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The restaurant business is full of tedious-but-necessary activities that can quickly pull the best performers on your team away from their passion — whether it’s cuisine or customer service. And, in turn, have a negative impact on everyone’s performance.
In this article, we take a look at some of these monotonous tasks and explore the reasons why restaurant staff often dislike them. We also explain how technology can spare restaurant management the inconvenience of having to assign crucial personnel to these mundane assignments, thereby enabling them to save time and cut down on operational costs.
8 most tedious tasks in the restaurant business
Keeping track of inventory
What can be more unappetizing for a restaurant employee than the prospect of having to continuously ensure that the supplies are up-to-date and usable? Apart from being exposed to the tedium of counting the contents of the larder and having to dispose of expired food, inventory checks can sap the energy reserves of even the most dynamic restaurant personnel.
This can keep them from putting in their best efforts towards food preparation or the enhancement of customer experience. And yet, this is a crucial component of the restaurant business. A shortage of supplies can lead to irate customers, while too much inventory can lead to wastage. Both can eat into your profits and revenue.
Thankfully, by investing in technology, inventory management doesn’t have to get in the way of employee satisfaction or compromise the guest experience. With the right digital solution, you can ensure that your restaurant is always well-stocked and never has to endure either scarcity or excess.
How to manage inventory in a restaurant
Scheduling
If you’re a manager, organizing shifts and managing workloads can eat into your time and take you away from those aspects of your job that drew you to the restaurant industry in the first place. After all, why should you be busy racking your brain over managing staff holidays and ensuring that staff levels correspond to how busy the restaurant is when you could be devoting your attention to tasks and interactions that can boost profit and revenue? With the right digital solution, you can ensure that you’re always on top of staffing challenges and able to devote more time to the running of the restaurant.
Sanitation
Restaurants have to continually ensure that their premises are clean. After all, it’s impossible to predict surprise visits from health inspectors. And besides, dirty floors, tables, and washrooms can lead to negative reviews and a loss of business. These factors don’t change the fact that maintaining the premises can be mentally and emotionally draining. After all, who wants to clean up after the customer who missed the toilet?
Thankfully, with the right approach to management, this crucial aspect of restaurant management can be organized and streamlined. In particular, taking advantage of technology and using the right digital solution can help you organize cleaning shifts and ensure that your staff don’t devote too much of their precious time to this mind-numbing task.
Accounting
Considering how important money management is to any business, this might seem like a surprise addition to the list. However, when you take into account the tedium involved in going through receipts and the stress associated with ensuring that all the numbers add up, accounting does qualify as one of the less enjoyable aspects of the job.
After all, why should a restaurant manager spend time sifting through receipts when there are menus to be designed, cocktails to be conceptualized and approved, and customers to be charmed and looked after? That said, with the appropriate POS system, this task can be simplified. It can help you organize your receipts and make key data easy to access. It can also perform the calculations you require, thereby saving you time and money.
Managing difficult customers
Sadly, unreasonable clientele with a sense of entitlement is part of the restaurant experience. Whether you’re a waiter, bartender, or manager, you’ve probably dealt with your share of unreasonable demands. The strain of having to remain composed while absorbing the negative energy that is being spewed at you can cause serious ripples in your passion for your work. Unfortunately, there are no technological solutions to help deal with these combative clients. Restaurant staff would be best advised to simply shrug their shoulders and consider the unpleasant experience a part of their learning curve.
Managing talkative customers
Not all disruptive customers are of the talkative type. In fact, the most tiresome variety of customer, as any bartender will tell you, is the kind that wants to engage staff in conversation. As a result, waiters, waitresses, and bartenders often end up struggling to focus on their work.
What’s worse, they can’t ignore the source of their distraction. The paying customer, after all, is always right and sociability is not a crime. These experiences constitute a part of the overall professional journey of a restaurant worker. They teach them to be tactful and, in the long run, serve to sharpen their professionalism.
Keeping allergen records
Although this might sound unimportant, being on top of the allergens in your menu items can help you avoid lawsuits and bad reviews. That said, within the dynamic environment of a restaurant, there may not be sufficient time to discuss the ingredients of each menu item with the chef, and ensure that there are warnings on the menu next to each dish that contains known allergens.
Chopping and peeling
Prep work can often be tedious. Whether you’re chopping onions and garlic in the kitchen, or fresh fruit for cocktails at the bar, the constant repetition involved in ensuring that all the required ingredients are ready to be used can be soul crushing. What’s worse, time is often of the essence, particularly when one of the cooking stations needs to be replenished during a busy cooking period, or the bar is full and you’ve run out of cocktail ingredients. The combination of pressure and monotony that is inherent to these tasks can make them among the most tedious in the restaurant business.
The best restaurant inventory app
Many of the tedious tasks that underlie restaurant work can be efficiently managed through the use of technology. This is especially true for inventory management which presents a unique set of challenges.
RapidBar’s inventory restaurant management tool can help you overcome these challenges. It comes with a whole host of features, designed to optimize your restaurant business:
- Money-saving features: By using the app, you can better manage your restaurant or bar’s profit margins by automatically calculating and managing drink costs.
- Batch recipes: For better stock control and food preparation, batch information recipes are also available on a daily basis through the RapidBar app. The software allows for real-time access to retail sales and inventory counts, thereby reducing the likelihood of errors and count abnormalities.
- Easy purchasing: Orders are controlled directly in the app, with filters for par level and out-of-stock items, thereby making purchasing easier.
- Improved collaboration: You can assign rights to multiple users on the mobile app for better control. Coworkers can use it to count inventory. You can also prevent them from having access to data they don’t require.
- Easy access to data from any location: The app allows you to access inventory data from anywhere, thereby ensuring that you don’t have to be in the larder to keep track of supplies.
Above all, the RapidBar app can enable you take your restaurant’s efficiency to the next level, save time, and ditch those tedious tasks that get in the way of running a restaurant.
