As of today, we are at over 2,200 users and counting. It was apparent from the time we developed our calculator to Recipe Costing 2.0 our users need more tools that would allow them to track and manage food inventory, create purchase orders, and build shopping list based on recipes or menu items.

44% of our visitors are returning to build better recipes and to understand their food costs. When starting a restaurant every penny counts and not watching those pennies can be detrimental to your financials. Many of our users asked us to include a USDA tool, vendor list, and in our next release we’ve added more money saving features:

• Sub Recipes
• Recipe Scaling
• Menu Engineering
• Purchase Orders
• Shopping Lists
• Inventory
• Enhanced Dashboard
• More Reports
• Live Chat Support
• Telephone Support

There is also an Android and iPhone/iPad app that will be released toward the end of the year allowing our users to manage inventory, receive inventory on a purchase order, and using the shopping list to buy products right from your smart phone. We continue to encourage our users to keep sending up ideas to help improve your bottom line!

from Starting A Restaurant

Our newest software release of recipe costing will include:

• New vendor module to keep track of food vendors.
• New Integrated USDA database for nutritional analysis information match ingredients to the database to get the nutritional breakdown.
• New create custom nutritional labels.
• Improved recipe items with additional costing fields, the ability to save those costs in history, and a dynamic cost breakdown analysis chart.

Don’t over pay for your restaurant point of sale! When starting a restaurant you have to be careful not to fall in the trap of buying an overpriced and antiquated restaurant point of sale software. You’re better off getting great grandpa’s shoe box. If you’re in the restaurant business and you’re looking for a restaurant software or restaurant management software or restaurant point of sale software; then, here’s a list of questions you should ask before making a commitment to any software product.

• Do I really need a restaurant point of sale software system that cost more than my equipment and furniture? When starting out you need a restaurant point of sale that’s inexpensive, but not cheap. On the high end you can purchase a point of sale system for $20,000 that has all the bells and whistles or you can go to the other extreme and purchase a restaurant point of sale that is just cheap with very little to no features. Don’t pay for a name… pay for what works best.

• Do I have to pay for programming charges every time I need to add a menu item button? If the answer is yes, keep looking!!! Your restaurant point of sale software may start at $8,000, but after the programming cost you can end up paying anywhere from $12,000 to $14,000 depending on your needs and customization.

• Are update and upgrades additional costs? If the answer is yes, keep looking!!! You don’t want to have to pay for updates or upgrades. Restaurant software can become outdated and new versions are constantly being written and paying extra for these services can be extremely costly.

• Can I install my restaurant software on any computer? If the hardware and software are proprietary and one day you decide to leave because you’re unhappy this may be extremely difficult when using an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) or proprietary restaurant software. This could mean buying an entirely new system from hardware to software.

• What are my maintenance and support costs? If your costs are more than $100 dollars a month… keep looking!!! If you’re paying $100 dollars or more, that’s $1,200 dollars a year! Why would a restaurant software system that costs $5,000 or more need a $1,200 dollar maintenance and support agreement?

• Can I view my sales online? If so, does it cost extra? What online partners are working with your restaurant software? You don’t want to be tied to your restaurant, but you also want to keep a close eye on your day-to-day operations. Make sure your restaurant point of sale software is doing just that or has partnered up with a back-end web base application.

For the sake of full disclosure I’m a reseller for PointOS; however, the reason I am reselling their restaurant point of sale software system has more to do with value, principle, and philosophy. In fact, don’t buy it from me you can go directly to their site and buy it yourself. The owner owned a bar and understands the importance of keep costs down. I owned restaurants and I watched every penny. I’ve bought the high end point of sale systems, and paid for programming, so I know how expensive restaurant software can run the restaurant owner.

With PointOS you can buy a full system with printers and software for less than $2,600. They offer free updates, upgrades, and technical support. The days of $8,000 to $20,000 point of sale systems are of the past. New low cost software with rich and better features are coming on the market saving you money that you can use to open your next restaurant.

Tracking restaurant inventory is never easy, especially when you’re hands on in the front of the house and the back of the house. When you’re managing a single location you can typically get away with using spreadsheets; although, this solution is prone to error due to an exhausting day at the restaurant. The last thing on your mind it tracking inventory or office work.

I’ve been there and I had to do it with 5 restaurants not easy. I created Kitchen Porter Tech to help restaurant owners manage the day-to-day operations and handle the inventory by synchronizing PointOS with Kitchen Porter Tech as items are sold from the PointOS system; inventory is being reduced based on the inventory. Don’t worry you can always adjust the inventory with our adjust inventory page.

