“Hindsight is 20/20” is something you should never hear in your line of work. While you cannot keep all mistakes from happening inside your restaurants, it is much better to focus on implementing preventative measures regularly rather than spending countless hours after every incident on corrective actions.
In the restaurant industry, management has to contend with a lot of moving pieces: staffing, inventory, budgets, menus, customer service, reporting, and more. Luckily, there are many tools now available to help manage all of these pieces online, giving restaurant management anywhere, anytime access to the information they need. While these tools are very helpful and allow management the opportunity to more carefully monitor their operations, that is still a lot of information and teams and moving parts management needs to keep tabs on.
A Practical Solution
If you’re reading this, you’ve hopefully done away with the paper trail that restaurants used to run on. Paperless HR and management software are the way to go these days. However, that’s not to say that the move to a cloud-based restaurant management system means you have to do away with old processes—especially, checklists.
Checklists are fantastic tools. Online checklists are even better and allow you to accomplish important goals like the following:
- Develop a preventative plan with a system of checklists, so that less time is spent on corrective actions and more time is spent on managing business outcomes.
- Provide a level of detail on what is required in each task and of each role.
- Create a consistent structure for team members in any location to follow.
- Ensure that all required procedures and standards are being met on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
- Deliver real-time tracking to management on the specific tasks and milestones accomplished in each restaurant.
- Track trends and inconsistencies in processes or in specific locations that may affect customers.
Online checklists are not only a practical tool for restaurants to have, but they’re also highly effective. There is only so much any one person can remember on their own, so to have a well-structured system of checklists in place, restaurant management and owners can breathe easy in knowing that all bases are covered.
Online Checklists for You
If you’re new to the idea of using checklists to manage your operations or if you’re simply wondering if what you have is enough, consider the following list of online checklists you should be using:
- Restaurant opening checklist
- Restaurant closing checklist
- Weekly (restaurant) inventory checklist
- Daily (kitchen) inventory checklist
- Kitchen prep checklist
- Food quality checklist
- Restaurant safety checklist
- Maintenance checklist
- Position-specific checklist (there are a lot of these, so the ones you have will depend on which roles you have employed in your restaurant)
The key here is that you use checklists for ensuring all necessary steps and procedures are completed when they need to be. Checklist templates would also be helpful in ensuring that your restaurant’s checklists are always set up the same way and have the appropriate monitoring and management settings applied to them. Finding a tool that allows you to develop these online checklists, virtually schedule them out to team members, and monitor the task completion is going to help you in being more proactive about your business.
You have a lot to worry about already. Don’t let these team responsibilities bog you down and keep you from focusing on what’s most important (running the business). If you’re interested in learning more about how our BOSS system can improve your daily management of business operations, let’s talk.
