Feedback Requested: Your Restaurant Management Tools

[Ramsey_A]

Hi Community,

I’m Ramsey A., an Integration Product Manager on the Square for Restaurants team. I’m responsible for better connecting the tools you use to run your business with Square POS (ex: online ordering, inventory management, etc.).

In order to continue to improve the integrations we offer, I’d love to hear your feedback on the following questions:

• What are the tools you use to manage your business, including areas such as inventory management, labor management, loyalty, etc. 
• Are any of these tools not integrated with Square today that you would like to see integrated? 
• What else comes to mind when you think of how Square could better connect to the tools you use today?
  

We really value your time, so thank you in advance for your valuable input.

Ramsey

[BeerGuy]

Also,

1. We were excited to integrate Square with Ekos (Brewery Inventory Management Software) because you guys have it listed as a possible integration, but apparently not for Square for Restaurants.

2. We sell beer, food, and merchandise. There is no good way to complete exchanges for merchandise when you run the Square for restaurants platform. This makes that branch of our business annoying to keep proper inventory.

3. The new interface is terrible and adds a little bit more time to each interaction, and over time this wasted effort adds up

Thanks for the possible future help,

[saydad]

I would have to agree the interface makes transactions more time consuming to complete and enter. 

[murisseattle]

We have similar issues, and are experiencing this with our printer right now.

[pawffeeshop]

We have this issue as well! It is SO frustrating when you have a line of people waiting to order and you can't process payments. 

[tmoul49]

Would be nice to integrate with Facebook order now button

[mksavage]

We currently use ClickBacon for running reports on COGS, labor cost, prime cost, etc. -- in conjunction with spreadsheets that we have designed to track specific metrics that are important to us (including COGS and labor costs week over week). We also use several other tools from Bacon/The Restaurant Boss for evaluating our menu (based on popularity/profitability), working on price adjustments, etc. 

Recently we've been developing our own tools for par sheets, prep lists, and order guides. 

To do our reports, I end up pulling information from Square -- from the sales reports and the labor cost reports primarily -- and importing them into separate spreadsheets to run comparisons and evaluate our progress.

[Ramsey_A]

Hi @mksavage, thank you for the detailed response. A couple questions as we think about potential future upgrades and integrations:

- Are you manually having to pull Square reports on sales and labor costs to upload to ClickBacon?

- How could we improve the week over week view so you don't have to upload reports into separate sheets to monitor progress? Can you give any additional detail on what you'd like to see here? E.g., a weekly showing changes in sales?

[QuokkaCoffee]

Can confirm we do something very similar to @mksavage! We use a range of tools because it's near impossible to find that one piece of software which covers all of our bases.

We're more of a QSR than an actual restaurant and use:

• Square POS with permissions enabled for the whole team to keep them accountable for daily sales targets
• Square KDS because printer hardware is expensive and I would get recurring nightmares about paper tickets going missing
• timecard management via Square Team which I sometimes have to manually correct because people forget to include breaks/clock-in/out
• Xero for bookkeeping; also great for exporting accurate reports to stakeholders like our accountant and insurance broker

A lot of our communication, team management and filling out of par sheets happens in Notion though. And that includes how I calculate for COGs:

A table tracking how much we pay for stock...... and another where I can push data into recipe costing cards

There's probably a lot of inefficiencies built into how we do things but I've reconciled myself to the fact there's no perfect system!

Happy to provide further detail,

[mksavage]

@QuokkaCoffee -- Really appreciated seeing your Notion sheets for tracking costs. I've never used Notion before (we currently do something very similar in Google Sheets). In the "Ingredients" column on the 2nd sheet, is it pulling the cost of each item listed (ice, cup, etc.) and then building the recipe/cost at the same time? Instead of having to manually do the math each time?

[QuokkaCoffee]

Pretty much! And as long as I keep my Ingredients Database up to date with ever increasing pricing then it'll update my Recipe Costing Cards accordingly. It's also been such a useful tool to show the team how much we're (not) making.

It took me a while to set up this system--and a lot of referring to David Scott Peters' book--mainly because no one taught me how to properly cost for a hospo venue. I'm still convinced I'm not doing it correctly!

