As a restaurant owner, you need to handle staff, maintain a whole kitchen, and be a bookkeeper, all while delivering great food and enjoyable experience for your customers.

It is a lot for everyone to tackle, but in particular, restaurant managers have an increasing range of mobile management applications at their fingertips.

From tablet-based POS systems that accept mobile payments to online reservation services- that allow customers to reserve a table with an app, more monitoring tasks for restaurants are carried out online and on mobile devices.

But with all the applications out there in the restaurant industry, how do you know the best ones you can use?

Think of it like cooking: whether you use an ingredient too much or too little, it destroys the dish.

Likewise, if you are using so many management apps, there is too much duplication in services (not to mention the fact that you are going to run out of bandwidth and money), and if you are using only one or two applications, essential features may be missed.

We have compiled a list of some of the best restaurant management applications for owners to help you get started.

Below you can read about the top 5 restaurant management applications that your company needs. But first, let’s go through some of the basics.

What Are Restaurant Management Applications?

A restaurant management system (RMS) is a type of point-of-sale software (POS) designed specifically for restaurants, bars, food trucks, and others in the foodservice industry.

Unlike a POS system, an RMS covers all back-end requirements, such as personnel and inventory management. Software and hardware such as registers, scanners, and receipt printers are typically included in the system.

How does an RMS vary from a normal POS system?

Although both systems are known as a point of sale, an RMS provides unique features for the foodservice industry, such as ingredient-level inventory alerts, the ability to directly send orders from the table to the kitchen and easily provide bill splitting.

What are the benefits of an RMS?

An RMS has more functions than a typical POS framework. Restaurants can use an RMS to:

1. Manage Attendance

If you had to do it manually, monitoring employee performance and attendance is a painstakingly difficult task.

Fortunately, with an RMS, you have an added advantage of controlling time and productivity for your waiters, managers, chefs, cooks, and other restaurant employees.

Here are some of the features of a typical restaurant management system with workforce management capacities:

• Update employee availability
• Employee attendance time
• Reports of employee leave and absence
• Employee scheduling

2. Manage Inventory

The success of your restaurant or cafe will rely on how effectively well you buy, stock, handle, and use your inventory by assessing consumer demand and supplies coming from the suppliers.

Inventory is also one of the greatest direct costs of a restaurant and one that needs to be kept tabs on regularly.

Know about your inventory in real-time, such as how much was bought, used, or lost, in storage, in kitchen, etc.

The benefit is saving food from being wasted and streamlining your inventory management process to better understand and serve customer demands.

3. Sales Tracking

Sales is a difficult concepts to keep track of. You need a restaurant management app that does it all for you, from customers paying in cash and credit cards to accounting for costs, taxes, and income.

You will get the added benefit of a tablet ordering system and a POS management system with one comprehensive restaurant management app.

When waiters take orders, they do so on the tablet, which is connected with the backend in real-time to track costs, revenue, and sales.

4. Processing Credit and Debit Cards

Although cash still dominates the Asian marketplace when it comes to making purchases, the use of credit cards among clients has been growing.

Therefore, it is important to cater to all types of customers which impact the bottom line, i.e. sales revenue.

The credit/debit cards and cash transactions will be taken care of by the restaurant management app.

5. Financial Statement Preparation

What is unique about a restaurant management system that does not include financial statements?

You should be able to produce weekly and monthly financial statements which monitor your expenditures, profits, taxes, wages, inventory, and much more.

Restaurant management applications simplify the process of preparing financial statements, such as declarations of income and loss, tax statements, etc.

For such a feature, all the necessary figures can be accessed instantly via the system, and that will save tons of time and effort as planned.

Available Restaurant Management System (RMS) Types

Since every restaurant has specific needs, different types of RMS are available to choose from.

Focus on the features your company needs and how important each of those features is to you and decide which style best suits your restaurant or bard.

1. POS

POS (point of sale) is the foundation of the program and helps you to incorporate it with third party inventory, accounting, marketing, and other main systems.

2. End to end

This is the sturdiest and most comprehensive RMS type.

