Best Restaurant Management Software for 2021

The multitude of processes involved in operating a restaurant can be overwhelming at times. The things you need to track keep on piling up with no end in sight. These things can be your finance & accounting (sales, costs, expenses), supply chain (procurement, warehousing, inventory), marketing (menu creation & management, promotions, recipe black books, loyalty programs), and your HR (hiring, training, payroll). The success of operating a restaurant comes down to how you can streamline and sync these processes together. This is where restaurant management software comes in.

The Most Common Types of Restaurant Management Systems

1.      Point of Sales

You’ve probably already seen a couple of these. Imagine ordering at a QSR: you mention your order, the saleslady punches your order into a terminal, you pay the amount on the terminal. The terminal is what you call the point of sales of a restaurant. The point of sales is usually connected to a Cloud system where you’ll be able to access sales and SKU data of your restaurant.

2.     HR & Payroll Solutions

A portal where all your employees can manage their time records and receive their salary is a necessity for restaurants. Restaurant staff do not work the normal nine to five hours and are more than likely to get overtime pay, rest day pay, night shift pay, and much more. Having this type of software for your restaurant as opposed to manually tracking your employee’s timecards one by one will save you a lot of time. That doesn’t even include calculating their pay for the month. Using a Payroll Solutions will help reduce human error when computing salary.

3.     Loyalty Program Solutions

Giving customers an incentive to come back is the main goal of launching a loyalty program for your restaurant. An example of a loyalty program is earning 5% cashback points on your purchases. A spend of $50 for a customer will give them back $2.5. A customer’s behavior is if they get a portion of their spend back from a restaurant, there’s a higher probability that they’ll go back.

4.     Restaurant Inventory Management Solutions

Taking care of all your procurement and inventory manually will have you drowning in numbers and lose time you won’t get back. Getting restaurant inventory management solutions to help with that will ease your burden and at the same time help increase your profitability as a restaurant. These types of software usually have a specifications library where you’ll input your recipes.

These solutions can be customized where the information you need will be shown. Having a restaurant inventory management software will help improve the supply chain management of the restaurant. You’ll be able to track the usage of each raw materials and create an accurate forecast of your orders. In relation to this feature, you’ll be able to reduce your wastage and prevent overproduction of your finished goods.

Best Restaurant Management Software for 2021

We’ve done our research and here are our top picks for the best restaurant management software:

HungerRush

We believe HungerRush is the best in terms of overall solutions because of the interconnection it can give between the departments of your restaurant. HungerRush is a cloud-based POS system that will help you in all aspects of your restaurant.

Features

One of its main features is its reporting hub which has been divided into these sections: sales, inventory, procurement & human resources. In between these four sections, you can create up-to a hundred different reports – daily sales reports, hourly sales reports, top products, and much more.

HungerRush also features a portal where you create a schedule for your employees. The schedules are created weekly and can be copied on to the next week if the shifts are the same.

HungerRush also has an available app called HungerRush HUB and is available on both iOS and Android. There are times that the owner or the manager will be busy managing the floor and won’t be able to go on to the browser. Having the app will have the numbers he’s looking for on their mobiles.

The best feature we believe for HungerRush is its Self-Service Online Ordering Website Builder. With this tool, your restaurant will be managing online orders with ease and will instantly provide an easy and exceptional online ordering experience for your customers.

Zenput

Researching Zenput has made us believe that it’s an ideal choice for restaurants with multiple locations having trouble conveying their standard operating procedures to their employees. Zenput is an operations execution platform that will help the company automate SOP’s, food safety protocols, and daily pre-opening and pre-closing checklists.

Features

Zenput features a task management tool that will help your restaurant track whether the task on hand is done in a timely and accurate manner. Having a centralized software to track each restaurant’s tasks is a game changer. What was previously a pen & paper checklist becomes an automated software where everyone can see the results.

With the ability to track your tasks, employee productivity will shoot through the roof as they’ll know how to use their times wisely and how to do it correctly. This task management tool can also help with executing a successful marketing campaign for the restaurants. Launching limited time offers for multiple stores takes precise coordination and having a tool that tells you when to put the signage up or how to prepare for a promotion is a necessity for a successful campaign.

Zenput also features an audit & corrective actions tool so every opportunity seen at the store can be identified and corrected. An audit can be done on your food safety preparations, licenses & permits, cleanliness, condition, hygiene and sanitation of your store, and product & process quality. This feature will allow you to compare store performances and let you know which store is failing its audits.

Zenput also has its own incident management feature. There are a lot of store incidents that are delayed in reporting or even goes unreported at all. With this tool, Zenput gives you the ability to find out what happened, in real time.

EagleOwl

For those struggling with profitability numbers such as cost of goods, profit margins, inventory variances and wastages, then EagleOwl is the best restaurant management software for you. EagleOwl is a cloud-based restaurant management software that promises to improve a restaurant’s profits by 20%. EagleOwl is a simple and straightforward software to understand and for this reason alone, it is separating itself from the competition.

Features

EagleOwl features a recipe tool where you can add your restaurant’s menu and automatically computes the cost. The software will alert you if a specific item is about to reach its cost threshold. Having this tool in your arsenal will help your curb your costs and achieve an above standard cost of goods percentage.

EagleOwl also features an inventory reporting tool where you can keep track of your current stock level, usage patterns, SKU’s and wastage. Some ways to hold inventory is to keep a 14-day stock level for a restaurant. With this in mind, you can use the data you’ll get from your usage and calculate the necessary amount to order. Doing this will prevent over-ordering and will help maintain your inventory at a healthy level.

EagleOwl also has a procurement feature on its software where you can list all of your bills, purchased items, contracts and suppliers in one place. The price trend tab is a great tool to use when making decisions for certain items. If it’s a dry good, you can check whether it’s currently at its low price and over-order a few so you can save a couple of dollars. Insights and decisions like these will help you save costs for the restaurant, no matter how small.

EagleOwl boasts an interactive dashboard that shows the insights of your numbers. These numbers can be filtered into different time periods: this month, last month, last year and even your own custom range. What we love about EagleOwl is that the Sales Dashboard has the Cost of Goods amount and skews the sales by weekdays or weekends. With EagleOwl managing your data, they will also make the necessary recommendations to increase your restaurant’s profits.

The best feature that EagleOwl has to offer is performing menu engineering for your restaurant. Menu engineering is the study of how you balance the profit and popularity of the products on your menu. EagleOwl will perform the menu engineering matrix on your products and show you which ones should be focused on and which ones should be left off the list.

Conclusion

Restaurant Management Softwares are powerful tools that will definitely help your company with improving operational efficiencies, improving cost percentages, and monitoring & managing your sales data. Whether you’re running a QSR or a fine dining restaurant, these solutions are there to help you solve challenges. Each of these software have a different price point. Some will be within your budget and some won’t be. Our pro tip on what to look for in a software is a good user interface and user experience.