Tracking Restaurant Inventory with multiple restaurant locations

What if you have multiple locations, and one location runs out of a key food item? What do you do? You got to the other location that has enough to get you through until the next food order. Running from location to location who has time to breakout the PC and open a spreadsheet? With our software you can use your smartphone or iPhone or iPad to logon to the portal and make an inventory transfer. Allowing you to Keep track of the inventory as it was moved including the cost of that inventory right from the Internet.

Doing this will prevent your food cost and the value of your inventory from being understated in one location and over stated in the other location. Leaving the manager thinking why is my food cost off?

Take a look at the video how Kitchen Porter Tech can help you with your inventory transfers from and to multiple locations.

Using technology with menu engineering

 
As a restaurant owner it’s difficult to find time to cost out menu items based on sub recipes, recipes, and inventory vendor items from your food order guide; however, finding that time can often mean a saving of 10%-15% on your bottom line. I spent the last few months improving Kitchen Porter Tech to help manage restaurant inventory, recipes, employee scheduling, point of sale synchronization, and menu engineering.
 
I created the video below to demonstrate how easy it is to figure out your cost quickly using our software Kitchen Porter Tech.
 

 

It’s only been 5 weeks and we are close to getting 200 users on recipe-costing.com. Our users are in 39 countries and counting.
 

We have users in Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Belgium, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Dominica, Estonia, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Jamaica, Kuwait, Malaysia, Nepal, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Saint Lucia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Tanzania, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States.
 

Food is a universal language and knowing our recipe cost is just universal math. As more and more users join recipe-costing.com, we are finding better ways to improve our software for everyone. Due to the success of our software, we have made some changes including to give everyone unlimited access to recipe-costing.com. We are also going to release an Android app in the next couple of weeks. Our most recent update was to create a grocery list from the recipes that are created by the user. This was uploaded last week and it’s been getting used quite a bit. Keep sending in those suggestions to help us improve this free version of our software. We would love to hear from you and I’m sure all of our users will benefit, so make sure you post on our site!

Obviously setting goals are vital parts of keeping our passion and drive alive! I’m a dreamer and I have a vision wall to prove it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not materialistic and I prefer to hang out in my jeans and tee shirt. It’s who I am; however, I want to be comfortable enough where I can work from anywhere there’s an Internet connection. I don’t want to be tied to my desk or like in the past to my restaurants! I want more time with my wife and my boys, and for me setting up goals is a way of keeping myself accountable while benchmarking my progress.

Here were my goals for 2011:

• Work from home
• Spend more time with my wife
• Spend more time with my two sons
• Cook breakfast and dinner for my family
• Build a restaurant blog site
• Build restaurant software
• Create a free recipe costing software program for the restaurant community
• Hire a full-time assistant

I achieved all my goals for the exception of building a restaurant software application. It has gone over the goal date I set, and should have been completed a few months ago; however, as of today the project schedule has a beta release date for February, 2012. The reason I mention this is because I’m moving over my 2011 goal of building my own restaurant software to my 2012 goal.

My domain is almost a year old and it’s the first time I built a niche site. A site I enjoy posting my thoughts, and developing tools for the community. Below are my goals for 2012!

Goal #1: Reach 3,000 New Subscribers for Recipe-Costing.com by December 31st, 2012

As of now, www.recipe-costing.com was launched 3 weeks ago with no marketing. I did it by rolling up my sleeves an optimizing each page for better online search results, and referrals from my blog. We hit 90 subscribers as of today which means we’re adding about 30 subscribers a week. If I continue at that pace, I will have approximately 1,440 subscriptions. I’m going to kick it up a notch and do the following to meet my goal:

• Improve my restaurant SEO results for my website
• Offer my software to culinary students
• Reach out to other blog sites
• Get 25-50 testimonials from my current users
• Join more restaurant groups and increase my presence in LinkedIn, FOHBOH, Facebook, and Twitter.

Goal #2: Write, publish, and sell 500 copies of my Restaurant SEO book by December 31, 2012

I’ve been helping a few restaurants and myself to rank for keywords. At times we rank on more than one spot in the 10 ten of Google’s first page. I want to share these ideas, and how to get your website to rank in the first page of Google, Yahoo, Bing, and ASK.com. To get my SEO book out by December 31, 2012 I’m going to do the following tasks:

• Research techniques
• Use different tools
• Test my theories

Goal #3: Update my FREE restaurant eBook, and business plan by August, 2012

If you’re familiar with my site, then you already know that I offer a FREE restaurant eBook, and I sell my restaurant business plan for $4.99. This is the same business plan that I gave to banks, malls, and shopping centers when I opened my restaurants. To reach this goal is simple find more free time!!!

