Restaurant technology in Ireland: what is worth paying for

Pay for technology that earns or saves money you can name: a way to take orders and bookings, a way to be found by people deciding where to eat, and a record of who your regulars are. Read your market from your own trade and the places around you rather than from trend reports, and skip anything whose effect you cannot measure.

That rules out more than it rules in, which is the point. Most small places have too many tools, not too few.

Which restaurant technology actually pays for itself?

Almost everything a small café or restaurant needs from software falls into four jobs:

• Taking money: at the counter, at the table and online.
• Taking orders or bookings: collection, delivery, tables or a walk-in queue.
• Being found: by somebody deciding where to eat right now.
• Bringing people back: loyalty, and a way to tell regulars something new is on.

Rotas, stock control and detailed reporting are useful, but they are the second wave. If a tool does not clearly help with one of the four jobs, it is a cost to justify, not an investment.

The most useful rule for a small business: prefer tools that charge when you earn. A monthly fee is charged in your quietest month too, and five of them add up to a fixed cost that does not care whether January was good.

How do you research the competition near you?

Not from a report. From the street.

• Eat there. Order what they are known for. Note the price, the portion, the wait and what the room is like on the night you go.
• Read their menu and prices. Where do they sit against you, dish for dish? What do they offer that you do not, and the other way round?
• Read their ratings, and look for dish names. What people praise or complain about by name tells you what the market values.
• Check when they are busy. Walk past on a Tuesday at six and a Saturday at eight.
• Look for the gap. No good breakfast within walking distance, nothing open after nine, no proper vegetarian option: a gap you can fill is worth more than a trend you can follow.

On Mosey, each town and city has a hub page with leaderboards built from real ratings, so you can see where you sit against the places near you, and which dishes in your area people rate highly.

Which numbers tell you about your own market?

Your own trade is the most reliable market research you will ever have, because it is about your customers rather than an average of somebody else's.

• Returning customers. Whether people come back tells you whether the food is working, sooner than revenue does.
• Your real quiet hours. Most owners are a little wrong about when they are quiet. Measure it by hour and day.
• Where bookings come from. Your website, your Instagram link, an app or the door. Spend effort where people actually arrive from.
• Which dishes are named in ratings. The dish people talk about is the one to put on every listing.

Mosey's analytics report each of these from your own trade, along with every fee you were charged, itemised. Returning customers are counted all-time rather than inside a short window, because coming back is a slow signal.

Will it work with the till you already have?

Ask this of any tool before you sign, and get a specific answer. "It integrates" is not an answer. "It reads your sales from your till every night" is.

On Mosey, some parts sit alongside whatever you use now. Mosey Tap runs in a browser on a phone, tablet or the computer behind your counter: a customer taps their phone on a small sticker, and their loyalty standing, a booking or an order waiting for collection opens on your screen. It does not take payments and does not need to see your till. Bookings made on Mosey can sync to your calendar on the Starter reservations plan. Other parts, such as Mosey Pay, the Mosey till and online ordering, take the payment themselves, and the money goes to your own Stripe account.

Is your customer data safe, and can you take it with you?

Five questions worth asking any platform, with Mosey's answers:

• Who holds card details? On Mosey, Stripe does. Mosey never sees or stores a card number.
• Can I export my data if I leave? Your customer list, menu, ratings and history are yours, and you can export what you hold.
• Are my customers being tracked by advertisers? Mosey uses no third-party analytics tools.
• Can I message customers who have not agreed to it? No, and neither should you want to. Marketing goes only to people who opted in.
• Can each person on my team have their own login? Yes. Staff, managers and owners each see what their role allows, so nobody shares a password.

See your data on Mosey for the detail.

What is worth automating?

Automate the messages you know you should send and never get round to, not the conversations that need a person.

• Booking reminders. Most no-shows are people who forgot. A reminder the day before is the highest-value automation there is.
• Win-back messages. A note to customers who have not been back for a while. On Mosey, automations can start in manual mode, so you read and approve each message until you trust the rule.
• Specials that expire by themselves. A Wednesday special that disappears when it ends is one less out-of-date offer.
• Menu updates. Photograph your menu and have it read for you, then correct anything it got wrong. Scanning again later updates the menu rather than duplicating it.

What should you skip?

• A full till installation when a card reader and a browser till would do.
• Rota software for a team of three.
• Enterprise reporting when you can count your regulars by name.
• A booking system if you do not take bookings: a walk-in queue may be what you need.
• A standalone QR menu that only shows a PDF. A menu people can order from, or find dish by dish, does more.

Before signing up to anything, ask: what does it cost in a month with no sales, does the customer have to download anything, and could someone on my team learn it in ten minutes?

Pick the one job your current setup does worst and fix that first. Claim your business free or See pricing.