Restaurants juggle separate tablets for each delivery platform
Food service professionals consistently face obstacles hindering business growth. These challenges span marketing, client acquisition, staffing, and rising food costs, creating a complex web of operational hurdles. Identifying and addressing these core issues is crucial for sustainable expansion.
SOURCES (60)
“Why does putting a restaurant menu online still feel harder and more expensive than it should? I’ve been looking into digital menu options for a small restaurant, and many seem to require several integrations, complicated setup, or monthly fees that quickly add up. Building one…”
The payroll integration part is what caught my attention.
“Whatever you charge, what decides this is whether a waiter has to do anything at the table. We had a redemption step that needed one tap from staff and it just stopped happening in week two, the owner was fine with it, the floor was not. Flat monthly is right for that reason alone, anything tied to staff behaviour means you're chasing every restaurant every month to find out what really happened.”
“Charge monthly based on number of seats in the restaurant so you can tier the pricing based on the amount of value you're likely able to create, without having to do monitoring.”
“The clearest test might be whether a new staff member can complete the three most common jobs—open an order, amend it and take payment—without training. I’d make those flows dominant and hide inventory, reporting and admin behind role-based navigation. An offline or degraded mode with a very clear sync status also seems important for a busy venue. What happens if the connection drops halfway through an order?”
“Recipe and allergen sync — and not because it's more useful day to day, because availability probably is. Because of what each one is underneath. Availability is a state flag on an item. Allergens are derived from what the item is actually made of. If you build the composition layer first, availability is one boolean you hang off it later. If you build availability first, you have a list of item names with nothing underneath them, and the day you add allergens you're changing the data mo”
“This gets into highly paid territory; you can automate this /and/ make it fast and cheap (software wise). Chick-fil-a uses a 3 node cluster for every single restaurant, you need Gitops and a really deep understanding of networking, Linux, Kubernetes and containers.”
“If you go with a big software tool, you'll most likely overcomplicate it and get too many features. Instead I think for two locations, you can probably just set up your own internal systems and tools. That way they can be more specific to what you actually need, everyone in your team can contribute to what they actually need, and you don't end up spending a fortune when you simply don't need it”
“That’s helpful. I think keeping it simple makes more sense for us right now. I’d rather have something the whole team actually uses than a ton of unused features.”
“Your first event can be a measurement run as much as a sales night. Give every order a ticket number, record order time and handoff time, and keep the cook out of payments and customer questions. One person owns dough and ovens; the other owns orders, boxes and calling numbers. Quote the wait from the back of the queue using the cycle time you are actually seeing, not the best-case bake time. If the backlog grows beyond what you can explain honestly, slow or pause new orders rather than stacking”
“I saw a restaurant in Italy where the POS prints a tiny government tax lottery code on every receipt, customers scratch it off and can win money. The integration was mandatory apparently I think lot of countries in EU are moving toward real-time tax reporting so maybe worth checking that direction before you start building Also please don't be one of those POS systems that forces a tip screen before you even get your food”
“Yeah that makes sense. R365 does feel like overkill for two locations right now. I’ll take a closer look at 7shifts and probably keep payroll separate.”
“Hey everyone, We're building a restaurant POS app called Adisyonist and we're thinking about expanding it to more countries. Translating the app is the easy part. The hard part is understanding all the weird local requirements 😄 For example, in Turkey some businesses need things like e-Adisyon, e-Invoice and fiscal/cash register integrations. So I'm curious: What is a must-have feature for a restaurant POS in your country? Could be a legal requirement, tax/fiscal integration, paymen”
“toast makes sense if you're already on their pos because the scheduling and inventory talk to each other without extra integration work, but the moment you want payroll built in you're paying more and it gets clunky. r365 is powerful but honestly overbuilt for a two-location setup, you'll be paying for reporting features your team won't touch for another year at least. hotschedules is the cleanest if scheduling and labor cost tracking is your main pain point, setup is fast and th”
“Whichever one you go with, make them show you cloning location one into location two before you sign anything. The first setup is somebody typing in every item, size and modifier for a week, and if the second site can't inherit that you now have two menus to keep in step and they will drift inside a month.”
