How to Set Up Strong Administration Systems for Your Restaurant
Whether running a small cafe or a multi-unit restaurant group, you need the right restaurant administration tools to keep control and know exactly what’s happening in all parts of the business. Financial reports are accurate, the staff productive, the kitchen is running smoothly, and customers keep coming back for more.
A strong administrative system is make or break for a successful business – here’s a range of solutions and software that can help manage your hospitality group effectively:
Get the Restaurant Administration Basics Right…
Business Email System: it could be based on Google, Microsoft or Apple – make sure you keep business and personal emails separate, and check your spam or junk folder regularly to see that important emails haven’t landed there.
Documents and Spreadsheets: Google Docs or Microsoft Office are popular choices – learn how to set up and share them. If you’re unfamiliar with Excel, hundreds of videos on YouTube will teach you the basics.
Manage PDF Documents: be ready to create PDFs, plus open and sign them using Adobe Acrobat or Apple Preview.
Fast WiFi with Plenty of Data: if it’s shared with family at home, ensure there’s enough for everyone. As recent outages in Australia showed, a second independent data network is also essential – have a cheaper plan that can be ramped up with more data if needed.
Microphone and PC Camera for Online Meetings: this could be through Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams – be ready to look and sound professional. This can also be used for staff meetings when people can’t attend in person.
Look Smart on Facebook and LinkedIn: You don’t have to love social media, but it’s essential for communicating with customers and staff. Use a professional photo and on LinkedIn, fill out some information about your business background.
Backup and Data Security: You need onsite backup to a hard drive and 24/7 online backup to a cloud-based solution like Backblaze.
Redundancy: This means alternatives are available for your critical systems, e.g., a second mobile phone provider in case one goes down, and your POS and communications depend on it. Or an iPad and iOS, Mac or Android alternative in case Windows goes down, as happened in July 2024. See also: No-Crisis Planning for Restaurants and Cafes
Organise your Office Space: You need a separate desk and lockable storage for private documents, plus a large second screen so you can see multiple pages and documents all at once—this will make you much more productive.
Add Powerful Restaurant Management Systems…
Accounting Software: This helps manage all your financial information, including sales, expenses, payroll, and taxes. Examples include Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks.
Rostering and Employee Management System: Such systems handle staff schedules, time tracking, leave management, and payroll processing. Deputy, Tanda, Employment Hero and FoundU are popular choices.
Inventory Management Software: This keeps track of your stock levels, orders, and supplier information. Systems like Restoke, Loaded Reports and Cooking the Books are examples.
Point of Sale (POS) System: This is used to process customer orders, payments, and sales data. Choices include Lightspeed, Square and many others – here’s what to look for when deciding on a system.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): CRM software helps you understand and manage customer interactions, feedback, and loyalty programs. ImpactData, MrYum, Bopple and OpenTable offer CRM solutions.
Reservation and Table Management System: These systems manage table allocations and reservations. NowBookIt, OpenTable and Resy are examples.
Health and Safety Compliance Software: This ensures that your restaurant adheres to health codes and safety regulations – record management, temperature tracking and monitoring refrigeration. Software like Squizzify is one of a wide range of systems available.
Task and Reminder Systems: these set up work management and reminder systems for the front and back-of-house, with checkboxes, reports and photographic records of work done or maintenance issues. Examples include Safety Culture, JotForm and Restoke.
Marketing Software: To promote your restaurant and manage campaigns, use tools like Mailchimp or Active Campaigns for email marketing or Buffer, Later or Hootsuite for social media management.
Feedback and Review Management System: To track customer satisfaction and online reviews – many marketing systems include this in their feature set.
The Importance of Integrating Restaurant Administration Systems…
Different systems must work together if you want a clear, overall view of business performance. Some systems make this easy, others not so much – it’s an important issue to ask about when you’re deciding what to use. Here’s how you can integrate various systems:
POS and Accounting Integration: Your Point of Sale system should be able to feed daily sales directly into your accounting software. This integration simplifies bookkeeping, ensures accuracy in financial reports, and helps with budgeting and forecasting.
POS and Third-Party Ordering Integration: this brings orders from systems like UberEats and DoorDash directly into your POS and order screens. It means all orders, in-house or online, can be viewed on the same screen by kitchen staff, reducing confusion. It also means sales data from third-party orders are automatically recorded in your POS system, reducing errors and delays. For successful integration, you’ll need a a POS system that offers native integration with platforms like UberEats or the assistance of middleware software (like Doshii) that connects the different systems.
Payroll Integration: Employee management and rostering systems often have built-in payroll modules or can integrate with specialised payroll software. This ensures that staff work hours, as recorded in the POS or employee management system, are automatically reflected in their pay.
