Pen & Paper vs. Digital: The True Cost to Your Restaurant

Still relying on a pen and paper system in your restaurant? You may think you're saving lots of money, and that this solution has all the functionality you need. In reality, using this outdated method is probably costing your restaurant in a big way.

Trying to sort through all of your booking notes and hastily scribbled table plans is no way to run an efficient service. That's not to mention all the other benefits and opportunities a digital system like ResDiary provides.

Read on to discover just how much money you're missing out on by sticking with your pen and paper system. 

Pen and paper vs a digital restaurant booking system

What exactly are the differences between pen and paper vs digital booking systems like ResDiary? Here are the key points you need to be aware of: 

Bring in bookings from different channels

ResDiary’s Channel Management tool lets you control where, when, and how many reservations are taken via your authorised online channels. It’s all customisable by area, timeslot, and venue.

You can take bookings from booking integrations like Google, Meta, Quandoo, Restaurant Hub, other third parties, or your social media. Track what’s working for your restaurant through our reporting suite.

With a pen and paper setup, you completely miss out on these opportunities.

Booking data

When customers place a booking, they're offering plenty of critical data for your business to use.

Want to track your high spenders or see what proportion of customers return to the same or different venues? Track guest behaviours, see overall trends, and drill down into the nitty gritty with our data and customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities. Then use the information to create smart campaigns and maximise your operations.

When you integrate ResDiary with our range of leading systems and tools, you can leverage the benefits of booking data even more effectively. You can also use ResDiary’s analytics suite to gain powerful insights.

Answering a phone and scribbling down reservation notes offers none of these benefits.

Ease of use

No matter how neat your handwriting is, there are definitely times that you or your team struggle to decipher your scrawl. With a digital system like ResDiary, you'll never have this issue.

Not only is text much easier to read, you'll also be able to access a range of different views to make understanding upcoming services easier. For instance, ResDiary offers table plan views and running order views, allowing you to choose which works best for you.

Another critical way that digital restaurant reservation systems supersede paper diaries is with cloud connectivity. You can run ResDiary on multiple devices within your venue, and even across multiple venues.

In addition to the desktop version, ResDiary is available as an iOS and Android app. These can be run on phones and tablets alike. You can connect up to eight devices to run concurrently during service, which is ideal for larger venues with multiple areas.

This ensures that two team members on opposite sides of your restaurant can be on the same page with the same information in front of them at all times.

Additional features

There's simply so much a digital table management system can do that a pen and paper solution can't. From white-label branded booking widgets and commission-free Google and Meta bookings, to secure payments or highly useful dashboard reporting, booking systems are an incredible hub for a range of tools.

With ResDiary, it's up to you what additional features you want to add into your system. These tools are seamlessly integrated for maximum ease of use and effectiveness.

These extra integrations allow you to make the most of your booking data and operate your restaurant in a highly streamlined way.

How much money is your paper diary costing your venue?

Here are six reasons to leave behind your paper diary and make the switch to a table management system.

1. Ease of use and time saving

By transitioning from a pen and paper system to a digital booking and table management solution, you can make your general business management much easier. Your booking and table information will be available to all your staff in service. With cloud functionality offered by systems like ResDiary, your team can access all the information they need from desktop, mobile, or tablet apps.

You won’t have to spend valuable time looking through a booking diary to find the information your employees need. You also won’t risk that someone didn’t immediately write down valuable details when a booking was made.

Without streamlining your bookings, your restaurant can run into the following issues:

• Bottlenecks in service and an uneven spread of bookings throughout service
• Being unprepared for dinner rushes and busy periods.
• Losing track of orders and special requests, resulting in unhappy  customers.
• Failing to stock appropriately.
• Losing track of how long jobs and operations are taking.
• Miscommunicating between the front of house staff and the kitchen.
• Dealing with consistently unhappy customers.
• Missing out on booking opportunities (and revenue) via phone, social media, Google, and other online channels.

