Apps for Restaurant Owners: 7 Essential Tools

Streamlining operations and reducing daily admin tasks should be key goals for any restaurant business. With the right mobile apps, you and your management team can quickly and efficiently manage staff rotas, reservations and more from anywhere.

However, staying up-to-date on which apps your business needs, and how to use them properly can be tricky. Here’s our guide to seven essential apps restaurant owners shouldn’t overlook.

Why are apps for restaurant owners useful?

Apps for restaurant owners are useful for many reasons:

• Improve operational efficiency: High-quality apps help you and your staff move away from inefficient systems that may be dragging your daily operations down, like pen and paper diaries.

• Cut down admin time: Apps can help you automate or streamline repetitive admin tasks and store all your valuable information in one space, instead of scattering data across multiple paper trails.

• Simplify management: Many apps for restaurant owners feature user-friendly interfaces that can make things like staff rotas much easier to manage. With easier administration, you and your team have more time to focus on what matters, like customer service.
  
  
• Oversight from anywhere: With a phone app, you can look over your business from anywhere at any time, letting you track or work on your business out of hours.

7 vital restaurant management apps

The right apps for your restaurant give you versatile tools you can use from anywhere. Here are seven vital restaurant management apps to help you improve your business. 

1. Trail

The Trail app is a digital task management tool tailor-made for restaurant owners and people in the hospitality business. It allows business owners to create digital checklists to streamline daily operations, easily manage safety compliance, and replace inefficient pen-and-paper systems.

By using the Trail app, you and your management team have real-time control of your operations through handy checklists that you can quickly access anywhere via mobile phone. Trail also uses cloud functionality to share checklists across your entire brand, making them perfect for restaurant groups and chain restaurants.

With digitised task lists, combined with alerts and deadlines, the most crucial daily routines for your business can be precisely monitored and completed across all shifts. This helps to ensure health compliance standards are followed by kitchen staff to prevent costly fines.

You can also create tasks to clean visible surfaces and sterilise furniture to maintain quality for diners. This helps to provide better customer experiences time and again.

2. Rotaready

Rotaready is a workforce management app specialising in staff administration. Rotaready is designed to help pubs, hotels, and restaurants automate staff schedules to reduce the time and guesswork in employee scheduling, track employee attendance, and manage payrolls.

With ResDiary’s Rotaready integration, you can predict future demand for your staff by leveraging your booking data. Use your restaurant's historical sales or upcoming events to determine how many team members you will need for each shift. This enables you to precisely optimise your schedules and reduce labour costs.

Rotaready provides real-time insight into wage spending as rotas are created, allowing you to monitor spending and support higher profitability in your business.

Rotaready can also help to simplify your payment and compliance processes. The system makes it easy to comply with labour laws regarding shift hours and working regulations.

The app has HR management features for tasks like handling leave and storing documents and pay records. This helps you streamline your HR process.

When using the Rotaready app, you get easy oversight into your staffing anytime, anywhere. This makes it easy to action last-minute changes and stay updated on team management.

3. CPL Learning

CPL Learning is a hospitality-focused learning management system (LMS) created to help busy restaurant owners efficiently on-board and train their employees. The app helps staff understand compliance standards and provides training on crucial tasks like food safety, menu knowledge, effective customer service, and other operational procedures. 

The CPL Learning app makes it easier for your team to get the information they need to perform in your business. They can access courses on a range of devices, allowing them to learn in their preferred way.

With high-quality training, your business can run much more smoothly. The CPL Learning app provides a streamlined training experience with instruction on current compliance standards.

CPL Learning offers a standardised training platform, giving you a high-quality system to consistently on-board your staff across all your venues. CPL Learning also provides performance tracking and reporting features to help managers monitor staff progression, identify possible training gaps, and recognise high performers. All of which you can access in the mobile app, for simple management.

In addition to training, CPL Learning offers a premises licence application variation service to take the stress out of licence applications. If you would like to change locations or adjust your premises licence, CPL Learning can help you:

• Consult the relevant authorities.
• Complete and submit your application to the local council.
• Prepare the necessary public notice.
• Advise on any negotiations or objections if needed.
• Ensure the application is completed in line with the compliant approval process.

4. Tonic

Tonic is a mobile scanning software and cloud-based ticketing app designed to make it easier for hospitality businesses and event managers to sell and manage event tickets.

Hosting events is a key strategy many restaurants use to increase revenue and offset slow sales periods. Our Beyond the Booking report on trends in the hospitality industry suggests that 42% of restaurant owners are planning to host more events in 2025.

Furthermore, it demonstrated that over 75% of diners typically eat out to celebrate an occasion or spend time with friends, making events a crucial way to generate more profits in your business.

Tonic lets you take advantage of special events and promotions with user-friendly features that help you cut down on stressful admin tasks. With Tonic, you can sell online tickets 24/7 and manage important details, such as guest lists, time slots, fee structures, and more. Thanks to mobile scanning features, Tonic also streamlines your check-in process for faster and more efficient attendance management.

Tonic is integrated with DesignMyNight, a nightlife discovery website with over 3.9 million monthly users. With DesignMyNight’s ResDiary integration, you can enable customers to make reservations at your restaurant straight from your listing.