Google Sheets was useful initially but I wanted the data to be more than just numbers, and for it to work with past/future/experimental databases. I can, for example, upload pictures of our stock into each of those ingredients, re-jig the data into par sheets for front/back-of-house, etc.

I also built in a 10% wastage allowance and am firm on the staff about sticking to recipes so we can keep our margin healthier than if we didn't. 

[mksavage]

Wow, this is so interesting @QuokkaCoffee! It sounds like you've built a really intuitive and helpful too. I love how it's possible to use the databases for cross-purposes like creating par sheets, etc. That would be so helpful!

Sounds like I also need to look into David Scott Peters -- I'd never heard of him, but it seems like he has some helpful guidance! We've learned a lot from The Restaurant Boss, but we're in the same boat -- we were never taught how to do the costing (or many other things), we sort of fell into restaurant ownership and have been figuring it out as we go along (and are also often convinced we're not doing it right). Thank you so much for sharing, you've given me a lot to think about!

[mksavage]

Hi @Ramsey_A! Thanks for the follow-up!

- Yes, I manually pull daily category sales reports to upload to ClickBacon. For labor, I look at the daily Labor & Tips report and manually add up BOH & FOH labor and input those numbers into Bacon so we can see the breakdown by team.

- Ideally, I think there could be a component that combines the offerings of ClickBacon and Square. Since Square already has the labor & sales reports, it would be nice to be able to just input our purchases (based on vendor invoices) and then run reports evaluating prime cost & profitability. 

- It's quite possible this exists and I just haven't found it yet, but is there actually a way to compare weeks to each other, showing the difference in sales? For example, we're open Tuesday-Sunday, so can I pull a report that shows me (either in graph or number form) a comparison of every Tuesday-Sunday time period for the whole year? This would be very helpful instead of having to manually record those numbers (by going week by week in sales reports) and creating our own graph/comparison.

- Additionally, it would be helpful to be able to compare (in the Square dashboard) two specific dates to each other. For example, how did Father's Day this year compare to Father's Day last year in terms of items sold, total sales, etc.

I hope this all makes sense! Thanks so much for your work on it!

[saydad]

I have never heard of Click Bacon, we have been looking for something to help us manage cost better other than multiple spreadsheets. 

[mksavage]

Hey @saydad! ClickBacon isn't perfect (we still use our own spreadsheets for some things), but it has definitely been helpful as a place to aggregate costs and run reports.

[maybeonmonday]

If the internet goes down for any reason or glitches, the KDS will suffer and can create CHAOS!
Just like the POS offline mode some kind of feature where it will work offline temporarily in the local network, Bluetooth?

[nutmegcafe]

Having a button on the Square for Restaurant Register as a Take Out/Eat In on the face page.  I currently need to hit three buttons to do this.  I am aware that this is available on the tablet app, but it is not available on the Register system.  This is a significant issue for a small coffee shop/café. 

[saydad]

A take out and Eat In on the Face page and the ability to see it on the KDS that is easier to notice would be amazing- 

[yellow_mug]

Hey @nutmegcafe we too are a small coffee shop and cafe, and the best workaround that I found was to make a required modifier for food/drink options. I have it set up for dine in - take out - and call in. Having it required makes sure that our employees don’t skip over it with guest. 

[nutmegcafe]

Hi and thank you.  The Square Team reached out and had me set it up on the home page using the Function button inside the menu options.  This had been working well.  It would be perfect if we could make it a color, but it's a real timesaver having it on the home page.

[gemcityjunction]

I used to have the fulfillment type buttons on my home screen so that we could select those when somebody was ordering.  The idea was that it would trigger something or notify the KDS...it doesn't though.  Maybe flag different colors.  When online orders come in, there is a "pickup" or "delivery" for the time, but if the order is called in, the KDS doesn't distinguish.

I would also like the KDS to countdown on pickup or delivery orders.  So right now, it just starts counting up and changes colors at 5 and 10 mins.  It should count down until x mins before the order is supposed to go out, then start counting up.

[Saloonsean]

A way a employee can individually pull up his tips for the day : WITHOUT being able to see the cash / credit sales for the day. This way they cannot pad their drawer and not ring in cash sales and pull money out if they are under or put money in if they are short after seeing the sales. We do not always have a manger on duty, and this would help by letting them know.