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Every restaurant has its distinct style, cooking methods, staff management strategies and approach to customer service. Yet all restaurants face a common challenge: remaining profitable while meeting ever-growing customer demands in a competitive market.
Rising costs are putting increasing pressure on the UK hospitality industry. In 2024, 95% of businesses reported higher wage bills. Upcoming changes, including a rise in employer National Insurance Contributions and an increase in the national minimum wage, will further squeeze margins.
That’s why savvy restaurant owners are turning to technology to help them simplify processes, reduce errors and provide the insights they need to run profitable operations. However, not all tools are 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 in sync and provides actionable data via an integrated analytics tool. This allows you to track every dollar spent on ingredients and labour, helping to identify areas where costs are ballooning and 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.
Centralising admin for easier operations
You don’t open a restaurant because you love handling administrative tasks, but chances are, they take up a fair amount of your time. That’s because so many systems are clunky and disparate, forcing business owners to log in to several different platforms to take care of staff rotas, time-off requests and sales reporting.
For Jess Blackstone and Mat Appleton, co-founders of Saltine in North London, choosing Square was simple: “We looked at other POS software,” says Appleton, “but discounted them because I don’t have a maths degree, so I wasn’t able to set up all of these ridiculously complex onboardings!”
With a daily-evolving menu, Saltine needed an agile POS system to manage frequent updates, provide real-time sales data for informed decision-making and integrate seamlessly with its reservation platform. With all this in mind, the team used Square to customise its operations. But 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 can make a crucial difference in preventing these costly errors.
Square point-of-sale (POS) systems deliver 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.
Seamless order management has been a game-changer for Ezra & Gil coffee shops in northern England. As operations manager Liz Harper explains: “Transparency is huge for us. Everything is clear for the customer, saving us time on remakes and explanations. We also log our customer allergen checks with the till system, and the customers appreciate that.”
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, organised 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.
And with Square Terminals, staff can take orders on the go, streamlining service and reducing wait times. “Customers who have been waiting outside don’t have to queue again inside,” says Harper. “We can jump in and move orders faster, getting customers seated and served quicker.”
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 restaurant costs to optimising your opening hours. Blackstone and Appleton identified the most profitable service times and adjusted accordingly. “It came down to looking at the data hour-by-hour – seeing where we needed to open more, where we could adjust and making those changes confidently,” says Blackstone.
And, when it comes to inventory, Square provides all the tools you need to eliminate waste. Square Inventory Management automatically monitors stock levels and sends low stock alerts when it’s time to reorder. By analysing 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’s data-driven insights become invaluable.
Square can help with employee management, streamlining your activities from shifts to team communication. Staff can easily view their schedules, request time of, 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 wellbeing matter to your business.
As for staff satisfaction, the integration of Square’s tipping feature has boosted morale, says Harper. “We’re a casual dining experience, not a high-end restaurant – there’s a self-service element with customers paying at the till. So we weren’t naturally comfortable with implementing a service charge, but the tipping function has been massively beneficial to the staff.”
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. 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.
