Here are 5 Things You Must Have on Your Restaurant Opening Checklist

Technology is everywhere in our modern world, but there is somehow a persistent impression that it has escaped the restaurant industry. Most people think that the only technology required to run a restaurant is a POS system. While the restaurant POS system you choose is certainly central to your restaurant’s operations, there’s a whole lot more to it than that.

From payroll to scheduling, there’s a ton of tech that goes into a restaurant’s daily operations. The best way to think about what you need and what you don’t is to think through the flow of your restaurant’s operations and make decisions that way, focusing on options that integrate with the others.The easiest way to navigate everything is to make a restaurant opening checklist.

Recommended Reading: How to Write a Restaurant Business Plan [with Sample]

If you’re curious about what that might look like, we’ve got an example of the order of operations you should follow right here. Here are the 5 things you should do before you open a restaurant, technologically speaking.

Top 5 Things on Your Restaurant Opening Checklist

1. Buy A Restaurant POS System

There’s a reason that a restaurant’s POS system is the tech purchase that stands out in most people’s minds—it’s one of the most important ones. It’s the cornerstone of your business, the place where everything from online orders to inventory are centralized which is why it’s good to start your tech buying with a POS system and build on it from there. Upserve’s Restaurant Management System is designed to be an all-in-one option that runs easily off of cloud-based tablet devices.

2. Figure Out Payroll

Payroll isn’t easy in general, a perhaps even less so for restaurants. Figuring it out means swimming through a complicated web of federal, state, and local tax laws as well as managing tips across credit cards and cash. Choosing the right payroll service mean the difference between endless stress—maybe even an audit by the IRS—and an intuitive, automated process that handles it all for you with a couple taps of a button. ADP, Kronos, and Gusto are all options in this space.

Recommended Reading: Why You Need to Integrate Your POS with Your Scheduling Tool

3. Decide On Training Tech

Say goodbye to boring conference rooms and binders of printout that no one really reads and say hello to online training. Yep, with the advent of programs like Waitrainer and Spiffy your trainings can happen entirely online without having to dedicate hours of your management staff’s time to conducting trainings instead of running your restaurant.

4. Consider Scheduling Options

Scheduling is another area where technology has taken over. Rather than filling out complex spreadsheets by hand and erasing and rewriting names a thousand times while balancing time off requests, 7shifts does it all for you and takes 80% less time to do it. Think about everything else you could get done (or simply have some time actually away from the restaurant) with all that extra time.

5. Master Engagement

By combining all of the tools, you can build out a world-class staff that’s ready to hit the ground running and make your restaurant the absolute best it can be. From flawless schedules that keep servers happy and ready to deliver excellent customer service to a POS system that never lets an online order slip through the cracks, every one of your customers will be happy with what they get when the dine with you.