Christmas and new year holidays are approaching and coming closer. Not only retail and mall that overwhelmed with the increasing number of customers, but restaurants also experience the same situation with the flow of customers that come to their place or or you can book in advance with booking management platform What about your restaurants? Have you prepared for it? If you’re still in doubt, we provide you 5 tips to manage restaurants during this time.
Table of Content
First tips to manage restaurants: prepare seasonal menu
Give customers an extraordinary impression when they’re dining in your restaurants. You can do this by providing seasonal menus with Christmas and New Year theme. Although there are fewer variants of meals for this season, you can experiment with the beverages and desserts. Christmas is always about candy cane and hot chocolate, remember? You can use ingredients such as caramel, marshmallow, berries, and many more.
To formulate a new seasonal menu, you should refer to your sales history to make sure that you’re selling the right dish. It will be easier if you have offered seasonal menus and recorded it in the sales system. The system if integrated with recipe management can inform you what kind of ingredients will bring you greater revenue.
Related article: 7 Software Every Restaurant Management Should Have
Check your inventory availability
Our second tips to manage restaurants is do check your inventory availability. More customers mean more inventory usage. The question arising is how do you stock enough inventory? We know you don’t want to apologize to customers because you are running out of inventory and unable to serve their orders. Lucky you, the sales forecasting feature once again saves you. It helps you provide the right inventory based on previous sales history.
The inventory system also helps you manage the inventory on hand. Using FIFO and LIFO method for monitoring the stock age allows you to serve the freshest ingredients. You will get notification whenever the stock is running low and ask you to do immediate purchases. So, so long to the running out of stock.
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Prepare your staffs well
You will not be able to gain the maximum profits if you’re staff is not ready. You should set the expectation for staff with different responsibilities (cashier, server, cooks, etc) during the holidays. Schedule their shift and rearrange, if necessary, their workload. Create a scheme to manage the restaurant when it’s full or if one or more staff are not showing up.
Another thing that you should consider is you will need their help more than usual. Discuss with them about how they want their overtime is compensated. It could be extra off days or incentives. Save all your discussion results, expectation, and plans in the HRM system for easier performance tracking, shift management, payroll, and leave management.
Simplify tasks in the kitchen
With so many orders coming in, the chef and the cooks must be overwhelmed. You can simplify their task by utilizing a kitchen display system. With that system, every order inputted by your staff on the front desk will automatically be displayed on the display. The cooks will have the information of order priority, recipes, ingredients, and in which stations it should be prepared.
If you stick to the manual ticket order, they might lose it or unable to remember the recipes. Long cooking duration will decrease customers’ satisfaction rate and long table turn-over. There’s also a possibility that you fail to meet customers’ orders. So, forget about manual and paper-based work.
Related article: 5 Reasons Why Restaurants Should Apply Kitchen Display System
Last tips to manage restaurants: provide interesting promos
Customers will come with their family and friends. You can allure them to go to your restaurants by offering promotions. For example, use the “3-for-2” offers, or you can give the free Christmas cookies. Free coupons will work too.
Whatever your promotion is, make sure that you upload the calculation in the POS system to make a faster transaction process. It will also help you to record the buying patterns of your customers, allowing you to make other promotions in the future.
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Conclusion
Various ways you can manage restaurants in the momentum of Christmas and New Year. Innovation at certain moments, such as Christmas and New Year, is a potential that you can use to grow your business, at least in the short term.
There is a general increase in sales management system you can make the most of, so it is essential to automate your work. Effective restaurant operations can undoubtedly increase productivity and customer satisfaction. Click here to see how ERP systems for restaurants can help your business.