Inventory and POS Integration: When a sale is made, the inventory system should automatically update stock levels. This helps with reordering, avoiding overstocking and understocking, and can suggest menu adjustments based on ingredient availability.
Supplier and Purchasing Integration: Inventory management systems should connect with supplier databases. This enables automatic reordering when stock reaches a certain threshold and tracking deliveries and invoices.
CRM and Marketing Integration: Your CRM should work with marketing software to tailor promotions based on customer behaviour and preferences as tracked through your POS system. Systems like
Data Analytics and Reporting Dashboard: A central data system can pull information from your POS, inventory, payroll, and other systems to provide real-time business intelligence and help you make informed decisions.
When selecting software for your restaurant group, prioritise those with integration capabilities or part of an integrated suite. This will save time and provide more accurate data for making decisions.
Using a Virtual Assistant to Help With Restaurant Administration
A VA is another version of someone ‘working from home’ but in a hospitality setting, where we usually think everyone needs to be hands-on and on the premises. They could be someone nearby, in another state or even overseas.
Examples of how a VA could assist with restaurant administration include:
Reservations: The VA can handle all phone and online bookings, ensuring customer tables are reserved.
Supplier Orders: The VA can handle ordering supplies – work off your inventory system and ensuring the kitchen and bar are always stocked.
Roster Management: A VA can organise staff rosters or schedules and monitor peak times or message replacements.
Recruitment: a VA can organise communication with applicants and any paperwork or forms that must be filled out.
Training: The VA can organise onboarding and training sessions for staff to be delivered by staff in the venue. This could include preparing videos, presentations and training documents.
Event Bookings: a VA can manage bookings for parties, events, or special dinners and ensure that confirmations have been handled.
Social Media: a VA can post regular updates, promotions, or photos on platforms like Instagram or Facebook.
Reviews: The VA can monitor and respond to reviews on sites like Google and TripAdvisor.
Bookkeeping: a VA can send invoices to suppliers or for events and monitor bills, payments and expenses. Bookkeeping services like Foodie Coaches Accounting act as virtual bookkeeping services, handling payments, bank reconciliation, payroll and cashflow remotely.
A virtual assistant does not have to be full-time, and they probably won’t be skilled at handling all of these tasks simultaneously. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the tasks you need to do (especially if you don’t have a business partner), this could be a great way to leverage your time and give more focus to important high-value tasks rather than getting bogged down in paperwork and data entry.
Whether running a small cafe or a multi-unit restaurant group, you need the right restaurant administration tools to keep control and know exactly what’s happening in all parts of the business. Financial reports are accurate, the staff productive, the kitchen is running smoothly, and customers keep coming back for more.
A strong administrative system is make or break for a successful business – here’s a range of solutions and software that can help manage your hospitality group effectively:
Get the Restaurant Administration Basics Right…
Business Email System: it could be based on Google, Microsoft or Apple – make sure you keep business and personal emails separate, and check your spam or junk folder regularly to see that important emails haven’t landed there.
Documents and Spreadsheets: Google Docs or Microsoft Office are popular choices – learn how to set up and share them. If you’re unfamiliar with Excel, hundreds of videos on YouTube will teach you the basics.
Manage PDF Documents: be ready to create PDFs, plus open and sign them using Adobe Acrobat or Apple Preview.
Fast WiFi with Plenty of Data: if it’s shared with family at home, ensure there’s enough for everyone. As recent outages in Australia showed, a second independent data network is also essential – have a cheaper plan that can be ramped up with more data if needed.
Microphone and PC Camera for Online Meetings: this could be through Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams – be ready to look and sound professional. This can also be used for staff meetings when people can’t attend in person.
Look Smart on Facebook and LinkedIn: You don’t have to love social media, but it’s essential for communicating with customers and staff. Use a professional photo and on LinkedIn, fill out some information about your business background.
Backup and Data Security: You need onsite backup to a hard drive and 24/7 online backup to a cloud-based solution like Backblaze.
Redundancy: This means alternatives are available for your critical systems, e.g., a second mobile phone provider in case one goes down, and your POS and communications depend on it. Or an iPad and iOS, Mac or Android alternative in case Windows goes down, as happened in July 2024. See also: No-Crisis Planning for Restaurants and Cafes
Organise your Office Space: You need a separate desk and lockable storage for private documents, plus a large second screen so you can see multiple pages and documents all at once—this will make you much more productive.
Add Powerful Restaurant Management Systems…
Accounting Software: This helps manage all your financial information, including sales, expenses, payroll, and taxes. Examples include Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks.
Rostering and Employee Management System: Such systems handle staff schedules, time tracking, leave management, and payroll processing. Deputy, Tanda, Employment Hero and FoundU are popular choices.
