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For cafes, restaurants and takeaways
The table you held all night for nobody.
Fewer no shows, more direct orders, and a wifi network that does not sit on the same wire as your till.
Hospitality runs on thin margins and long days, and almost every technology decision in it comes down to the same question: how much of each sale do you actually keep. A booking that does not turn up keeps none of it. An order through a delivery platform keeps a good deal less than it looks. A card fee takes a slice of everything.
The other thing that makes this trade different is that nobody has time. Nobody is going to sit down at four in the afternoon and learn a system. Whatever you use has to be obvious to a new member of staff on their second shift, because there will be a new member of staff on their second shift.
So we keep it practical. Take bookings in a way that reduces no shows. Give your regulars a way to order directly from you. Understand what each channel really costs. And make sure the wifi, the card machine and the till are set up so a guest browsing the internet is nowhere near the systems that take money.
Sound familiar?
- Bookings taken on paper and by phone, with no shows costing you the busiest table of the evening
- Delivery platforms taking a serious slice of every order you send out
- Card fees and platform commission eating a margin that was thin to begin with
- Guest wifi that either does not work or is wide open to anyone in the street
What we do about it
- Online booking with confirmations, reminders and deposits on the sittings that matter most
- Your own ordering page, so regulars can order direct instead of through a platform
- A clear picture of what each channel actually costs you once fees and commission are counted
- Guest wifi that is separate from the till and the office, and works properly at a busy table
A day that probably looks like yours
Nothing here is a disaster. That is rather the point: this is an ordinary day, and the cost is spread so thinly that nobody ever adds it up.
- 10:30Bookings taken by phone while prep is happening, written into the diary.Two entries with unreadable names and one table double booked.
- 12:15Lunch orders come through the delivery platform.Every one of them arrives with commission already taken off the top.
- 16:00A guest asks for the wifi password. It is written on a card behind the bar.The same network the till and the back office computer sit on.
- 19:40A table of eight does not arrive and does not ring.The best table of the night, held empty through the busiest hour.
- 21:00A regular rings to order a takeaway and is told to use the app.A loyal customer routed through a platform that charges you for them.
- 23:30Cashing up, comparing till, card machine and platform reports by hand.Forty minutes at the end of a fourteen hour day, every day.
No shows are a communication problem before they are a money problem
A no show is rarely somebody being deliberately inconsiderate. It is usually somebody who forgot, or whose plans changed, and who did not ring because ringing a restaurant to cancel feels like a confrontation. The fix, therefore, is not to be sterner. It is to make remembering easy and cancelling painless.
A confirmation when the booking is made, a reminder the day before, and a one tap way to cancel or change turns most silent no shows into cancellations you receive in time to fill the table. That single change is worth more to most venues than anything else on this page, and it costs very little.
Deposits are the second lever and should be used with judgement. Taking a card or a small deposit on large parties and peak sittings is now widely accepted and rarely loses bookings. Applying it to a table for two on a Tuesday just makes you feel unwelcoming. The point is to protect the sittings you genuinely cannot afford to lose.
Your own ordering, alongside the platforms
Delivery platforms are genuinely useful for discovery. They put you in front of people who have never heard of you, and for that they are worth something. What they are not good at is being the route your regulars use, because a customer who already knows you, already loves your food and would happily order direct is the most expensive kind of order to send through a platform.
Having your own ordering page changes that without you having to leave anything. New customers still find you where they find you. Regulars get a simple way to order straight from you, and you keep the difference. Over a year, on any real volume, that difference is not a rounding error.
The way it works in practice is a nudge, not a fight. A card in the bag, a note on the receipt, a sign at the counter, a message to people who have ordered directly before. It works slowly and steadily, and it is one of the few things in hospitality that improves margin without changing a single thing about the food.
Knowing what each channel actually costs
Very few small venues can say with confidence what a pound of revenue is worth to them through each route: in person, on the phone, through their own site, through each platform. Between commission, card fees, packaging and the labour of managing orders, the true figures differ far more than most owners expect.
Getting that picture is not an accounting project. It is mostly a matter of pulling the numbers you already receive into one simple view each month, so you can see the difference between what you sold and what you kept. Once you can see it, decisions that felt like guesses become obvious.
It usually changes behaviour in small, sensible ways. Which platform to stay on and which to drop. Whether a minimum order value makes sense. Whether it is worth the effort of getting regulars to order direct, and roughly how much effort it is worth. None of that is visible while the numbers sit in four different portals.