Any time staff spend on administration and booking is time they can’t serve your customers. Falling behind during a rush period puts your venue at risk of creating a cycle of unsatisfied diners. 

Comparatively, with an online booking system, all your vital information is in one place. From bookings to what promotions are selling the best, your entire staff have one easy location to find every detail they need to do the best possible job. 

2. Control the flow of bookings

ResDiary’s online reservation system features smart rules to automate your booking process. With ResDiary’s smart rules, you can set exactly what availability guests can see when they make a booking.

You can set rules on how you accept online  bookings and walk-ins by time slot, service, cover volume, and even by booking channel. Then, ResDiary ensures you don’t accept any bookings that break the rules you have set. In addition, you can create smart rules to ensure specific tables are booked first.

It’s also simple for you as the operator to “break” your rules during a given period. This process is simple, and users with the correct access privileges - like shift managers - have the flexibility to do this.

If you are short-staffed, automated booking rules will ensure you quickly and effectively control your customer flow. This is in stark contrast to businesses relying on pen and paper systems. With analogue systems, there’s no way to exercise this level of automated control.

Another powerful tool ResDiary offers is segments. Segments allow you to change aspects of your diary during a given period.

For example, if you are opening up an outdoor space in summer, you can automatically reflect this change in your booking diary. Customers will see these changes when they go to make a booking, and your team can see them when they look at your diary.

You can then easily switch your diary back to normal when the time comes. When summer comes around again, you can revert your diary back to its segmented form. This is another level of control that analogue systems cannot match.

3. More booking functions

ResDiary’s booking system offers many other features to make your life easier. No-shows are a costly and disruptive issue in any restaurant business.

With ResDiary, you can send automated booking reminders and confirmations to customers to ensure they attend, edit, or cancel if they need to. You can also use the Stripe integration to set up credit card detail storage, deposits, or full payment in advance to ensure customers honour their reservations.

ResDiary’s booking functions are accessible on multiple devices, and front of house staff can quickly and easily find diners' bookings. Back of house staff will also be able to access vital booking information when they need to.  This helps your entire team commit to the guest experience.

With quick access to information from anywhere in your business, your staff can adjust to changes and bookings on the fly. Additionally, ResPhone by ResDiary can automatically accept bookings when your team can’t answer the phone and can help you store customers' phone numbers.

ResDiary also features W8List™ to manage walk-in customers with ease. With these booking tools at your disposal, your business will be running more smoothly than ever.

4.  Features and integrations

ResDiary offers more than just booking tools. It also empowers you to take your advertising to the next level by using customer information to personalise your marketing.

Create branded emails and text messages tailored to your customers’ data. Automatically promote set menus, special events, and marketing deals, like wine tastings or birthday dinners.

Automatic marketing features let you attract more customers without slowing down your business or reassigning staff. Create special promotions to advertise your business when you know there may be fewer customers, like during winter or outside peak tourist seasons.

ResDiary integrates with Silverstreet to automatically send SMS messages based on rules that you set. You can also rely on customer relationship management integrations like TalkBox or Acteol to get even deeper insights into your customers. Remember that personalised marketing is effective marketing.

Are you pursuing social media and search engine marketing for your restaurant? ResDiary integrates with Meta and Google to allow you to take bookings directly from these channels into your digital diary. This makes it easy to convert diners who see your marketing efforts into paying customers.

These vital marketing tools are extremely effective when paired with booking data from your diary. From simple contact information to dining preferences, marketing through your restaurant reservation system is an effective way to attract customers to your business.

5. Take advantage of other integrations

With the right software and integration capabilities, you can turn your restaurant into a well-oiled machine. When it comes to reservation software, new tech should never slow you down or create extra work.

ResDiary’s software integrates seamlessly with your current restaurant management processes. We don’t create new tasks; we automate old ones so you have more time for what matters.

You can use an electronic point of sale (EPOS) software integration to reliably accept payments, monitor your inventory levels and much more. Tools like SumUp EPOS or PowerEPOS from Triniteq offer a range of useful features on top of securely accepting payments.