Main features include core POS, inventory control, CRM, personnel, menu, management of orders and payments, technical support, monitoring, and analytics.

You will be able to mix and match features according to the RMS provider.

3. iPad or Android only

Most systems are designed to only operate on one form of device to preserve system integrity. Determine which form of device you are comfortable using at your restaurant.

4. General POS

This system is tailored for businesses that provide both retail and food services. For add-on modules it offers smooth convergence.

What Can be Managed with an RMS?

Depending on what type of RMS you choose, you can manage almost every relevant aspect of your business.

On an end-to-end device, you will have full access to the following:

• Employee schedules, including day to day, vacation and sick leaves
• Payroll
• Financial statements
• Inventory
• Accounting
• Reporting and analytics
• Core POS
• CRM
• Menu
• Reservations

What to Consider Before Getting an RMS?

Since this program will be responsible for most of your day-to-day operations, it is important to find one that fits well and provides exactly what your company needs.

Begin with a specific reason for which you need the system for and a list of the required functions. Next, take careful note of the following:

1. Scalability

If you intend to expand or franchise your restaurant, go for a scalable system.

Make sure the system can accommodate a rise in the number of terminals and mobile devices, provide advanced large-scale analytics, provide multi-branch add-ons, and can manage a large number of workers (and their schedules).

2. Type

Determine which type of system fits well with your business needs.

If you are running your company on Android devices, do not buy an iPad system.

If you want a one-stop-shop, the most cost-effective option would most likely be an end-to-end system.

3. Unification

No system is perfect, so you will most likely need to integrate your RMS with other (or multiple) software apps to get what you need.

Therefore, you should make sure that your RMS is easily unified and integrated with other systems, such as OpenTable or Yelp, so you do not waste time repetitively entering data into separate programs.

4. Ease of Use

It is hard running a restaurant, as it is. You do not want to waste time in the midst of a dinner rush addressing the RMS. Spend a decent amount of time checking the RMS out, make sure it’s intuitive and offers an easy approach to fixing problems.

Top 5 Restaurant Management Applications

Now that we are familiar with the functions and benefits of restaurant management applications, you can take a look at the below list to make a decision for the best restaurant management applications:

1. Mapchise

Mapchise is an analytics and location management platform designed for the growth and management of current and prospecting locations.

The primary purpose is intended for multi-chain prospecting and management.

With its Socio-demographic and Task/location management system features still in progress, integration of Task management into maps with Mapchise will be groundbreaking.

Additionally Mapchise offers an Analytics Map and a Location Management System.

Analytics Map

This feature is built for exploring locations based on demographic analytics.

It is the primary product and the main selling point of Mapchise.

It comprises 3 different data sources: Demographics and socio-demographic (still in production), Commercial Real estate, and Residential real estate.

Socio-demographic is a categorization of different types of age groups, race, and income.

Key Features include: Commercial Real Estate Data (Data for all of US), Competitor Analysis, Customized Target Demographic Reports to Customer Needs, Socio-Demographic Data, Real Estate Data, Traffic and Regional Market Analysis, Territory Zoning to Prevent Cannibalization, Various customized layers to customers target demographic.

Location Management System     

This product is designed similar to Asana.com and Trello.com but intended for multi-chain stores. The Maptize Location Management System is intended to be a stand alone product or in conjunction with the analytics platform.

Key Features include: Accountability Checklist for all locations, Uniformity and cohesiveness between current business chain locations, Reminders for tasks and due dates, Includes sub-tasks, Connects to the map for easier location management checklist, Specifically designed for multi-chain management systems.

Why is Mapchise different from other similar systems?

Mapchise Offers all the information you need to quickly open a place and analyzes competition on the map.

The data is also proprietary so it won’t be found online for free. In addition, its Task management system is designed and built for multi-chain stores and is easy to use by corporate and store management.

Mapchise products are equipped with a fully customizable analytics system designed for the user target market and demographic.

The map and data are built around provided data by the target market users. After answering a few simple demographic questions, the map is fully customized to users’ input.

Task management system is incorporated into the map for easier management of the tasks.

