The Complete Guide to Hospitality Management

What is Hospitality Management?

Hospitality management is an umbrella term for management of the day-to-day operational, commercial and administrative activities within the hospitality sector. This term covers various sectors within the industry from venue based food and beverage and hotel management right through to event management. Hospitality management professionals oversee every aspect of the guest experience and manage front of house and kitchen teams. They often also take responsibility for front desk staff, housekeeping, and sales and reservations. The responsibilities of hospitality managers differ depending on the size of the business but generally cover the following key areas:

• Hiring, training and managing staff
• Overseeing the operations of the site
• Managing the atmosphere and environment
• Accounting and cash flow analysis
• Optimising business performance
• Improving operational systems and process
• Customer management and experience
• Health and safety compliance
• Liquor Licensing and Food Safety Compliance

What are the Skills Needed for Hospitality Management?

The hospitality skills you will need to develop for managing a restaurant, bar or cafe successfully are:

• Analysis, critical thinking and problem-solving You need to be able to think on your feet, and thrive on being an innovative problem solver. You will make the right financial decisions to impact the growth of your company and interpret reporting and data to back this up.‍
• People skills, Teamwork & Leadership You will be the main motivator, creating the energy in your venue to keep your team working to a high standard. This also means dealing with performance management issues and going above and beyond to set good examples.‍
• Process improvement and Quality assurance. You will need to have a critical eye to keep the standard high for your customers. You will need to see your business as a machine. By analysing and streamlining processes, controlling costs and reducing waste you can increase your profit margins.‍
• Hospitality Experience Business acumen, high levels of hospitality skills and experience are key to a successful bar, cafe or restaurant manager. To be able to steer an effective ship you will have to be able to back up what you are talking about with facts and data.

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How to Set Yourself up for Success in Hospitality Management

It is not just people skills that are essential for a good hospitality manager. Critical commercial and operations experience are just as important to keep the site you are running alive and thriving.

You will need to ensure you keep your finger on the pulse of your site by understanding costs, and sales data to make the right decisions to manage the profitability of your venue.

This is where having a good tool set or Hospitality Management software to support you is the difference between the success or failure of the bar, pub, restaurant or cafe that you are running. A tool set that allows you to reduce the time taken to analyse your costs, streamline your operations and manage your admin. You can then focus on the important things like growing your customer base, increasing profits and keeping your team engaged.

Loaded is Helping the Hospitality Industry do Better Business

We are not just a software company selling a solution in the cloud. We have been in your shoes. We provide expert advice on how to improve your management efficiencies and we partner with coaching and advisory services to help improve your business

Get in touch today to discuss how we can help you build a stronger, more resilient business.

We offer a 14-day free trial so you can see for yourself the value add to your business.

What Are the Benefits of Hospitality Management Software for Bar, Pub, Cafe and Restaurant Managers?

Getting the right bit of kit and knowing how to use it properly will empower your operational and financial decision making.

• You will ensure accountability, both with staff and your suppliers. Time keeping can be accurately recorded whilst orders and costs can be managed more efficiently.
• You can prioritize and focus your time on the actions that will grow your business and isolate where your largest cost savings are most likely to be. Clear, real time reporting can support your decision making. Learn more in our blog on improving the efficiency in the hospitality industry

What Should Hospitality Managers Prioritise to Grow their Business?

There are five key areas in your bar, restaurant or cafe that having the right hospitality management tool can significantly improve. This ranges all the way from your top line sales revenue to your bottom line profitability

Clear and Simple Reporting

Reports should show you everything you need to know and nothing you don't in real-time,

You’ll always want to make sure you have access to the following if you want to do your job well;

• Cloud based reporting & analytics so you can see the performance wherever you are.
• Simple dashboards to track your key metrics in real time.
• Customisable revenue, labour & cost of goods reporting tailored to your business.
• Staff sales & performance reports so that you can manage your team effectively.
• Consolidation reporting for of all your venues into one multi-site reporting suite.
• Easily comparative reporting for previous weeks, months and years to monitor performance progress.

Easy Cashups & reconciliation

Cashup in the cloud so that your on site and admin team are always totally in sync.

• Sync your expected revenue by tender type against actual takings.
• Reconcile actual revenue to your accounting system to stamp out theft and shrinkage.
• Nightly management reports with easy access for all users and stakeholders of the business.
• Full reconciliation reporting and multi-site comparison of variance.

Budgets and target setting

Budget creation tools, and actual revenue vs budget gives your team targets to drive success

• Compare apples with apples by setting targets by the exact same day of the week as last year.
• Actual sales auto compare with sales budgets and last year's sales.
• Create future business plans with clear informative reporting

Efficient Staff Management With Timeclock & Rostering

Accurate real time labour costs and percentages that seamlessly connect to your payroll system.

