How to reduce restaurant operating costs behind the scenes

Key takeaways

To reduce restaurant operating costs without touching the plate, look behind the scenes. Bookings, enquiries, supplier invoices and rota admin take owner and manager hours that should be spent on the floor. In our example, 16 hours a week of that admin costs about £25,000 a year in management time, and unanswered enquiries cost more in lost covers.

• Back-office admin takes managers off the floor at a high cost.
• 16 hours a week is about £25,000 a year in our example.
• Unanswered booking and event enquiries are lost revenue.
• Check supplier invoices against deliveries every week.

Where do restaurant costs go?

Restaurant costs go mainly on food and drink, wages, rent, energy and business rates. Owners watch the first two closely. The cost that goes unmeasured is management time spent on administration, which appears as wages but buys no service, no training and no quality control.

• How BPO can help businesses reduce operational costs
• What are operational costs? A plain guide for UK owners
• Restaurant admin tasks: what they cost owners

What does back-office admin cost?

Take an illustrative restaurant where the owner and general manager spend 16 hours a week between them on booking messages, event enquiries, supplier invoices, rota changes and reviews. Valued at £30 an hour, that is £480 a week, or about £25,000 a year.

Handled by a managed team at an indicative £12 an hour, the same hours cost about £10,000. The bigger effect is those 16 hours going back to the floor at the times guests are in the building.

• Admin time: 16 hours a week.
• Cost at £30 an hour: about £25,000 a year.
• Managed team at £12 an hour: about £10,000 a year.

• The cost lever scorecard: find savings process by process
• Work out your cost per task before you outsource

What do unanswered enquiries cost?

Unanswered enquiries cost the bookings they would have become. Messages arrive during service, when nobody can reply, through the website, social media, WhatsApp and the phone. A private dining enquiry answered the next afternoon has often been placed elsewhere.

In an illustrative venue, two lost group bookings a month at £600 each is £14,400 a year, which is more than the cost of having every enquiry answered within the hour.

• Reservations and guest support outsourcing for hospitality
• Slow response to enquiries: what it costs and the fix

Which admin can be handed over?

Admin that happens on a screen and follows rules can be handed over. Anything that needs to taste, see or serve cannot.

• Reservation messages, confirmations and reminders.
• Event and private hire enquiries, from your packages and prices.
• Supplier invoice entry and matching to delivery notes.
• Review monitoring and first-draft replies.
• Rota and holiday record keeping.

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• Three-way matching: stop paying invoices you should not
• Customer service macros: faster replies at lower cost

What must stay accurate?

Allergen information must stay accurate. Food businesses must provide information on the 14 major allergens, and anyone answering guest questions needs a current, approved source and a rule to refer anything uncertain to the kitchen. Pay records matter too. Workers must receive at least the National Minimum Wage and 5.6 weeks of paid holiday.

• Quality assurance for outsourced teams
• How to cut costs without hurting customer service

What should not be cut?

Do not cut floor and kitchen staffing below what service needs, training on allergens and safety, or maintenance. Guests notice at once, and so do inspectors. Cutting prep hours to save wages and then comping meals for slow service is a familiar false economy.

• False economy in business: when the cheap option costs more
• Cost-cutting mistakes that end up costing a business more

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see in independent restaurants: the owner answers booking messages between courses, on a personal phone, and loses track of which were confirmed. Double bookings and no-replies follow. Routing every channel to one inbox handled by a dedicated team removes the errors and lets the owner stay in the room.

• See client work
• BPO Solutions for UK businesses

Restaurant cost checklist

Review these over a typical month.

• Log management hours spent on admin.
• Count enquiries by channel and response time.
• Count enquiries that never received a reply.
• Check supplier invoices against delivery notes.
• Confirm reminders go out for every booking.
• Confirm allergen information has one approved source.

• Cost baseline: measure today's cost before you change it
• Operational cost reduction checklist: 20 checks

Next step

Tell us how many covers you serve, which channels enquiries arrive on and who answers them. We will show you what the admin is costing and what could be handled for you.