“Intestering if you actually see a painpoint here I'd develop it for free and test it with you.”
“Somebody already flagged the real risk here, the overtime blind spot once two locations share payroll but not scheduling visibility. worth adding what actually catches that at two locations. neither Toast nor R365 reconciles it for you automatically, only the plans that specifically cover multi-location labor rollup do, and a lot of the cheaper tiers skip that. Until you know for sure the one you pick handles it, keep one shared hours tracker both managers actually check while building the week&”
“To be transparent, I'm not an operator, but a banker that focuses on restaurant technology, so I have some exposure, but take what I say with a grain of salt. For two locations R365 is probably too much software for you, but I'd certainly consider it if you were to continue to expand. What POS are you using? If Toast, I'd probably just stick with Toast environment since it's pretty robust. If not, I'd look at 7shifts and then keep payroll separate. But yeah, hard to say witho”
“Just opened a second location and now the restaurant management stuff is getting way more complicated than it was with one location. Looking at Hotschedules, r365 and Toast right now. They all seem decent but it’s hard to tell what actually makes sense for a smaller operation. Big things are ease of setup, cost, scheduling and payroll. Not really looking for a bunch of features that nobody on the team is going to use. For anyone who started small, what worked well for you? And have you actually”
“Watch the printer on this. Ours took orders happily while the thermal printer at the counter had been offline for a minute or two, so the guest got a confirmation and nobody behind the bar knew the order existed. We moved to an order board on a screen with a sound as the real source of truth and treated the printed ticket as a copy, and anything still unacknowledged after 90 seconds pings the manager's phone.”
“A friend of mine runs a restaurant, and during busy periods I noticed the same problems coming up again and again. Customers were waiting for someone to take their order. Staff were moving between tables just to take simple orders. When prices or menu items changed, the menu needed updating again. And when things got really busy, it became easier for orders or table numbers to get mixed up. It made me think: Why does a QR menu usually just open a PDF? If the customer already has their phone out,”
“Building the app is honestly the easy part now. Getting people to actually use it is where most projects die. Restaurants have it even worse because rent and food waste can eat up your margins before you even get close to breakeven. Operators dealing with busy shifts usually end up looking at stuff like HotSchedules once multi unit scheduling gets messy. Software bugs can usually be fixed overnight. A bad lease can screw you for years.”
“The calendar is honestly the easy part. Break tracking and keeping up with local labor laws is where it gets messy. One compliance issue can cost way more than the app is worth. I can see why restaurants stick with something established like HotSchedules rather than roll the dice on a new startup app.”
“Been using Chowbus for a while now and the biggest win for us has been the kitchen display. No more piles of printed tickets or wondering where an order went. Everything is right there for the team, and their support has been solid whenever we’ve had questions.”
“We ran into this with restaurant ordering, every place wanted one quirk and half of them couldn't tell you what their own process was until we sat in the shop for a day. What kept it a product was refusing any exception that couldn't be a row in a config table a non engineer could flip. The table is up to about 40 flags now and it looks awful, but no customer has a branch with their name on it.”
“Wondering how restaurants track their customers and bring them back in. Or better yet, do restaurants have the time to manage this? submitted by /u/vanillaunicorn3 [link] [comments]”
“Hi, unfortunately we use Gastronovi in our restaurant. It’s pretty common here in Germany, but honestly quite expensive for what it offers. I’m currently looking at installing a few TVs around the restaurant to show our lunch menu, specials, etc. Ideally, I’d also like a screen for the kitchen so staff can quickly see what needs to be prepared. The main thing I’m looking for is a system where I can manage several displays centrally through a website. If possible, I’d also love to connect it to G”
“Hi! We’re looking for a caterer/provider who can supply packed meals for around 300 pax for an upcoming company event. 📅 Date: August 26, 2026 🕚 Time: Around 11:00 PM 👥 Headcount: Approximately 300 pax 📦 Requirement: Individually packed meals 📍 Location: UP Technohub Important requirements: ● Must be able to issue an Official Receipt / valid receipt or invoice for company reimbursement purposes ● Must accept credit card payment ● Can accommodate an order of around 300 packed meals ● Ideally”
“Depends on your market. Probably there is a niche somewhere in there to focus on. Not just restaurants, but maybe food trucks, or make it spanish speaking, etc.”