Plus, Mapchise offers fixed pricing and is upfront with the cost of the platform, which is a fraction of the competitors’ rates.

2. Ambur

Every restaurant needs a reliable point of sale (POS) system to keep a smooth running of its service. And if you only have the money to pick one app for restaurant management, Ambur should be your option. It is a full point of sale app specifically built for the restaurant industry.

It does everything from collecting payments and splitting checks, to making reservations and taking orders. Ambur has what it takes to streamline the entire business process when it comes to restaurant-management apps.

This restaurant management app lets you insert a custom table layout to mimic your restaurant or bar.

It helps remove any ambiguity when it is time to seat customers, delegate employee tables, or speed up food delivery for customers.

It also has the ability to store the entire menu, so the waiting staff can take orders right at the table from an iOS device. When an employee enters an order, a kitchen printer sends it straight to the kitchen.

The chefs can immediately start preparing the meal, and there is no messy handwriting to interpret or questions about ticket times.

3. Waitlist Me

Waitlist Me is a mobile app that makes it easier for customers and personnel to wait for tables. The easy-to-use restaurant management software uses alerts from text and phone calls to warn diners when their table is ready.

Core features include monitoring customer age, gender, party size, and any special needs or requirements for children, such as high-chairs or booster seats.

Once consumers are added to the waiting list, their iPhone or Android device receives an alert. When their table is ready to sit, they will get another notification.

When customers are seated by the hosts and hostesses, they allocate the ready table and a member of the waiting staff to the customer. In this fashion, everybody is promptly waited on and the overall waiting time will go down.

But it is not the easy, seamless process of Waitlist Me that has added this restaurant management app to this list.

The coolest feature of the app is its public waitlist view which allows guests to check their table status via their smartphone. This way, when the staff should be doing other things, they are not bombarded by other tasks.

4. Crunch Time

If your restaurant needs a reliable back-office system, Crunch Time is a good choice. It offers both an iOS and Android Mobile application.

In addition to mobile devices, the app is also web-based, so that you can access it on a computer. This feature makes it easy to see detailed information about your business on any computer.

Crunch Time lets you control food prices and it monitors the quantity and frequency of products used. It helps you to know exactly when to reorder or not.

Since the program manages everything from food prices, inventory control, ordering, and labor management, running the restaurant takes the guesswork out of hand.

Detailed reports tell you what to order, which will eventually help you eliminate unnecessary overspending.

In addition, Crunch Time incorporates data from your point-of-sale network, allowing you a closer look at your revenue patterns and cost of labor. All of these data will help you define your strong suits and places where costs can be cut.

5. Delagat

If your restaurant is thriving and you are considering adding additional locations, Delagat can facilitate that process. As your business grows and you start adding new technology solutions, everything will become harder and harder to manage from one central location.

As you can see from this list, restaurants don’t have a serve-all requirement. A single program can not be a POS system, a payroll system, and an all-in-one booking system. 

The core product of each app is so special that they would really be a master of none if they tried to be a jack-of-all-trades. You wouldn’t want a restaurant management app that is both responsible for ordering and proper payroll taxes.

That is why Delgat is so great. It takes all those technologies and core business functions and integrates them seamlessly into one easily manageable platform.

Comprehensive information from many different places can be accessed and combined with the applications and devices you are actually using, or you expect to use in the future.

For example, if you are using Ambur as your point-of-sale software, you can configure Delgat to collect data from your Ambur app to use while providing insight.

Additionally, the app can track performance indicators for staff and restaurants, as well as manage all accounting and payroll needs of your company.

Finally, the reason this app stands out is that it uses analytics and data to detect employee-theft loss prevention. 75 percent of workers steal from the workplace and quick-service restaurants (QSR) lose up to 7 percent of their annual revenue through theft by their workers.

Conclusion

A good restaurant management program makes all the difference in how well the restaurant is operating (or not).

Although there are many variables to consider, it is worth taking the time to decide exactly how your company wants to be represented by the system, and what benefits you want to gain from it.

You are well on your way to getting your restaurant up and running by having a clear goal in mind and a list of non-negotiable features.