If your restaurant is part of a hotel or inn, we offer a range of property management systems (PMS) which integrate effectively with ResDiary. Systems like Guestline allow you to create, edit and cancel bookings within a single platform. You can also link table reservations with hotel bookings, saving on admin time.

There are so many advantages to integrating your restaurant reservation system with these kinds of tools. Most importantly, you can use two-way data flow to get the most out of each and every one of them.

With a pen and paper system, you aren’t empowered to use integrations like these. This means you can put off gaining advantages from integrated EPOS systems and CRM systems. A digital system like ResDiary is the perfect entry point to a world of valuable integrations, with over 70 leading integrations available.

6. Analyse your booking data for decision-making

Every point of data you gather for your business can benefit your operations. By analysing your booking data you can see where you may have an operational inefficiency. You can learn more about your peak days and how you can maximise value from them.

ResDiary offers a digital suite for analysing a broad array of restaurant data. It enables you to make more informed decisions on where your restaurant needs to improve, and what your top opportunities are. By sticking with a pen and paper system, you will be in the dark when it comes to these insights.

ResDiary also allows you to gather customer data such as contact information to put to work in your marketing efforts. You can offer more personalised service with easy-to-use booking notes.

If you want to add a personal touch to your customer service while relying on a pen and paper system, you’re reliant on the team member answering the phone and writing information down. Digital systems offer a far more reliable way to achieve customised service.

Using booking data can be as simple as opening up your digital diary during a pre-shift meeting and sharing insights to help your team prepare. With a digital system, your team members can access this information before and during service.

Digital reservation systems allow you to put your data to work in a way that pen and paper systems simply cannot match.

How much money is your paper diary costing your venue?

With so many clear reasons to make the switch from pen and paper to digital, there's probably only one advantage of analogue systems left in your head: Price.

Table management systems carry subscription fees, and some charge commission fees on top. ResDiary never charges commission fees to our customers, ensuring every booking you earn leaves more money in your business.

In reality, digital table management systems pay for themselves. Relying on a pen and paper system is losing your business money, and we can prove it.

Based on our own booking data, as well as information sourced from third parties, we've determined the average amount of money restaurants are losing out on by sticking with analogue systems.

Specifically, we've looked at how much revenue you could be missing out on from Reserve with Google bookings. We've also added in the time ResDiary will save when it comes to managing your bookings.

Based on this research, we’ve calculated that by making the switch, your bookings will increase by at least 6%. That’s not to mention the hours you’ll save with less time spent managing your paper diary.

Think about what your business could do with all that extra revenue. Still convinced that a digital reservation system is too expensive for you?

Calculate how much business you are losing with a pen and paper system

Want to see how much more you could earn? Try out our value calculator. This tool analyses the amount of time your business is wasting manually managing reservations each month.

Based on this information, we'll show you how much you can save, or even earn, by making the switch to ResDiary. It will dispel any lingering sense that restaurant reservation software isn't a worthy investment for your business.

Wondering exactly how ResDiary helps you manage reservations more quickly? Here are some of the most important tools we give your business:

• Smart rules: ResDiary's smart rules allow you to set certain conditions for bookings you will accept. For example, you can prevent your diary from placing bookings for short-sold tables during peak hours. This is a level of automated control no pen and paper solution can offer.
• ResPhone: When you rely on a paper diary, your business phone is your master. It's usually your only source of bookings, so you can never let it ring out, no matter how busy service gets. ResDiary offers ResPhone, an automated phone answering service that connects to your diary and allows your customers to place bookings. This allows you to accept phone bookings without throwing service into disarray.
• W8List™: Struggling to manage walk-ins in your business? ResDiary offers W8List™ as an easy way to do just that. W8List™ integrates with your booking data to provide an accurate estimate of how long a diner will have to wait to be seated. Then, it automatically alerts a customer when their table is available.

