Running a hospitality business has never felt more like cooking under pressure. By November 2025, 111,000 UK jobs may have been lost, while the cost of keeping kitchens running - from sourcing ingredients, to staffing and energy bills, continue to rise. The financial recipe is getting harder to perfect, with thin margins being shaved down daily.
Every day, restaurant teams are weighed down by invisible admin: stock checks, staffing headaches, reports and spreadsheets. These tasks are necessary, but they quietly steal time, energy, and creativity. Time that could be spent doing what hospitality does best: creating unforgettable experiences for loyal guests. These small points of friction are costly and deny staff the opportunity to engage with customers in ways that build loyalty out of a great experience.
For owners and managers, the incessant need to manage these processes is a drag on achieving the business’ full potential. In truth, if you walk into the back office of many restaurants today to look at their IT processes, it might not look all that different to 15, 20 years ago.
This is worsened for businesses with multiple venues. Head office frustrations are likely to mount if they cannot see what is happening in something close to real time. In today’s climate, senior executives need fast access to data insights and trends so they can intervene and improve performance.
Can you have your cake and eat it?
Yes. You can. No hospitality business – let alone just restaurants - needs to be tied down by time consuming admin. About 80% of these tasks in hospitality admin are already automated in organisations that have joined up all their important data.
When POS, menu-management, inventory, HR and ERP sit in one place and talk to one another, businesses get a single version of the truth that’s both accurate and actionable. The capture of sales, inventory, purchasing, staff and prep in real-time allows restaurant operations to become self-driven.
Imagine a driverless car that tops itself up with oil, changes its own air conditioning filters and even replaces its own brakes when they begin to wear down. Driven by AI, today’s automated
hospitality systems continuously calculate, plan and prompt actions to optimise a restaurant’s performance and reduce waste.
Automation means restaurants achieve tighter cost control across both front and back-of-house functions. Orders are made with confidence instead of guess work. If a dish cools off, ingredient purchasing scales down automatically. If a local event is due to spike demand, the plan accounts for it before anyone’s on shift. Restaurants can predict what the day will bring, based on sales data, the weather and comparisons with previous years.
Smart notifications keep managers on track without drowning them in admin. Calculations are devised with much greater accuracy, reducing errors and lightening the load on staff. Managers can save time and focus on customer service, driving growth and revenue.
Keeping head office happy so your team can focus on creating customer experiences that matter
For multi-site businesses, visibility is everything. Do your head office teams get the information they need when they need it? Well, it’s not as hard as it once was. Connected systems let leaders spot trends, track spending and monitor performance across every site in near real time. Whether it’s ingredient costs, staffing levels or sales data, decision-makers gain fast, accurate insight to act with confidence. And sometimes more importantly, they get the answers they need so they don’t even have to ask, saving time for the people who should be delighting guests.
That’s a world away from the old way, wrestling with spreadsheets, manual currency conversions and disconnected reports that slow everything down.
Taking action to protect margins
The pressures facing hospitality are going nowhere. Excelling in difficult economic conditions requires the replacement of slow, fragmented processes with connected, real-time operational intelligence. When sales, inventory, purchasing and staffing data sit in one place, managers can see demand earlier, order with confidence, reduce waste and schedule people so staffing levels are always in alignment with demand.
With clear, timely reporting across currencies and locations, head office staff can take action to protect margins, direct spend more effectively and back their local managers with practical guidance.
By putting real-time intelligence at the heart of operations, restaurants and hospitality businesses can refocus on what they do best: innovating and creating standout experiences that keep guests coming back. While they are using their human skills to maximum effect, the intelligence of a self-driving platform is working behind the scenes to optimise margins even in difficult times.