“Saturated doesn’t mean closed, but ‘another scheduler’ won’t be enough. Talk to 10 restaurant managers and find the one workflow the big tools still make painful.”
“cant tell if the space is saturated with hot schedules, 7shifts, when I work, and schedulefly, or if i can actually carve out a name for myself. thoughts? submitted by /u/BigUps7175 [link] [comments]”
“For owners with multiple locations, forecasting sales and staffing off last years numbers only gets you so far. Some weeks you overstaff and overorder, other weeks you get slammed and run short. Im trying to figure out if restaurant forecasting tools genuinely help with this or if most operators still lean on spreadsheets and manager gut feel. Bonus points if the system factors in weather and local events. What are you using to forecast sales and staffing more accurately. submitted by  ”
“Why do workers lie about how long an order would take? I had a stacked order this morning. Picked up the first one no problem. The 2nd one had a far drop off but the first order was just a few minutes from the 2nd pickup. I went to pick up the 2nd order and they told me “a couple minutes”. I’m thinking that since it’s only a couple minutes, I’ll wait even though the other drop off is nearby. Over 20 minutes go by and they finally bring the food out. I tell them they don’t have to lie about how l”
“Hello. I work at a restaurant bar where I hand out online and call in Togo orders (pizza place). We have our online orders as a clocked in “employee” dubbed “online order”. We had a large order scheduled a day in advance ($1900+) and the store rang up their order as any Togo order would be rung up. I handed out almost all the food, walked boxes to their cars, etc.. the receiving party tipped $300 on the bill and management decided it would be split among the 8 employees (including Me) helping ou”
“I’m not seeing customers messages at the restaurant only when I get to destination ! what am I doing wrong ? submitted by /u/Salty-Sample145 [link] [comments]”
“the app, for exactly the reason you named. a restaurant has people walking past it, mine has nobody unless i go put it in front of them every single day.”
“I was thinking about this because they almost seem difficult in completely opposite ways. With a restaurant, just getting the business running seems brutal. You have rent, employees, food costs, equipment, permits, inventory, spoilage, and a million things that can go wrong every day. Even if people like your food, you can still lose money. With software, especially now, actually building something feels more accessible than ever. One person can build and launch a pretty legitimate app without a”
“the thing nobody has said yet, where does the floor data actually come from. kitchen and pos data exist because a machine already produces it. greet time, how long a table sat, when it turned, all of that has to be entered by the exact staff youre about to measure, and they quietly stop doing it inside two weeks. learned that one the expensive way. on the objection itself, with independents we're not busy enough usually just means we have no money this month. thats not a positioning problem,”
“quick context so this makes sense: 3 of us, pre-MVP, building software that gives restaurant owners visibility into what's actually happening in the dining room. the whole thing started from noticing that the kitchen and the POS produce tons of data but the floor produces basically none. been doing discovery the slow way, actually walking into places and talking to owners instead of blasting out a survey. what keeps coming up is that the floor basically runs on the owner's memory. they k”
“Hey, appreciate the feedback. When we were pop-up, we used to do everything by ourselves, and sometimes neglecting the phone calls during rush hours or outside working hours. We used couple of similar services that they would still call our number when their AI was stuck, and sounded very robotic. So we created ours, starting from catering requests. To respond those requests you have to dedicate 5-10 minutes, you cant simply do that if you work in fast food industry and you have a line to serve.”
Hey everyone, I’m working on a project aimed at making table ordering and bill-splitting a lot smoother during busy shifts. We all know the drill during peak hours: guests waiting to order…
“Hey everyone! I work service well at 1 of the busiest restaurants in my city. We get stress-inducing piles of tickets when we're deep in the weeds during dinner service. Any tricks & tips to get drinks out w/ proper garnishes + rims efficiently as quick as possible? What order of ingredients and organization process do you use to batch drinks/do rounds fast + effectively while keeping your station clean and ready for the next stack of tickets to knock out? Example: Ticket 1= 2x salt rim”