6 must haves for your restaurant in 2022

[Donnie-M]

Ok, I was reading a lot of articles the other day and came across different ideas of things that people were wanting to do in 2022 and decided to discuss 6 things every restaurant probably needs in 2022 and get your feedback and what ideas I might have missed, and these are in no particular order:

1.  Online Ordering (Really who shouldn't have online ordering now?)

2.  QR Code ordering/Kiosk/Table Side Ordering:  This one is my big to do next month.  I realize I should have a QR code to my website or ordering page where customers can come up to a table and order food and we know where it goes automatically.  This could also be great in a parking lot for people who don't know what they want, but want to order to-go.

3.  TikTok Presence -  Ok, this one bugs me, but it falls under the heading of facebook, instagram, etc.  I want to be posting about my food visually, because people do eat with their eyes.  I am also thinking about setting up a spot/space where it says, post from here and get a discount.  People love to have that spot to say "Hey I was here".  TikTok is the social media app and has shown it's staying power.  I know many of you have fell down the tik tok hole or had your legs go numb while sitting watching them.

4. Labor & Food Cost Controls:  With the rising prices we are seeing in the restaurant industry you have to have some sort of recipe costing cards available to really see what they burrito costs you to make today.  I plan to keep updating my prices in small increments every 60 days rather than making big jumps like I did last year.  Labor is killer, so I make sure to look at my labor cost on the day & week using squares free time cards.

5.  Customer reviews:  I was on vacation last week and looking for places to eat.  I was constantly looking at the Google reviews.  I just didn't realize how much weight I gave those when I was going around looking for a place to eat.  Often I had it down to 2 spots, and I would choose the 4.5 versus the 4.2 almost every time.  I am debating on using a survey management/review type company to try to streamline this for myself, but at least I am gonna be soliciting some reviews from my regular customers.  It hit home for me, my last night in Florida I was asked by a manager if I was happy to give a good Google review and I would get a free drink/dessert.  I was happy so I did, and bam...free dessert.  I had chosen this restaurant based on the good reviews....was I just socially influenced????

6.  Last but not least:  Simplicity  I want to streamline and make things less complex.  Anything that is labor intensive, I am especially gonna be looking at those in the next 60 days.  I think here of "Lean" training.  What can I change to make my life easier?  I have started this process by writing down my "pain points" and tracking what I do every day.

So, I know Square has several things here from online ordering, qr code tableside ordering, square terminal, and reports to help me with a lot of these.  I am also exploring ways to use the square ecosystem in each one of these areas to simplify the number of interfaces in which I have to go into each day.

So how are you using square in 2022 and what do you think is more important than any of these 6 for a restaurant in 2022?

[lenjobakes]

Wowee! What a fab list.

Truthfully, I haven't done a "vision board" yet (on the docket for next week) but I too have been thinking about making a more tangible effort in planning for my business as opposed to flying by the seat of my pants.

For a restaurant (we're a bakery), I think everything you have here is a great starting point.

I'm with you with the slight cringe toward TikTok. I asked my staff (most of whom are a part of the TikTok generation) whether we should get on board and heard NO, so I'm sticking with that. They also kindly reminded me that I'm not even that good at reels on Instagram, so why start something else that is exactly the same thing? 😂

Along with my vision board is re-standardizing our recipes after costing everything out. We use a variety of methods - increase prices, but also participate in "shrinkflation" so that our regular customers aren't seeing price changes all the time. We've been open for nearly 2 years and we've done 2 price increases - right after our first Christmas and another just before the holidays in response to the increases in chocolate, sugar, butter, eggs, flour...all of our essentials. The re-jigging is annoying and the standardization time consuming, but definitely can see it being beneficial.

For the customer reviews, there is something I hate about the trade. "Do this review and we'll give you this!" I don't know why, but it doesn't sit great with me. I totally understand the ratings comparison in determining where to dine, but I would love to know that a review is generated completely organically. Doesn't mean there can't be a prompt, but if I went somewhere because they had great reviews and then was told I could get something for free if I too left a review...it gives the impression of "purchasing" good reviews from customers. MAYBE IT'S JUST ME. I'm cynic.

Oof! Simplicity. I'm right here with you on that one. I'm going to start using Facebook/Instagram's Creator Studio so that I can schedule social media posts. That's going to be one big thing for me and a small pain point that I have. I wish someone wrote a book of all the systems you should set up as an entrepreneur so that you can just fill in the blanks.

Can someone do that, please? A MadGab for entrepreneurs that's actually helpful?

Tagging @pessosices and @VanKalkerFarms because I feel like they just might have some gold to add to this topic.

[pessosices]

This is absolutely fantastic @Donnie-M ! Thanks so much for taking the time to think this through, write it up, and share it here for everyone - a lot of really valuable stuff here!

