Running a successful restaurant operation involves much more than serving Michelin Star caliber cuisine. In fact, it’s more than overseeing the dining area or operating with experienced sous chefs and staff in the kitchen. While the food that you’ve served to your enthusiastic and devoted patrons borders on heavenly, edible art, you’re still running a business.
Think of each evening of dinner service as performance art. After all, the idea isn’t so far off when you think about it. Just like your performance artist counterparts, you and your army of sous chefs and kitchen staff are actively preparing for what is essentially a live show. Your audience are your dinner patrons. Each chef: an actor. Servers and kitchen staff: stage hands and props. And the lead? Well, that goes to you. You are the head chef, the restaurateur. The business proprietor, who is essentially, responsible for everything. When you deliver, everyone from Yelp to Zagat raves about your culinary masterpieces, and how your creations inspire everything from an enriched pallet, to art, to saving humanity. And when you’re off, when you fall short, your business and your reputation are at stake.
So, to avoid the pitfalls of culinary imperfection, you do everything from intense preparation, rehearsals, tasting, testing everything from your food to your appliances to ensure that every detail is vetted and meticulously scrutinized. You’re working and preparing as if every dinner patron is an influential food critic. After all, there are no do-overs. In the immortal words of one 8-Mile wordsmith and poet: You only get one shot. Do not miss your chance…
[Related: Special ingredients that go into Gravity Software]
And all that meticulous preparation and rehearsal isn’t limited to tasting every dish before it leaves the pass line. Your live culinary performance hinges as much on how well (or poorly) you’re running your business as anything else.
Testimonial
"Gravity Software has been a great fit for our company as we expand our entities. We had long outgrown QuickBooks, but didn’t quite require an expensive and overly complex enterprise application. We’ve been able to streamline our internal accounting processes based on the capabilities of Gravity. We’ve eliminated (at least) two outside programs/processes that we previously utilized for reporting purposes. We look forward to building upon the Microsoft Power BI dashboard capabilities in Gravity to provide additional analytics and insights into our growing business."
Shawna Bailley, Director of Accounting, 360 Destination Group
The proper ingredients
Running a successful kitchen is as much about business science as your food is art.
Yes, you need to know your business. From the number of tables, to which dishes were a hit and which fell flat. And yes, know what you’ve got on hand, what’s running low, and what’s on its way. While no one else in the world may present duck confit as well as you, you’re in for a rough night if you can’t fill the order because you’re missing an ingredient. That’s right: knowing and properly managing your inventory is just as important to operating a successful business as cooking technique and execution.
To avoid the inevitable tailspin that results from not having what you need on hand, you’ve mastered the art of ensuring that you have the optimum amount of everything for any given dinner service. You’ve ordered just enough that you can accommodate a full house, while avoiding the blunder of ordering too much that your inventory turns to waste. When the culinary stakes are beyond high, the 80 to 100 hour work week is probably the norm. Yet, you’ve managed to keep the kitchen running like clockwork.
As your reputation for culinary magic began to spread, so did your business. That single restaurant, previously a lone beacon of what exquisite food could be, has since turned into an armada of forward-thinking, envelope-pushing, majestic locales for unparalleled dining. Yes, you and your 2, going on 3 Michelin stars, have grown and come into your own.
And before you allowed yourself to succumb to the pitfalls of trying to do everything yourself, you looked ahead and revamped your business infrastructure by embracing a scalable system that could grow right along with your business.
Bon appetite with Gravity
Yes, you ditched QuickBooks and looked to the cloud. You knew that there were numerous cloud-based solutions out there that offer inventory tracking features; and you also knew that your business needed an inventory solution that could effectively track and manage. More than just counting accurately, it had to provide all of the following:
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Intuitive management capabilities to reduce and eliminate the need for manual inputting processes. The last thing you want is for your kitchen staff to look into the pantry and the walk-in quantifying produce counts every day because you’re not sure what’s there.
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Real-time visibility into your inventory with secure access anytime and anywhere to critical information and updates. As much as you’d love to shoot the breeze with the head chef at your Northville Bistro, neither of you has the time because they’re gearing up for a soft opening and you’ve got a banquet in less than 36 hours.
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Seamless integration with demand planning, financials and logistics.
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Promotion and maximization of efficiencies from start to finish of the inventory You need to know when a delivery is on its way, the lead time, when it’s arrived and who signed. And you need to have all of that information without having to pick up the phone.
When you looked to the cloud, you were looking for a software solution that proactively manages and tracks for you. That’s why you implemented and chose the power of Gravity Software® (Gravity). With true multi-location inventory tracking capabilities, Gravity gives you the ability to track, control and manage your products wherever you do business. From Bistro #’s 1 through 10, each location can control its own pricing, reordering and stocking characteristics. With FIFO, LIFO, Weighted Average, Standard and even specific item costing; you get a precise profit analysis on every sale.
Ultimately, you’ll save time and money because you’ll know what you have at each location, so you can determine what you need and when. By utilizing the Microsoft Power Platform (aka Dynamics 365 CRM), Gravity makes it simple for businesses to track and analyze multi-location inventory from anywhere, at any time without all the startup costs associated with other accounting applications. If you’re a restaurant owner it’s time to get on-board with Gravity. So, schedule your online demo.
Gravity Software
Better. Smarter. Accounting.