• Real time wage analysis driven by an online time clock system or via your point of sale.
• Analyse your actual shift against your roster to see where you are underperforming.
• Analyse wage cost trend versus sales trend to ensure maximum productivity.
• Copy your roster to future weeks for speed of setup.

Stock Management

Smart stock management designed and tested to deliver an 8% reduction in cost of goods.

• End to end stock management to ensure cost of goods accuracy.
• Live pricing of stock items, recipes, menus and cost of goods sold.
• All items and recipes compared to actual price sold via your point of sale.
• Order items directly from our Global Stock list.
• Create one purchase order and send to all suppliers.

Hospitality Management Software Makes It Easier to Run Your Business

At Loaded, we have designed our hospitality management software as an end-to-end solution to support your business – from labour management and sales reports to cafe, bar and restaurant inventory management.

Loaded is the easiest way to increase your profits and reduce the time you waste juggling your admin. Get in touch for a free 30 day trial and onboarding.

How to do Hospitality Operations the Right Way:

If you want to join the top 1% of hospitality managers, then you need to be clear on the two goals of hospitality management – making your customers happy and delivering a great return on investment for the owners of the business.

Loaded software makes this possible and simple. Everything, all in one place.

Streamline Your Business Process

We started at Loaded after years in the hospitality industry. We wanted to give hospitality owners and their managers a clear and easy way of managing revenue, labour and cost of goods. As well as provide the tools for you and the team to manage these areas in the simplest way possible.

The Loaded Hub has been designed so that you can implement our revenue, team, and stock tools in a stepwise manner to take control of your business and run all of your operations from one place.

Our goal is for you to feel like this;

"My shoulders have dropped three inches since we started last month. Even though I can see it’s going to take us a little while to get there, I can actually see a clear path for getting a handle on everything and we’re already making improvements across the board because it’s so easy to use and the team actually like it. yay!”

Increase control and put the passion back into your job.

What starts as a creative passion in hospitality, can often end up as a huge amount of stress, long hours and a feeling of not being in control. This is not a great road to productivity and success. Unfortunately we see hospitality owners and managers working too many hours, over and over again.

You need a more effective way of reducing the admin and increasing the control you have over your business.

It takes energy to transform a business into an efficient, consistently performing operation, but we’ll be there to show you the exact steps we took to get our 13 site hospitality business absolutely humming, and how 1000’s of other creative, passionate hospitality owners and managers like you have taken control of their business and got their lives back.

Monitor Your Stock Costs vs Revenue

The problem with most stock systems, is they don’t do everything you need from one place, so you end up with your ordering in a bunch of different places, your recipes in another, your invoices sitting in your accounting system entirely separate from everything else, your stocktaking in your POS or being done by someone who charges you an arm and a leg and finally if you’re lucky a spreadsheet from 1997 that you use to try and bring it all together.

We had exactly the same problem, so we worked on a system, where you do all of your ordering and receiving of stock, your recipe management, your menu and margin analysis, your stocktaking, and all of your reporting. We even export out to your accounting system so your cost of goods always lines up with your financials.

We’ve got documented case studies of customers who have decreased their cost of goods by 8% using Loaded, resulting in over $200,000 of increased net profit.

Ditch The Spreadsheets

You’ll find very few accountants have had to complete a spreadsheet after a 12 hour shift at 4am in the morning. So why should you?

Don’t get us wrong there are lots of jobs the faithful spreadsheet delivers strongly on, but just like the Cranberry and Brie panini is no longer the top selling item at every cafe across Australasia, the sun is setting on the spreadsheet.

The ideal thing about cloud software is that your whole team is working from the same system, looking at the same information and completing everything in exactly the same way so that you get one true way of managing your business the same way, every day. It might even allow you to take a day off now and again!

Our most creative customers tell us they love that someone else has thought through all of the maths and data that drives their revenue, labour, cost of goods and profitability and all they have to do is get their team to pick up their phone or tablet and engage in the tools that help manage every key part of their operations.

Loaded gives you the freedom to breathe and do it right.

As a passionate cafe, bar, pub or restaurant owner or manager you thrive on the people you serve and the food and the environment you create to create unforgettable experiences for your clientele.

Loaded can help you achieve your hospitality goals and keep the magic flowing. Making life simpler for the hospitality industry is what gets us out of bed every morning.

Choose Loaded for an all in one tool to help you with:

• Inventory Management
• Menu and Recipe Management
• Budgeting and Reporting
• Food Costing
• Timekeeping
• Cashup and Reconciliation

Reach out to us today and let us help you make hospitality management easy.

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