Thanks for the tag, @lenjobakes - I'm with you on the TikTok - I know it could help, but I just don't have the patience or video skills for that, haha. Maybe one day?

Figuring out costs and pricing accordingly is key. It's definitely a hard choice between doing big raises vs small incremental ones.

We're tax-included pricing, and we stick to round numbers so we don't have to deal with change, and we're at the point where our prices are already pretty high and we can't really go any higher. We made a bunch of big raises the past few years, so luckily that helped then, but now we're kind of stuck unfortunately, despite a big increase in cost this year and going into next year. We'll see what happens.

I'm also a little apprehensive about the free stuff for reviews, but if it works for them, it works for them!

Yelp does have a policy against that practice, but some folks do it anyway. 

I just stick with organic reviews, and it works well for the most part, but I definitely wish we had more reviews. Who knows!

I love love love the simplicity and streamlining and standardization. We did that two years ago, cutting out allll of the big pain products, especially ones that were less than 5-10% of our sales, and things have been so much simpler and easier for us and our employees. Core products, new variations & flavors, but nothing out of hand and hard and annoying to do. Life is a lot better and it's the workload of running half of the business while barely losing any money. Highly recommended! 

I'd love to hear about your path to simplicity and what you end up cutting and why and how it helped!

Way to rock @Donnie-M and thanks for sharing your path too @lenjobakes !

[Atlanta-MGT-GCC]

Add analytics.  Square needs improved reporting.

[Donnie-M]

@Atlanta-MGT-GCC Which analytics would you like to see?  what metrics are you missing or wish you had?

Donnie-M

[Atlanta-MGT-GCC]

Hi,

I have a list of analytics needed.  But this one is what is needed most often:

* report with order and customer information:

   when i go to reports/ item sales/ specify a date and location I get all the information I want except order number and customer contact information.

 If I go to online/orders/ select my location and order status, then export my orders.  I have to wait for it to be sent to me.  This is not a problem.  However, the report has the order and customer information on two lines AND includes orders from other locations.   The data does NOT reflect my selection criteria. I have to massage this report and this takes forever.

Thank you!

[El_Hbt]

Good morning,

My company sells food at 6 different farmers markets every week (basically, we have 6 different locations with one opening day per week for each of them). I offer the preorder option to all of our clients and we have exactly the same issue that previously mentioned:

1. To get all my clients orders for one specific location for one specific week, I had to create a CSV file to import the order data from Square and rework it so I can know which clients ordered at this specific location, for this specific week. It takes a while and it can get really frustrating.

—> I would need from Square to allow me to export my client orders per location per date range.

2. My kitchen team needs to know which products to bake and gather the products preordered for a specific date range and location to set them aside. The idea is to avoid having to go order per order to figure out what we presold at this specific location (takes time and mistakes are made when done manually).

—> I would need from Square a product summary file listing the products and quantities per product preordered per location per week.

Thanks to the Square team for any assistance provided to these two issues.

[larissa166]

This would be awesome! We also do pre-orders for the farmers market, home delivery, and pick-up (sometimes), plus wholesale. Right now, I log all orders received into a spreadsheet so we can get totals of each product for production and order packing. And because this is a manual process, there are usually errors. I would love a more automated way to export orders to know totals and locations, including figuring out a way to get our wholesale orders into Square to automate ordering (right now they contact me outside of Square) and to manage our total inventory. 

[GourmetOnWheels]

@larissa166 We do the same thing sell at Farmers' Market, take preorders (Paid at pick up at the FM) Home delivery (Paid at Delivery), and wholesale (Paid with Square invoice) we have the same issues.

René

[larissa166]

Do you have an issue with no-shows? For our retail pre-orders, they pay online when they order. Wholesale is supposed to pay by delivery. Sometimes, I have to chase them down. Lol

[Tom_Herman]

We have only a few wholesale customers. Most we invoice after the delivery, and they often pay the same day. A few are barter agreements. All of our farmers markets are either online orders or phoned in. The phoned in orders we try to make sure they are paid up front so we can put them into the order stream. Otherwise they are "saved tickets" and are sure to get lost somewhere. The saaved ticket system is horrible. It can't be searched, andevery time you open one looking for something, it is saved with anew time entry. If it is a store pickup, staff usually forgets to bring up the saved order and riigns them up anew. Resulting in weeks and weeks of saved orders stacking up in the list.

As I have previously written, we currently use OrderNova for our holiday orders. It prints the necessary reports without tweaking. Unfortunately is uses Strripe for payment, not Square.

I have gotten a lot of offers on Upwork for the Excel work we need to translate the square order downloads, Hopefully it will solve our problems.

[GourmetOnWheels]

@Tom_Herman I use Square Tickets and save them with the customer name when I look in Tickets I see all the save orders (Tickets)

And since the customer is attached to that ticket they also get loyalty points automatically when they pay.