Inventory Management Software: This keeps track of your stock levels, orders, and supplier information. Systems like Restoke, Loaded Reports and Cooking the Books are examples.
Point of Sale (POS) System: This is used to process customer orders, payments, and sales data. Choices include Lightspeed, Square and many others – here’s what to look for when deciding on a system.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): CRM software helps you understand and manage customer interactions, feedback, and loyalty programs. ImpactData, MrYum, Bopple and OpenTable offer CRM solutions.
Reservation and Table Management System: These systems manage table allocations and reservations. NowBookIt, OpenTable and Resy are examples.
Health and Safety Compliance Software: This ensures that your restaurant adheres to health codes and safety regulations – record management, temperature tracking and monitoring refrigeration. Software like Squizzify is one of a wide range of systems available.
Task and Reminder Systems: these set up work management and reminder systems for the front and back-of-house, with checkboxes, reports and photographic records of work done or maintenance issues. Examples include Safety Culture, JotForm and Restoke.
Marketing Software: To promote your restaurant and manage campaigns, use tools like Mailchimp or Active Campaigns for email marketing or Buffer, Later or Hootsuite for social media management.
Feedback and Review Management System: To track customer satisfaction and online reviews – many marketing systems include this in their feature set.
The Importance of Integrating Restaurant Administration Systems…
Different systems must work together if you want a clear, overall view of business performance. Some systems make this easy, others not so much – it’s an important issue to ask about when you’re deciding what to use. Here’s how you can integrate various systems:
POS and Accounting Integration: Your Point of Sale system should be able to feed daily sales directly into your accounting software. This integration simplifies bookkeeping, ensures accuracy in financial reports, and helps with budgeting and forecasting.
POS and Third-Party Ordering Integration: this brings orders from systems like UberEats and DoorDash directly into your POS and order screens. It means all orders, in-house or online, can be viewed on the same screen by kitchen staff, reducing confusion. It also means sales data from third-party orders are automatically recorded in your POS system, reducing errors and delays. For successful integration, you’ll need a a POS system that offers native integration with platforms like UberEats or the assistance of middleware software (like Doshii) that connects the different systems.
Payroll Integration: Employee management and rostering systems often have built-in payroll modules or can integrate with specialised payroll software. This ensures that staff work hours, as recorded in the POS or employee management system, are automatically reflected in their pay.
Inventory and POS Integration: When a sale is made, the inventory system should automatically update stock levels. This helps with reordering, avoiding overstocking and understocking, and can suggest menu adjustments based on ingredient availability.
Supplier and Purchasing Integration: Inventory management systems should connect with supplier databases. This enables automatic reordering when stock reaches a certain threshold and tracking deliveries and invoices.
CRM and Marketing Integration: Your CRM should work with marketing software to tailor promotions based on customer behaviour and preferences as tracked through your POS system. Systems like
Data Analytics and Reporting Dashboard: A central data system can pull information from your POS, inventory, payroll, and other systems to provide real-time business intelligence and help you make informed decisions.
When selecting software for your restaurant group, prioritise those with integration capabilities or part of an integrated suite. This will save time and provide more accurate data for making decisions.
Using a Virtual Assistant to Help With Restaurant Administration
A VA is another version of someone ‘working from home’ but in a hospitality setting, where we usually think everyone needs to be hands-on and on the premises. They could be someone nearby, in another state or even overseas.
Examples of how a VA could assist with restaurant administration include:
Reservations: The VA can handle all phone and online bookings, ensuring customer tables are reserved.
Supplier Orders: The VA can handle ordering supplies – work off your inventory system and ensuring the kitchen and bar are always stocked.
Roster Management: A VA can organise staff rosters or schedules and monitor peak times or message replacements.
Recruitment: a VA can organise communication with applicants and any paperwork or forms that must be filled out.
Training: The VA can organise onboarding and training sessions for staff to be delivered by staff in the venue. This could include preparing videos, presentations and training documents.
Event Bookings: a VA can manage bookings for parties, events, or special dinners and ensure that confirmations have been handled.
Social Media: a VA can post regular updates, promotions, or photos on platforms like Instagram or Facebook.
Reviews: The VA can monitor and respond to reviews on sites like Google and TripAdvisor.
Bookkeeping: a VA can send invoices to suppliers or for events and monitor bills, payments and expenses. Bookkeeping services like Foodie Coaches Accounting act as virtual bookkeeping services, handling payments, bank reconciliation, payroll and cashflow remotely.
A virtual assistant does not have to be full-time, and they probably won’t be skilled at handling all of these tasks simultaneously. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the tasks you need to do (especially if you don’t have a business partner), this could be a great way to leverage your time and give more focus to important high-value tasks rather than getting bogged down in paperwork and data entry.
Check the other useful blog posts on the Foodie Coaches website…
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