5 ways to improve your restaurant's margins with technology

Many restaurants are faced with stagnant growth even though they see an uptrend in the volume of customers and revenue they have on a day to day basis. That could be due to the increasing variable costs that increase as business grows.

Examples of such costs include ingredient and manpower costs. In this article we share X tips on how to improve your restaurant’s profit margins.

1. Inventory forecasting
2. Optimize labour
3. Intuitive POS system
4. Use customer facing technology
5. Improve employee retention

Inventory forecasting

Staying on top of your restaurant’s inventory is not only crucial for keeping your best sellers available, but also to help you to reduce inventory costs. How so? This is because forecasting your inventory consumption allows you to buy in bulk during peak seasons, which gives you more negotiating power to reduce supplier costs.

This helps you to reduce cost per dish which in turn, improves your profit margin per dish.

Optimize labour

Labour is one of the most costly aspects of running an F&B business, due to high labour costs and levies if you are hiring foreign labour. Many F&B businesses fall into the cycle of hiring more to handle the higher volumes of customers.

By falling into this cycle, the F&B business, while seeing an increase in revenue also sees an increase in expenditure in its manpower costs hence, diminishing any gains even as there is an increase in customer volume.

To break out of this “hire more to handle more” cycle, F&B businesses can opt to digitalise by adopting ordering technology such as QR ordering or self ordering kiosks. 

With digital ordering technology, your restaurant can rely less on staff to take orders from customers manually. Instead, customers can either scan a QR code to place their orders on their own, or simply self order through a self ordering kiosk. Effectively, reducing the manpower dependence on order taking staff to bring down labour costs.

Intuitive Restaurant POS system

Not ready to adopt digital ordering systems yet? At least make sure that your restaurant POS system is as intuitive as possible.

An intuitive POS system speeds up the ordering process by allowing your staff to easily locate menu items when entering an order manually into the POS system thus speeding up ordering time. While it may not seem like much, these little time savings add up, which improves your table turnover rates.

Improve employee retention

Hiring new staff is costly. Things such as posting hiring ads, training period of new employees costs your F&B business money. Having to go through the whole hiring process constantly due to high staff turnover is bad for your margins.

By being able to retain experienced employees for as long as possible, your restaurant will operate much more efficiently, reducing operational costs and improving revenue. Try our these tips to improve your employee retention!

Getting a restaurant POS system

Adopt a restaurant POS system like MEGAPOS that is easy to use, is able to integrate with digital ordering solutions and offers cloud connectivity for you to manage your restaurant and analyse business reports from anywhere.

Click here to get a FREE demo today.