Anyone who runs a catering business knows if you don’t run a tight ship, things can quickly become disorganized, inefficient and overly complicated. Between coordinating with suppliers, keeping up to date on staffing, managing orders, and delivering on time—there are a lot of logistics that need to run smoothly to have a successful business. It can be hard to manage it all without efficient catering software!
Luckily, implementing efficient catering software like FoodStorm can help you collect data and find ways to improve efficiency across the board. In this article we’ll discuss key ways to use data collected from catering software to find efficiency improvements and help your catering business run like a well-oiled machine.
Catering software tracks all of your orders, so you can look at which items are the most popular and which items do not sell well. You can also analyze trends, such as seasonal or regional trends, to see if certain items do better at certain times of the year or in certain locations.
If items are overly unpopular, you might remove them from your menu and eliminate unnecessary work streams related to those items. If items are popular, you might dedicate more resources towards them. Knowing where to direct your resources can help your business run efficiently.
Data around popular items and popular times of the year can also help you properly prepare your staff. If you identify peak business times then you can increase staff accordingly and decrease staffing around low periods. Being properly staffed is one of the best things you can do to ensure your business runs efficiently.
Catering software provides a quick and easy way to take orders online and track any order changes. While we all try our best, inevitably human errors can happen when we try to track all our orders manually via the phone or email.
Having an automatic online order tracking system makes the ordering process fast and provides an accurate record, therefore reducing the potential for any mistakes, confusion or customer issues.
Catering software is a great way to automatically collect customer feedback. Gathering feedback alone can give you valuable insights into your customers and how your business is doing. But did you know that you can run analytics on your customer feedback?
Find additional insights with customer feedback trends and monitor if any business changes result in positive or negative responses from your customers. Any negative trends can be a sign that something needs to change!
Furthermore, tracking analytics with catering software can tell you how much of your business is coming from repeat customers versus new customers. Learn how you might be able to drive more revenue from your existing customers and expand your market share.
Catering software can automatically create delivery logs and collect data on your deliveries. Gain insights on how many deliveries you are doing, how much time is spent on deliveries, where you deliver to the most and more. Find new ways to automatically group deliveries together to cut down on the need to run multiple inefficient trips and spend less time in transit.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data is a powerful way to gain valuable insights on your customers, but it can be difficult to keep this information organized and run analytics on it manually. Automatically manage all of your customer information in one place with catering software so that your team can easily and efficiently find the customer information they need to run your business smoothly. Analytics tools can help you easily gain insights on who your customers are and who your target markets might be for growth.
Catering software integrates with various types of accounting software and helps make it easy for you to properly file your taxes. All your business information is automatically transferred over to your preferred accounting software so that you can quickly file your taxes and get back to the more enjoyable parts of running your business.
There are countless ways catering software can help you identify efficiencies within your catering business, but where do you start in your software research?
Contact our specialists today to discuss what your catering business needs and what FoodStorm can do for you.
