If there’s one industrial sector that’s taken on more than its fair share of challenges over the last few years, it’s the restaurant industry.
From the global health crisis to ongoing supply chain issues and the difficulties created by a seemingly never ending shortage of labor, the restaurant industry is feeling the pinch in more ways than one.
It’s an especially strange state of affairs – everyone loves restaurants and dining out, yet recent years have seen the hospitality sector surging from one major obstacle to the next. With a global financial crisis seemingly in the making at the time of writing, it looks like it’s a rocky road ahead too – no matter how innovative restaurants are being today.
Restaurants today need to balance the books as never before
Making every dollar and cent count has never been more important for restaurants than it is today. That means that business owners in this space are required to understand their finances at every level, from how reliable the establishment’s serving staff are to the efficacy of its outlay on ingredients and essentials.
Naturally, this kind of demanding ecosystem has created a legion of software solutions that are vying for modern restaurant owners’ time and attention. From Xero and Quickbooks to Sage and Kashoo, it’s become quite a crowded market indeed as far as business accounting software as a service (SaaS) programs are concerned.
As you might imagine, these software packages go out of their way to remain approachable and easy for busy business owners to operate. Details like logging receipts, calculating expenditures and getting profit margin charts detailed down to the daily income and outgoings are all just a few clicks of the mouse or swipes of the thumb away.
Yet are these really the best way forward for the modern restaurant owner? This is an industry in which a level of expertise and traditionalism is key – and many restaurant managers and owners, perhaps understandably, shy away from accounting software for businesses altogether.
Why? They can be too generalized, too eager to please all industries and therefore specializing in none. Restaurants are very unique businesses, and no two are ever alike – something that demands a more bespoke approach than many accounting software packages can provide.
Should restaurant owners avoid accounting software altogether?
Not at all – only you can truly discern how best to run your own business. Yet with a business model as time intensive and demanding as running a restaurant can be, many business owners simply don’t see value in even the most streamlined accounting software solutions.
Why? They still take up time, energy and commitment to operate – things many busy restaurant owners simply don’t have. Instead, established culinary managers often continue using the benefits of outsourced and specialist restaurant accounting services to run their businesses effectively with additional expertise.
An industry as demanding as the culinary arts needs accounting capabilities at hand that understand the rapid changes and ebbs and flows of restaurant trade – something it seems that even the best business accounting tools haven’t yet evolved to fully provide.