René

[Tom_Herman]

Our porblem with saved tickets is the counter staff just treats them as "reminders". When the customer shows up, they grab the printed ticket, grab the order, then rings them up. The saved ticket stays in the system until someone goes in and cleans them all out. I know that right now they go back 72 days. Our customers get used to paying when they order, so we are using fewer and fewer saved tickets. We have a printer in our kitchen that prints whatever is printed at the register. That way we can keep track of special orders or other stuff we aren't making. Online orders print there too. 

[GourmetOnWheels]

@larissa166 No my customers when they order for farmers' market pick up, always show, very rarely they text me early, early morning that they can't make it. I will then deliver it after the market. My website is delivery only and everyone pays at delivery and I use Square tickets to save the order. We cannot charge at order time as 80% of my items are priced by weight, I price it the morning of my delivery day or the day before the farmers' market.

I could send an invoice then, but that costs me more and my customers do not like to pay before they get the product.

René

[Donnie-M]

@Atlanta-MGT-GCC @El_Hbt 

So let me make sure I understand the business flow that you are looking for: 

1.  You want to take pre-orders (pre-paid) for in the future through the online store.

2.  You need to be able to manipulate/print these orders with the pertinent contact information for production and packaging.

3.  Deliver/Fulfill these orders on the promised date...

4.  Ability to divide the orders up by incoming source.

I don't know if there is a good answer yet, but I want to make sure I understand your business flow and what would be ideal and see what there currently is, or what would need to change to make it workable.  I have sometimes in my experience found workarounds in the current system, and sometimes it may be "in the works", and sometimes it may need to be a feature request we can write up and submit to the dev teams at square and get it added.

Donnie-M

[El_Hbt]

Thanks @Donnie-M for the summary. For our company:

1.  You want to take pre-orders (pre-paid) for in the future through the online store. - YES

2. You need to be able to manipulate/print these orders with the pertinent contact information for production and packaging. YES AND ASLO BEING ABLE TO MANIPULATE/PRINT THE TOTAL AMOUNT FOR EACH PRODUCT REGARDING ONE LOCATION SO WE KNOW WHAT TO BAKE AND BRING THAT DAY.

3. Deliver/Fulfill these orders on the promised date... YES

4.  Ability to divide the orders up by incoming source. EXTRACT ORDERS BY DATE RANGE + LOCATION SO I KNOW THAT ON MONDAY 1/10 AT LOCATION AB I HAVE TO BAKE X BAGUETTES, Y QUICHES TO FULFILL PREORDERS.

[Tom_Herman]

This why, for major holidays, we switch ordering over to OrderNova. It has the reports we need, but doesn't provide the order control that square does. We have decided this week to find someone to create an Excel report  or a set of macros to get us the info in the form we need. Square has a long way to go to solve the needs of bakeries.

[Nolanryan]

Yes I agree! For the Christmas this year we really struggled with the online orders for our bakery. We simply wanted a way to visually see how many items we had for a certain date range that way we knew how much product to make. I know you can pull reports to see how many items were sold but that doesn’t help for knowing how many you need for a certain day like Christmas Eve. I had to individually go through each and every order and make a mark on a paper to get a total number for each item needed, which is absolutely pathetic! Then you had to pray you didn’t mess up and accidentally mark an item extra or not enough. For bakeries, I also would like an option to print all upcoming orders for receipts at once. If you use the order scheduling feature, they only let you print ticket automatically or manually. If you set to auto, it will print the order ticket but there’s no time attached to it. Which is confusing because if I update the time and then reprint ticket, although one ticket now shows pickup date I now have two order tickets and if I forget to throw the first one away I might make double the product for one order. I think they should allow you to select or select all upcoming orders and print all at once instead of manually going through and printing each ticket. And when you have 100s of orders, it’s a ton of wasted time spent. 

[RS4]

I agree, it would be helpful to be able to print a report with date ordered & pick date for items. Date ordered is usually not the same as pickup date for bakeries. Thank you!

[lenjobakes]

@RS4 @Nolanryan @Tom_Herman I know that @isabelle has recently put this forward to the product team to see if some changes could be made to have this information provided to bakeries.

The manual tallying this Christmas was super overwhelming, but I know that Square at least recognizes this is a very very very frequently requested product update so hopefully it comes sooner rather than later.

[Donnie-M]

@Nolanryan I agree with you.  When I have catering set ups, sometimes the system doesn't have a way to really show me what I need.  I have been using invoices as a better way to manage those orders that are paid/not paid and keep more specifics.  I need to dig into the invoice reporting some more and see what it may offer that I have missed.

But yes, multiple pre-orders with batches that need to be done then split up to each order doesn't have a good flow currently.