5 Ways System Integration Improves Restaurant Operations

By John Ragsdale

 

How many technology systems are incorporated into managing your restaurant, cafe or bar? A restaurant’s Point of Sale (POS) system is often the IT backbone to run a restaurant efficiently. Inventory control, employee time management, cash flow tracking and more are consolidated into a single system. What about payroll? Moving employee time and tip data from one system to another can be challenging. And, if your restaurant has more than one location? Manual work can pile up quickly.

To curb manual efforts, restaurants often invest significant resources and dollars into systems that bring efficiencies to standard processes. Unfortunately, systems can fall short on integration or connectivity to transfer information. So where does that leave restaurant managers? Manually transferring data, calculating overtime, processing payroll and exporting data to spreadsheets. Recently, a Panera Bread franchise, Rolling Dough Enterprises, was struggling to move employee punches and tip data from their POS to Paycor.

Visibility across multiple locations becomes impossible without the right tools and automated processes to sync POS and HR systems like Paycor. When these systems are connected, management can remove unwanted and often error-prone tasks of managing employee time and tip data. Data connectivity processes for the Panera Bread franchise were automated through system integration to make time and attendance tracking more effective, efficient, and timely for payroll.

If your restaurant is struggling with manual processes to manage data or payroll, consider a third party system integrator. Here are 5 ways third-party integration improves restaurant operations.

1. Eliminate manual work Exporting data to spreadsheets can be eliminated when data flows freely from your restaurant POS to your payroll application. The calculation of overtime and tip amounts can be configured automatically, reducing human errors and paycheck corrections.
2. Improve employee satisfaction Inaccurate calculations can cause your employee satisfaction to take a hit, and result in duplicate work or rework of payroll processes. Management can spend less time making payroll corrections and other administrative tasks. 
3. Streamline operations Compliance issues can be reduced significantly with confidence in data transfers, data field accuracy and processing error notifications. Accurate information across multiple systems helps operations run smoothly.
4. Real-time insight into financial performance Accurate and trusted reporting Is invaluable as restaurants consider location or franchise expansion opportunities. With location, corporate analytics and reporting capabilities restaurants can make real-time adjustments to operations. 
5. Automatically update employment status changes Whether an employee is onboarding or offboarding, their information and status should be consistent across all platforms. Integration makes new hire processes move quickly with automatic data syncs.

How can you help your restaurant managers today? Eliminate the Manual Efforts and SpreadSheets (MESS) workflows that cause headaches and frustration. Consider third-party integration solutions to connect core business systems. 

Operations and administrative functions can run smoothly with the right processes to transfer data accurately and automatically. Leverage cloud-based solutions for a quick and affordable implementation. Also, look for sophisticated reporting functions so location visibility can be accomplished through comprehensive data mining.

Solutions that are customizable to match work weeks and unique schedules will enable a quick launch to get your data moving automatically, so your employees don’t miss a beat.

John Ragsdale, CIO, TAP Innovations Co-founder and Board Chair

For 25 years John has provided technology leadership, vision, strategic planning, to help organizations deliver large-scale project solutions. This vast experience in cost and data management for diverse departmental and organizational needs drove John to create TAP Innovations so anyone can benefit from better data management for staff, customers and partners. Follow John on social media for industry news and business updates! @JohnOnIT