Get the most out of your restaurant events with ResDiary’s event management software and promotion features. With ResDiary, you can take your event bookings and ticket sales online, as well as set up custom menus, enable pre-payments to reduce no-shows, and send out personalised emails and alerts to market your event.

With the Tonic mobile app available for easy ticket scanning, operating events in a streamlined and profitable way becomes far easier.

5. QikServe

QikServe is a digital ordering and payment platform for hospitality businesses. The platform enables self-service ordering and payment options in your business, as well as convenient menu management and other automated services.

With QikServe, you can enhance your guests' ordering and payment options at your restaurant. By using an online ordering system and pay-at-table features, customers can pay when they want to without waiting for a bill.

Online ordering can also help front-of-house staff reduce human error or poor service caused by the dinner rush.

With QikServe’s mobile enablement, restaurant owners can access an online dashboard and see key information about how QikServe is operating in their business.

QikServe also gives you tools to increase your revenue and manage your income more easily. By using mobile or automated ordering systems, you have more upselling and cross-selling opportunities throughout your business. You can also increase your table turnover and take pressure off your staff so that they focus on delivering great service.

6. Wireless Social

Wireless Social is a guest Wi-Fi platform for restaurants and other hospitality venues. Wireless Social captures valuable data, such as contact details like email addresses and how often customers visit your business.

By using the data Wireless Social provides, restaurant owners can craft a comprehensive profile of their customers. With insights from customer data, you can more effectively market your restaurant and analyse foot traffic.

A customer profile can also help you enhance your relationships with your guests by using targeted marketing, personalised advertisements, and automated email messages.

Wireless Social functions well for business owners with mobile enablement. You can access a web dashboard with access to customer profiles and much more. Get more out of your data by accessing it whenever you need to.

Taking advantage of ResDiary’s built-in email marketing features is another great way to leverage data collected through Wireless Social. With ResDiary, you can automate follow-up messages with guests after they’ve dined with you to encourage more repeat business or customer reviews. Email marketing is also a great way to advertise special events or personalised discounts.

Check out our best restaurant email marketing templates if you’re unsure how to start your email marketing campaign.

7. ResDiary Plus

ResDiary Plus is a mobile and tablet-based table management system designed to give restaurant owners and managers more precise control over their reservations and table layout. You can enjoy the most convenient features of ResDiary on your mobile phone.

ResDiary Plus gives you access to quality table management software and integrations from anywhere. With the app, you can optimise your venues operations and revenue by:

• Controlling bookings: With ResDiary, you have access to smart rules that automatically control the flow of your bookings. You can precisely manage your reservations on busy nights, spread out your guests more evenly and maximise your space automatically. ResDiary also lets you break your set rules with one-off exceptions whenever you need to for additional versatility.

• Maximising space: With more control of your venue space, you can ensure you are getting the most value out of your location. Use ResDiary Plus to access exceptional table plans and fill out as many seats as you can. For example, during the summer, you can create an outdoor space and easily expand your available covers with the segments feature.

• Increasing communications: ResDiary Plus is a central management system that enables quick communication between staff. With features like booking notes, your team can access crucial information to improve the dining experience.

• Waitlist management: Reduce the number of customers you need to turn away and remove the guesswork of waiting lists with ResDiary’s W8List™ feature. With a quality restaurant waitlist management system, you can swiftly process the details of a waiting customer and provide an accurate waiting time for them. With more accurate waiting times, you can offer customers a better, less frustrating waiting experience.

ResDiary Plus is the perfect companion to the full ResDiary system. While ResDiary Plus offers a refined experience optimised for service time, ResDiary has a range of additional features to help your business thrive.

ResDiary’s high quality integrations can help seriously streamline your business. POS integrations like PowerEPOS from Triniteq or AccessEPoS by Impact Data help integrate booking and sales data. With marketing and social media integrations, customers can directly book a table with you from Google or Meta platforms, increasing your bookings and your online presence.

With ResDiary’s extensive analytics suite, you can create a two-way data flow from your reservation data and other services that you can turn into actionable insights. Optimise your menu based on customer feedback and preferences, increase your profit margins by examining the cost of goods sold, or reduce food waste in your inventory management.

How to get the most out of your restaurant apps

Here are some additional tips for getting the most out of your restaurant management apps:

• Use integrated tech stacks: By relying on an integrated tech stack like ResDiary, your business can get the most out of using different pieces of software through a centralised managing system. A unified tech stack can also ensure software is shared across multiple venues, enabling greater oversight and making management easier and transparent across your business.
  
  
• Get rid of redundant tools: With a quality tech stack, you can construct a more cost-effective and efficient approach to restaurant management. You may be able to discard apps you are currently using, as ResDiary has features or integrations to replace them.
  
  
• Share apps across teams: To help keep your team on the same page, share access to apps wherever possible. ResDiary has cloud functionality and can be accessed by your front-of-house team on multiple devices, helping service run seamlessly.
  
  
  

Use ResDiary to elevate your tech stack

With ResDiary’s quality features and integrations, you can elevate your tech stack and streamline your business to be more efficient. Reduce your time spent on tedious admin tasks and elevate your customers’ experiences.

Put together a precise restaurant technology stack with dozens of great integrations and features. Enjoy enhanced oversight and control over your business, and deliver high-quality service across your business with a centralised reservation management system.

Build a powerful tech stack for your business today by booking a demo with ResDiary.