Every restaurant has its unique style, meal preparation techniques, staff management and approach to customer relationships. Yet all restaurants face a common challenge: staying profitable while delivering exceptional service in an increasingly competitive market. In 2024, 62% of restaurants were operating at a loss or barely breaking even, according to Restaurants Canada. And nearly 70% of restaurants will be increasing their prices in 2025, according to data from Square’s 2025 Future of Restaurants report. As industry-wide margins grow tighter and customer expectations rise, keeping operations lean and efficient becomes essential for success.
For Lambo’s Deli, it’s all about optimizing operating speed. “Because we’re a quick service restaurant with something going out the door every 30 to 45 seconds, transaction time has to be as fast as humanly possible,” says Lambo’s Deli co-owner Justin Leon.
Savvy restaurant owners like Leon understand the need for efficiency. They are turning to technology to help them simplify processes, reduce errors and provide the insights they need to run profitable operations. However, all tools are not created equal. To unlock real benefits, you need technology tools that are adaptable to your business. For example, a modern point-of-sale system like Square for Restaurants supports any service model, whether full-service, quick-service or hybrid. It keeps your front and back of house completely in sync and provides actionable data via an integrated analytics tool. This allows you to track every dollar spent on ingredients and labour so you can identify areas where costs are ballooning and where you can cut back.
If that sounds like the solution you need, read on to discover how the right tools can help you build a more efficient business. Plus, get valuable insights from successful owners who use Square to power their business.
Centralizing admin for easier operations
You don’t open a restaurant because you love handling payroll, but chances are you spend a fair amount of time on administrative tasks. That’s because so many systems are clunky and disparate, forcing business owners to log in to several different programs to take care of functions like timecards and sales reporting.
For Jim Salusbury, founder of Forecast Coffee, adopting Square means gaining back time: “With the time that I’ve gotten back from the efficiencies gained with Square, I’ve been able to spend more time with my staff and actually help my managers manage the business.” By consolidating administrative tasks into one intuitive platform, Square allows you to refocus your energy on the parts of the business that truly matter.
Streamlined administration is just the first step in building efficiency. Once your back-office operations are in order, it’s time to turn your attention to the customer experience.
Improving accuracy for happier customers
When it comes to customer service, mistakes can be costly — financially and in terms of customer loyalty. A misheard order, a forgotten modification, or a kitchen mix-up can create a ripple effect that throws off an entire service. Using modern restaurant tools like Square can make a crucial difference in preventing these costly errors.
Square Point of Sale delivers far more than simple payment processing. Servers can instantly send detailed orders to the kitchen, complete with specific cooking instructions and dietary restrictions, eliminating the traditional handwritten ticket that could be misread or lost in the chaos of a busy service.
Square Kitchen Display System (KDS) takes accuracy even further by serving as a digital command center for your team. Instead of paper tickets cluttering the pass, orders appear on a single, clear, organized screen where you can filter items and sort tickets to ensure everything for a table comes out together. Square KDS also tracks critical order information, including placement time, source and pickup times for delivery orders. This comprehensive tracking helps alert staff when orders are running behind, maintaining consistent service times and keeping customers satisfied and impressed.
Evaluating costs and cutting waste
When customers are reporting a great experience and operations are running smoothly, it can be hard to step back and see the bigger picture. Yet, that’s often the best time to evaluate your processes and identify areas for improvement. That’s where data comes in.
At a minimum, things like sales reports should help you figure out your current state of affairs. But they’re also a tool that can help you make important decisions on everything from your business hours to restaurant costs, inventory, and even your expansion strategy.
“Before signing up with Square, we didn’t have real-time data at our fingertips, so we didn’t have instant access to our labour hours or labour cost percentages, which are really critical in the food and beverage industry,” says Salusbury. “Now we have real-time reporting. This is key, because that’s how we are able to budget and manage our profit margins.”
When it comes to inventory, Square provides all the tools you need to eliminate waste. The inventory management feature automatically monitors stock levels and sends low stock alerts when it’s time to reorder. By analyzing historical data, you can predict busy periods and stock appropriately without over-ordering perishable ingredients that may go to waste.
Enhancing staff productivity
When you first opened a restaurant, you might have had a good handle on how many people you needed to schedule during certain slots. But as your business grew, keeping track of staff performance and scheduling across locations became increasingly complex. That’s where Square data-driven insights become invaluable.
Square Shifts helps streamline your team’s activities from scheduling to time tracking and payroll prep. Staff can easily view their schedules, request time off, or swap shifts through mobile apps, eliminating the confusion of paper schedules and reducing stress around work-life balance. With features like built-in time tracking, inventory management, and integrated POS systems, Square creates a comprehensive ecosystem that helps your team work more efficiently while feeling more engaged and valued.
When your staff sees you investing in tools that make their jobs easier, it sends a clear message: their time and well-being matter to your business. Dough Stephen, co-owner of Downlow Chicken Shack, has seen the impact of better systems on employee retention: “We now have eight or 10 staff members who’ve crossed the five-year threshold.”
Switch to a modern, flexible system
The difference between a good restaurant and a great one often comes down to how smoothly it runs behind the scenes. Outdated systems that are slow to evolve can hold your business back.
Square is different. You can adapt the Square suite of tools to fit your restaurant’s unique needs instead of shoehorning your business processes to fit inflexible systems. For those new to the restaurant industry, like Leon, Square feels intuitive: “Everything just kind of integrates well. You don’t really have to think about anything, it’s all very seamless.”
Beyond core restaurant management features, Square integrates seamlessly with over 100 business apps — from QuickBooks to Fresh KDS — through the Square App Marketplace. By leveraging these modern, adaptable tools, you can boost efficiency across every aspect of your operation, from order accuracy to staff productivity to cost management. The result? A smoother-running restaurant that’s better equipped to delight customers and drive profitability in today’s competitive market.
Running a business is no easy feat, but Square is here to help. We have all the tools you need to start, run, and grow your business, whether selling in person, online, or both. And we’ve made all our tools work together as one system, saving you time and money — and making decisions easier so you can get back to doing the work you love and focusing on whatever’s next.