After two long years, the National Restaurant Association’s annual show will finally reopen its doors from May 21 to 24 inside Chicago’s iconic McCormick Place. Restaurant365 will be at the center of the nearly 600,000-square-foot show with almost four dozen team members ready to connect, talk shop, and discuss R365’s latest restaurant technology innovations. When it’s all said and done, we’ll raise a glass to toast the restaurant owners, operators, and teams that are a testament to the industry’s strength and future.
Can’t-miss events include a chat Sunday, May 22 at 2 p.m., between Dave’s Hot Chicken CFO James McGehee and Restaurant365 Co-Founder and Chief Customer Advocate Morgan Harris. The pair will discuss how restaurant technology and lessons from Amazon’s playbook took Dave’s to new heights of revenue generation and profitability, even throughout the pandemic, and helped the company grow from seven to 110 locations in two years.
Dave’s isn’t alone. Many operators during the pandemic found technology to be the key to ensuring a thriving business. It could be streamlining inventory management and accounting to manage Prime Cost better. It could be shifting manual recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding to a digital process that helps attract, hire, and retain top-quality employees. Bringing together the disparate systems required to successfully run a restaurant group on a single, cloud-based platform is emerging as the best way to drive growth and successfully manage the unexpected.
“The pandemic forced our industry to accelerate the adoption of technology at a record pace, leaping the equivalent of four years forward,” said Mark Calvillo, Senior Vice President of Product at Restaurant365. “Our team took notice of how restaurant norms changed overnight, and we knew we had to keep pace by accelerating the advancement of our solutions. These latest innovations and enhancements will be of great value to our customers as they continue to optimize their post-pandemic operations.”
Restaurant technology to meet the industry’s evolving needs
Those restaurant technology innovations include a digital, mobile-first manager logbook to improve shift-to-shift communications, so no detail is overlooked as teams cycle throughout the day. As part of R365 Operations — a suite of solutions that includes POS integration, forecasting, and inventory management — manager logbook eliminates the time and disorganization of physical notes while helping managers spot trends and use those insights to improve business.
Next is R365 Payments, which includes the new AP Center, a single source of truth and functionality, where restaurant operators can manage their entire payments process, from accounts receivable to approvals to actual payments. At its core is R365’s AP Payments, which streamlines and automates the AP process, eliminating manual invoice work, chasing people down for approvals, and printing and mailing checks. AP Payments turns it into a digital workflow with audit and approval features that help earn rebates, control accounts payable, and help teams recoup time to focus on more important initiatives that benefit guests and the bottom line.
As the industry wrestles with ongoing labor challenges, R365 Hire offers restaurant operators of all sizes a better way to attract, hire, and onboard the best candidates. It starts by advertising open positions, benefits, perks, and culture with a custom careers page while providing the ability to post to multiple job boards with a single click. Managers can use digital tools to collaborate, streamline interview scheduling and communication, and better understand where candidates are in the selection process. Finally, it enables new hires to hit the ground running by filling out paperwork before their first day.
Product managers and customer success teams will be on-hand and in-booth (#5834) throughout the show offering overviews of Restaurant365’s end-to-end Restaurant Enterprise Management platform and its core operations and manager logbook features, AP payments and automation, and R365 Hire.
Connect over a drink
Of course, the return of the NRA show and the restaurant industry’s perseverance through the pandemic, and then some, warrants more than a little celebration. On Sunday, May 22, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Restaurant365 will host a happy hour at City Winery down the street from the show, while on May 23, from 3:30 to 5 p.m., Restaurant365 will partner with Toast for a Rock The Block party right in the middle of the show floor. We hope you’ll join us to toast the accomplishments and future of an incredible industry that offers so much promise and so many memories and opportunities to individuals, families, and communities across the country.
If you would like to easily track your inventory and gain insight into your restaurant operations, consider a comprehensive, restaurant-specific accounting and operations solution that includes inventory management software as part of the platform. With Restaurant365 you can save on food costs by adjusting in the moment, based on up-to-date information. Restaurant365 is a cloud-based restaurant management solution that also includes scheduling, payroll and HR financial reporting, operational reporting, and more.
