According to the National Restaurant Association, the average restaurant failure rate sits at right around 30%. It's very difficult to get a restaurant off the ground and keep it afloat for more than a few years, much less a few decades.
If you own a restaurant or simply help manage one, you should do everything in your power to ensure it's able to stay open. This will include serving delicious food, providing excellent service, and keeping your facility clean.
You should also consider investing in a digital restaurant audit tool. By auditing a restaurant early and often with the right audit tool, you'll be able to make your entire restaurant operation safer and more efficient.
There are many benefits that'll come along with using digital restaurant audit tools. We're going to run through some of the top reasons to invest in one of the many restaurant audit options today.
Here are 11 reasons why you should get your hands on a digital restaurant audit tool and perform restaurant audits with it.
1. Modernizes Restaurant Management
As the owner or manager of a restaurant, it's going to be your job to keep tabs on every aspect of your business. In the past, this would have meant walking around with a binder filled with papers related to your restaurant and everything that goes into running it.
Fortunately, you won't have to do this anymore thanks to digital restaurant audit tools. These tools have helped to make restaurant management more modern by digitizing all the paperwork you'll need and putting it right in the palm of your hand.
2. Prevents Waste
Recent reports have revealed that about half a pound of food is wasted every time a restaurant prepares a single meal. As you can probably guess, all this wasted food can really add up and result in a restaurant wasting a lot of money.
A digital restaurant audit tool can also keep track of the food waste you're creating. It'll put you in a position to reduce your restaurant's food waste by leaps and bounds.
3. Promotes Food Safety
Food safety is going to be something that will need to be of the utmost importance to your restaurant. If you don't put good food safety practices into place, you could potentially put the health of your customers at risk.
A digital restaurant audit tool will promote food safety by helping you to take the temperature of food items throughout the day. It'll also help you perform food preparation equipment checks.
You'll still need to be extra diligent about taking food safety as seriously as you can. But you should be able to sleep a little better at night knowing that your audit tool is doing its part to make your food safer for consumption.
4. Ensures Compliance
When you have a digital restaurant audit tool at your fingertips, you'll be able to practice restaurant audits so that you're prepared when a health inspector stops in on a whim. You won't have to scramble at the last minute to prove that your restaurant is complying with all the health rules and regulations that a health inspector will be checking for.
The sight of a health inspector walking through your restaurant's front doors every six months won't send shivers down your spine anymore. You'll feel better about the fact that you're doing everything possible to comply with local food safety laws when you have an audit tool set up and you can perform self-audits all the time.
5. Creates Checklists
There are a series of checklists that you'll need to create for your restaurant to keep it running smoothly. For example, you'll need a checklist for opening and closing your restaurant. You'll also need one for cleaning specific areas of your restaurant, like your kitchen, your bathroom, etc.
These checklists can come in handy when you're training employees on how to do certain things within your restaurant. But since there will be so many of them, it can be challenging to keep track of them.
A digital restaurant audit tool can help you create the necessary checklists and ensure that you're able to keep good track of them. There won't be any confusion about what will need to be done when your employees carry out tasks within your restaurants.
6. Produces Reports
Wouldn't it be great if you could look through a single document quickly to see how things went with your restaurant on any given day? A digital restaurant audit tool will provide you with the power to get your hands on reports regularly.
You'll be able to sneak a quick peek at these reports to see which tasks were and were not completed. It'll highlight the things that your employees did well while also pointing out some areas in which they came up short.
You'll appreciate being able to get a glimpse of how your restaurant is doing without having to dig through documents or spend a bunch of time speaking with your employees who are busy doing other things.
7. Improves Culture
Some of the employees at your restaurant might not feel like their jobs matter all that much. They might clock in, do their jobs, and clock out without taking any pride in the work they're doing.
A digital restaurant audit tool will suggest otherwise. It'll show your employees the impact that they're having on your restaurant operation and make them feel like the work they're doing is important.
You might even want to go as far as to "gamify" your digital restaurant audit tool to make work more fun for your employees. You can give them the chance to gain recognition for a job well done by allowing them to cross off tasks they were responsible for within your audit tool.
All of this will work wonders for your restaurant's company culture. People will enjoy working for your restaurant way more when they know that they're having a real impact on its success.
8. Increases Accountability
While a digital restaurant audit tool can help highlight some of the good things your employees are doing, it can also shine a light on their shortcomings as well.
Your employees might not like this aspect of an audit tool. But it will make them feel more accountable for the effort they put forward.
Your employees won't want to have any of their mistakes show up within your audit tool's portal. This will make them more productive at work and encourage them to put their best foot forward when they're carrying out any task.
9. Suggests Changes
To ensure your restaurant sticks around for a long time, you're going to need to find ways to make improvements to it over the years. If you don't do this, it'll only be a matter of time before you begin to lose ground on your competition.
A digital restaurant audit tool will suggest different changes that you can make to improve your restaurant operation. It'll be up to you to actually figure out a way to implement those changes. But you won't need to feel like you constantly have to search for ways to change your restaurant business for the better.
10. Tracks Failures
There will be aspects of your restaurant business that will be broken from time to time. And you won't always be able to fix them overnight.
When your restaurant experiences failures, you'll need to work on implementing changes to correct them. You'll also need to track these changes to see if they have a positive impact on your failures.
A digital restaurant audit tool can make tracking failures a breeze. You'll be able to see which steps are being taken to correct issues within your restaurant business.
11. Saves Time
It isn't all that out of the ordinary for restaurant managers to put in more than 50 hours of work each week. Some restaurant owners will put in even more work than that.
At the end of the day, the biggest reason to invest in a digital restaurant audit tool might be that it's going to save you time. It'll automate the audit process for you so that you don't have to carry around a pencil and paper anymore to perform audits manually.
You might be surprised to see how much time this can save you. It'll enable you to focus your efforts on other areas of your restaurant business. It'll also allow you to take some much-needed time off every so often.
Take Advantage of Our Digital Restaurant Audit Tool
Now that you know all about the benefits of using a digital restaurant audit tool, how about giving one a try? FreshCheq can set you up with an audit tool that will be second to none.
It doesn't matter if you own one small independent restaurant or a string of chain restaurants. You can benefit from using the audit tool from FreshCheq in a huge way.
Get a demo of our audit tool to see how it can help you.
