Automation for restaurants, bars and nightlife

What happens now: bookings arrive through the reservation platform, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, the phone and people who just walk up. The book is in one system, the DMs are on somebody's personal phone, and the waitlist is on paper by the host stand.

What we build: every channel feeds one book. Confirmations go out immediately, reminders go out on a cadence that suits the service, and a guest who does not confirm frees the table automatically at a cut-off you set. When a table is released, the waitlist is offered it in order, by text, without anyone making a call.

Double benefit: fewer no-shows, and the ones that still happen get backfilled instead of sitting empty. This is the clearest financial return on the page, because a covered Saturday table is measurable and a lost one is gone for good.

Club and lounge work runs differently. Guest lists arrive from promoters, from the venue's own channels and from regulars who message the owner directly. Table and bottle inquiries need a price, a minimum spend and a deposit before they are real.

What we build: one list per night that every promoter feeds, with each name attributed to whoever brought it. Table inquiries get an automatic reply with the minimums for that night, a deposit link, and a hold that expires if the deposit does not clear. Door staff see the final list on a phone, already sorted, with deposits marked paid.

Operators value the attribution most: at the end of the month you can see which promoter actually filled the room rather than who says they did.

The highest-value inquiries a venue receives, handled by the slowest process it has. A buyout, a rehearsal dinner or a corporate booking usually arrives as a vague message and needs a capacity check, a date check, a package, a quote and a contract.

What we build: the inquiry is captured wherever it lands, qualified for date, headcount and budget, and answered immediately with the relevant package and availability. A proposal and a deposit link follow, the deposit is tracked, and the inquiry is chased on a schedule until it is booked or closed. Nothing sits in an inbox for three days.

Review requests sent automatically after a visit, timed to the kind of service rather than fired at everyone at the same hour. Positive experiences are pointed to the public platforms that matter for your rankings. Anything negative routes privately to a manager who can actually fix it, with the booking and the server already attached.

Worth stating plainly: this is not review gating, and we would not build it that way. Everyone gets asked. What changes is that complaints reach a manager the same evening rather than appearing in public a week later.

A venue on three delivery platforms plus its own ordering page is maintaining four menus by hand. Prices drift, an item goes out of stock on one and stays live on the others, and someone finds out when a customer complains.

What we build: one menu as the source of truth, pushed to every platform. An item marked out of stock disappears everywhere within minutes. Price changes propagate once. Orders from every platform land in one view with the margin after commission shown, which is usually the first time an operator sees what each platform actually earns them.

Supplier invoices arrive as photographs, PDFs and paper, in a sector where prices move weekly. Checking each one against what was ordered and what was delivered is tedious, so it tends not to happen, and the drift is invisible until the P&L looks wrong.

What we build: invoices read line by line, matched against the order and the delivery note, and filed. Anything outside tolerance stops and waits for a person, with the variance already worked out. Price changes on key lines are flagged rather than absorbed quietly.

The rota built against forecast covers rather than guesswork, published to the team, and a shift that needs covering offered automatically to everyone qualified to take it, in order, until somebody accepts. Confirmations and changes flow back to payroll without a manager retyping them.

What this is not: a tool for cutting staff. In this sector the constraint is almost always finding cover at short notice, not having too many people, and that is the part worth automating.