Wifi, tills and keeping guests off your business network
In most cafes and restaurants we look at, the guest wifi and the till are on the same network, often the same router the owner set up years ago, with a password written on a card behind the bar and never changed. That means a guest device, or anything on it, sits on the same network as the systems that handle payments and the computer that holds your staff records.
Separating them is straightforward and not expensive. Guest access on its own separate network, with sensible limits, and the till, card terminals and office equipment on another that guests cannot reach. It is the sort of thing that takes an afternoon and quietly removes a whole category of risk.
While you are at it, the coverage itself is usually worth fixing. A single router at one end of a stone walled building rarely reaches the far tables or the beer garden, and guests judge that harshly. Getting the wireless right means fewer complaints, better card terminal reliability at the tables, and an ordering page that actually loads for the person sitting furthest from the bar.
Real examples
Illustrative cases drawn from the kind of work we do. Tap one to see what happened and what could have been done. We do not name clients without their permission.
The Saturday table that vanished
The case
A bistro with limited covers regularly lost its weekend large tables to parties that neither arrived nor cancelled. Because the booking was only in a paper diary and nobody had contact details beyond a first name and a number scribbled at speed, there was no way to reach them and no way to fill the table.
What could have been done
Taking bookings in a way that captures contact details properly, confirms them, reminds the day before and takes a small deposit on larger weekend parties turns most silent absences into cancellations that arrive early enough to resell the table.
The regulars ordering through a platform
The case
A takeaway found that a large share of its delivery orders came from the same local customers, week after week, all arriving through a platform that took commission on every one of them. Those customers knew the shop well and would happily have ordered direct if there had been a way to.
What could have been done
Putting a simple ordering page of their own in place and mentioning it on every bag and receipt gradually moves the repeat customers across, while leaving the platform to do what it is genuinely good at, which is finding new people.
The till on the guest network
The case
A cafe had one router handling everything: guest wifi, the till, the card terminal and the back office laptop with staff and supplier records on it. The wifi password had been the same for four years and was printed on a card on every table.
What could have been done
Splitting guest access onto its own network, separate from the systems that take payments, is an afternoon of work and removes a serious and completely unnecessary exposure. Improving the coverage at the same time fixes the complaints about signal in the back room.
What cafes, restaurants and takeaways usually ask us for
Website design and build
Fast, accessible sites that load in under two seconds and read well on a phone. Built to be edited by you, not held hostage by us.
£4,000 to £8,000
E commerce and online shops
Sell online without a monthly platform fee eating your margin. Stock, payments, shipping and VAT wired into what you already use.
£8,000 to £18,000
Reputation and review management
The stars people see before they ever call you. We make getting good reviews part of your day-to-day, keep an eye on what is said, and help you handle the odd bad one well.
£300 to £900/month
Local SEO and Google Business
Get found by the people down the road who are ready to buy. We fix your Google Business Profile, get your Name, Address and Phone matching everywhere, and win the map pack that sits above the normal results.
£500 to £1,200/month
Wifi and router support
Drop outs, dead spots and a connection that is fine everywhere except where you actually work. Diagnosed and sorted, with honest advice on what hardware is worth it.
£75 to £120/hour
Common questions
Will taking deposits put people off booking?
On peak sittings and larger parties, generally not. Most diners now expect it and it reads as a well run venue rather than a suspicious one. Applying it to every booking is where it starts costing you goodwill. The sensible approach is to protect the tables you cannot afford to lose and leave the rest alone.
Should we come off the delivery platforms altogether?
Usually not. They bring you customers you would not otherwise reach, and that has real value. The better move is to keep them for discovery while giving your regulars an easy direct route, so you stop paying a finder's fee on people who found you long ago.
Our staff change constantly. Will they cope with a new system?
Only if it is genuinely simple, which is why we would rather add one well chosen thing than a suite of them. If a new starter cannot use it correctly on their second shift with no training, it is the wrong choice for hospitality and we would say so.
Do we need a new website, or just online booking?
Often just the booking, at least to begin with. Plenty of venues have a perfectly reasonable site that simply lacks a way to book or order. If the site is slow, awkward on a phone or shows last year's menu, that is a different conversation, but we would not start there by default.
Can you sort the wifi without closing for a day?
In most cases yes. The bulk of the work can be prepared in advance and the switch over done before service or between sittings. We would rather work around your opening hours than ask a venue with thin margins to lose a day's trade for a network change.
Not quite your trade?
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Admin Rescue for cafes, restaurants and takeaways
A job management system built around how you actually work. Missed calls text back automatically, quotes go out in minutes, and everything lands in your accounts software without you retyping it.
from £2,400 setup then £150/month