These are just some of the ways digital restaurant reservation software offers far superior ways to manage your restaurant. For more information, check out our guide to the top six reasons your restaurant should ditch pen and paper systems.

How do digital table management systems help your business get noticed?

One of the key benefits of digital table management systems is the ability for customers to place bookings  just about any way they discover your business. ResDiary connects seamlessly to a range of marketing avenues to provide ultra-smooth customer journeys.

Website

Your website is one of the most important places for diners to find your business. It's where they’ll look to find your menu, trading hours, and more.

If you're relying on a paper diary, your customer is likely landing on your website, trying to track down your phone number and calling your venue.

Assuming you're able to make it to the phone, you'll then have a drawn-out conversation as you rifle through notes, trying to figure out when you can fit them in.

Or, you can use ResDiary. ResDiary uses booking widgets to easily accept reservations from your website. Customers will quickly see your booking widget and can swiftly find a time that suits them and place their booking.

In an increasingly efficient world, it's crucial that you don't waste your customers' time. ResDiary helps you do exactly that.

Google

Often, getting customers to land on your website from a Google Search can be tricky. Achieving a high ranking for generic restaurant-related keywords can be difficult.

Unless your brand name is extremely distinct, you might be competing against other pages, even when customers are specifically looking for your business.

Fortunately, you can get bookings without customers needing to land on your website. With ResDiary's Google integration, you can place booking widgets on your Google Business Profile.

This saves your customer even more time. As long as your Google Business Profile appears in their search results, they can be taken directly to your booking diary. It's a level of convenience your pen and paper solution cannot compete with.

Social media

Social media is a valuable tool for spreading awareness about your restaurant. In Australia, 87% of diners have visited a restaurant after seeing it on social media.

After all, the visual world of social media is perfect for sharing your tastiest creations. Check out our complete guide to social media marketing to inspire your social media campaigns.

Just because someone sees your viral post doesn't mean they will necessarily place a booking. However, you can maximise your chances with ResDiary's Meta integration. This tool allows you to place booking widgets directly onto your Facebook and Instagram profiles.

All customers need to do is follow the link and they’ll be placing a booking in no time.

Once again, ResDiary goes above and beyond to provide a seamless customer journey for your diners.

Online booking platforms

Online booking platforms are a popular way for your restaurant to get noticed. These platforms boast millions of users, providing an exceptional opportunity to get your venue in front of more interested customers.

ResDiary customers in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore can take advantage of our partnership with Quandoo. This integration does come at an additional cost, but offers the same benefits of synchronised booking data between platforms.

Digital table management systems make it easy to tap into the enormous opportunities offered by online booking platforms. While using paper diaries can be a highly limiting way of accepting reservations, digital systems empower your business to broaden your horizons with a wide range of platforms.

Integrated marketing efforts

Marketing is crucial for any hospitality business. When you use ResDiary, you can access a range of outstanding integrations to level up your marketing and drive more reservations.

ResDiary offers built-in email functionality. You can configure branded emails to be automatically sent in response to bookings being placed, reducing the risk of no-shows. Check out our complete email marketing guide for expert tips to maximise these channels.

You can also automate your SMS marketing with our Silverstreet integration, enabling consistent communication with customers. Don't forget to use customer relationship management tools like Acteol or TalkBox to gain more customer insights and personalise your marketing.

Using these tools in an integrated way is a highly effective route to great marketing results. Two-way data flow means each system operates as efficiently as possible.

If your business uses a paper diary, you'll miss out on all these advantages and more.

Make the switch to ResDiary

It's almost a guarantee that using a pen and paper system is a significant financial drawback for your venue. Make your employees’ lives easier and enjoy all the benefits that come with a digital system when you make the switch to ResDiary.

Best of all, the financial advantages ResDiary offers aren't offset by commission fees thanks to our pricing structure. Enjoy smoother operations and keep more money in your pocket.

Book your ResDiary demo today and level up your hospitality business.