Growth and efficiency are essential for success in today’s competitive franchise, chain, and restaurant industry. Owners must address increasing costs, rising customer expectations, and the need for better data insights. Here’s a closer look at the most prominent trends shaping the future of food service, followed by an exploration of common business challenges restaurant owners and operators face.
Key Trends Shaping Restaurants
Rising Customers Expectations Are Driving Investment in Technology
Customers expect a seamless and convenient dining experience, prompting restaurants to invest heavily in technology. Mobile ordering apps, self-service kiosks, and advanced POS systems are becoming standard as they enhance customer experience and operational efficiency. Additionally, these tech investments provide valuable data that helps streamline operations and drive profitability.
Growing Prime Costs: Food and Labor
Prime costs, including food and labor, continue to rise, posing a significant challenge for franchise operators. To manage these growing expenses, franchisees explore creative solutions such as menu engineering, optimizing supply chains, and incorporating automation in specific workforce processes. Finding ways to reduce costs without compromising quality is crucial for long-term sustainability.
Harnessing Real-Time, Actionable Data
In the competitive realm of restaurant management, tailored reports powered by financial and operational data are imperative for achieving success. These reports provide vital insights, including identifying lucrative menu items and optimizing operational strategies. They transcend traditional analytics by revealing cost-saving measures that uphold quality.
These reports are more than just numbers on a page; they are a blueprint for success, allowing restaurant owners and managers to precisely tailor insights to their establishment’s unique challenges and goals. Whether dissecting sales trends, pinpointing cost efficiencies, or elevating customer satisfaction, these personalized analyses offer a comprehensive view of what is effective and what can be enhanced, thereby instilling unwavering confidence in the precision of the data.
Common Restaurant Business Challenges
Restaurant operators often encounter several challenges when managing their business, particularly when gaining insight and making data-driven decisions. Here are some of the most common obstacles:
Excel-Based Consolidations and Reporting
For many restaurant owners, reporting relies heavily on Excel spreadsheets, which can be time-consuming to consolidate and reconcile. These Excel-based reports often span 20 pages or more, making it difficult for managers to extract the necessary insights quickly. Searching through pages of data can become overwhelming when ad-hoc requests from executives come in, and the insights may not always be actionable in real-time.
Incomplete or Delayed Visibility
A frequent issue for restaurants is outdated or incomplete visibility into performance metrics. Reports that are weeks or months old leave managers with stale data hindering their ability to make informed decisions. Without timely insights, metrics lose relevance when responding to operational changes or market conditions challenges.
Scaling and Overhead Challenges
As restaurant locations grow, so does the operational complexity. More locations mean more transactions, sales orders, purchase orders, and bills for the finance team. Relying on manual processes and spreadsheets to manage this increased volume can lead to inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Additionally, restaurant owners often find that their current platforms don’t scale with growth, resulting in higher overhead costs to maintain operations.
Manual Integrations and Spreadsheet Workarounds
Growth also brings the burden of more manual processes, such as data integrations between various systems. Spreadsheet workarounds, late-night reconciliations, and labor-intensive tasks can quickly become the norm for finance teams as they struggle to keep pace with expanding operations—this slows down decision-making and reduces the overall efficiency of the business.
As the restaurant industry evolves, staying ahead requires a focus on innovation, efficiency, and adaptability. Restaurant owners who embrace change and invest in the right tools and strategies are better equipped to navigate challenges and seize new opportunities.
Discover how to spend less time on numbers and more time making impactful, strategic decisions—the best use of any business owner’s time—with our 12-page guide, Recipes for Success: Boost Restaurant Profits with Strategic Accounting.
This material has been prepared for general, informational purposes only and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal or accounting advice. Should you require any such advice, please contact us directly. The information contained herein does not create, and your review or use of the information does not constitute, an accountant-client relationship.
