process, save money and increase profit. 

Administration process changes using technology can take many faces. 

Double Entry: How many businesses are entering stock invoices into their Point of Sale Stock Management system and then another person is entering it into the companies accounting system. This process is alone can be adding thousands of dollar of data entry labour to a company. It is common practice now that many software packages that specialize in one area e.g., Stock Management will integrated to other packages like accounting software.

Manual Records: If we take a typical approach to wages. Staff complete a manual time sheet form and leave it for the manager -> The manager signs off on the forms by comparing them with the roster going through page by page, staff member by staff member and updates the consolidated spreadsheet -> The manager emails the spreadsheet to the administration person who looks after the payroll -> the payroll administrator enters the hours into the payroll system and pays the staff!. Once again cost hundreds of hundreds of dollars of hours in administration. Using technology this process can be reduced. Staff Clock in & Clock Out on the Point of Sale or Rostering software -> the manager only has to sign off on the staff who's hours are different to the roster -> the payroll administrator receives a completed payroll that they just process to the staff.

A Menumate Case Study on Technology for 


Murray Macarthy has built up a chain of Thai Restaurants throughout New Zealand. On the back of a dream and with a credit card and a desire to succeed Murray has grown his Thai Restaurant business from 1 store to over a Dozen.
 

Murray and Menumate got together as Murray’s business started to get bigger and Murray needed more controls to manage his growing venture. Murray faced the normal challenges  that come with a growing company. The more restaurants, the more staff, the more spreadsheets, the more potential problems and the greater need for solutions.

 Menumate sat down with Murray to discuss the areas where Menumate and our knowledge and business partners could help. One thing we do at Menumate is to bring our best practise partners to our customer’s to deliver the BEST solution. We focused on increasing sales, reducing costs and started to measure each business to set some KPI.

Once of the firstly changes we implemented was centralised web based reporting that is automatically updated by Menumate Point of Sale every 5 minutes. This solution reduced the heavy requirement on multiple manually updated spreadsheets that were required to run the business. Using the specifically designed Web Dashboard meant Murray’s management team instantly knew which store to focus on and what issue to address within minutes of the days business. This automation allows Murray to reduce administration costs of 30 minutes per day per store or approximately $35,000 in savings per year.