Nickels and Dimes: 4 QSR Operational Money-Savers You Likely Haven’t Tried Yet

You’re a multi-unit Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) operational expert with a hard-working team. You have been tightening up your operations for the past few years and yet, you still feel like you could implement changes to squeeze every possible penny out of your businesses.  

Operating multiple QSRs (Quick Service Restaurant) and getting the most out of your businesses can feel like a never-ending obstacle course. If you’ve got a best-in-class restaurant reporting system or a team of data analysts backing your every move, your operations in tip-top shape, and your team regularly meets their key performance metrics, you might be asking yourself, “What do I do now?” 

What is next for your team of highly performing operatives? We have just the list for you.  

1. Optimize Food and Good Delivery Schedules. 

If your food, paper products, and other delivery orders come throughout the week at varying times, you might be wasting time and labor resources. When you must schedule additional employees for multiple delivery days, you’re paying for those extra deliveries in your scheduling. 

Look at your delivery schedules and your employee schedules through a cost-critical lens and do some digging to see if there are optimizations you could be making to cut back on labor costs during those deliveries.  

2. Loss Prevention: Keep Your Closing Costs at Zero.  

If your team is finding cash drawer discrepancies at the end of each shift, congratulations! You’ve found an additional opportunity to save money—that small amount each day can add up, fast.  

If the allowable threshold has been set at a $1 discrepancy per day or more, you’re opening your business up to allow loss.  

Make it a priority to review your standard cash handling procedures with your team, and set up  alerts to your loss prevention tool to find instances in which procedures aren’t being followed, or in which loss occurs.  

3. Limit Your Opening and Closing Times. 

Keep an eye on your closing times; If your employees are spending additional, unnecessary time on the front and back ends of the day, you’re losing money.  

To minimize the time spent on opening and closing, consider making easy-to-follow closing and opening checklists for your employees to follow if you do not have them already. 

4. Manage, Maintain, and Reduce Your Costs of Goods Sold (COGS).  

If you are not managing the cost of goods sold for your store(s) and working on reducing your COGS, you could be missing cash savings.  

From paper supplies to beverages, to ordering and inventory, cost of goods sold (COGS)   affects almost every part of every restaurant operation. Read up on COGS best practices and limit factors that inflate COGS. Not sure where to start? Check out our article on How to improve  COGS by nurturing your supplier relationship. 

There are so many avenues to move down if you’re looking to save money and get those last dollars out of your business — but don’t fret. Take one step at a time and use data to inform your decisions on scheduling, staffing, loss prevention, COGS, and more.  

If you need of a data consolidation tool to guide your decisions and to allow you to focus your time on cost savings, you can. schedule a demo with one of our restaurant data experts to see Delaget Coach in action.