Goal #4: Launch Kitchen Porter Tech restaurant software tool live launch by March, 2012

This is part of my 2011 goal that did not make the cut. It happens… what can I say? We are about 85% complete and my team is working hard to get the new software out by February, 2012. Kitchen Porter Tech is going to be built for the restaurant owner and restaurant franchisor. It will be fully integrated into PointOS software. As you sell menu items the software will also reduce your inventory, and warn you when you’re running low on a food item. If you own a restaurant, here are some features you may want to learn more about in Kitchen Porter Tech:

• Point of Sale (PointOS) Integration
• Daily Sales Synchronization
• Inventory management and real time inventory
• Recipe Costing & Menu Engineering
• Data Polling
• Employee Scheduling and POS synchronization
• Built-in catering module
• Manage one or more restaurants online

Goal #5: Create a new revenue stream by selling powerful, yet inexpensive point of sale systems

When I was in the restaurant business I couldn’t understand why point of sales systems were so expensive, you could easily spend $8,000 – $22,000 dollars for a point of sale system. We need to be able to buy a $22,000 point of sale system for less than $2,800 dollars with a powerful web based polling system that allows the business owner to spend less time in the restaurant and more time making profits! Restaurant owners can use the rest of that money to purchase food or finish the build out without having to go cheap on a tool that is VITAL to the success of a restaurant. Keep an eye out for our new website www.restaurantpossoftwarepro.com

Goal #6: Loose 20lbs and document my results by December, 2012

Okay, this is a personal one, but it does have to do with food! I’m motivated to lose 20 pounds this year to update all of my online photos. I’m hoping that in the process I can motivate others to do the same in my family and if I can get some subscribers too that would be awesome. How am I going to reach this personal goal?

• Eat healthier
• Keep my daily calorie intake within 1,700
• 30 minutes treadmill 5-6 days a week
• Weight training 3-4 times a week

Goal #7: Increase my affiliate income $15,000 by December, 2012

In the last few months, I’ve decided to join up with some of my favorite companies and setup their affiliate links on my site. Below are the tasks to help me reach my goal.

• Create a Google AdWords account
• Get more affiliate links from companies I like and trust
• Use AWeber more effectively

It’s not only important to have goals written; also just as important, is how to obtain those goals. I will keep everyone posted throughout the year on my progress.

Thanks

Rob

The beginning of 2011 was a hard year for the restaurant business just in my neighborhood alone I’ve seen many restaurants close; however, in the last quarter I’ve seen restaurants bouncing back because more people were eating out.

It may have to do with end of year shoppers since the last quarter a lot of shoppers were out for the holidays.

Restaurant owners that visited my site were looking for ways to begin using social media and making their social media sites better. Next year I’m going to publish my 2012 goal post.

This will include adding enhancements to the free recipe costing software I developed.

Here are our top blog posts for 2011:

Know your recipe costs by using our FREE recipe costing software tool!

I don’t think I have to tell you how important it is to know your cost when preparing a recipe. Here is a tool my team and I developed to help figure out those costs. We want to make this the best FREE recipe costing tool with your help.

Try our tool and post your suggestions. We want to hear from you! Click Here to start using our recipe costing tool. Make sure and participate by sharing your ideas on how we can improve this recipe costing tool!!!  

The importance of creating recipes and know your recipe costs

My family and I went out to dinner last night to one of our favorite restaurants; unfortunately, my son and I were disappointed with our dishes. We both had steak and it was overwhelmingly under seasoned. After drowning it with condiments, the thought occurred to me that whoever cooked our meals skipped the recipe all together.

Google Plus for your Restaurant

Here we go again another social media site or so I thought. Google plus to me is the next evolution in social media. In Google fashion they found a way to unify several of the services we already use in Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Not only have they succeeded they’ve also improved it over the other social media sites.It’s been that most of us will open a Facebook account for our personal contacts, linkedin for business, and twitter for both; yet, there have been times when a business associate “friends me” on Facebook…

What does your Facebook Fan page say to your Fans?

Facebook has become one of the major platforms to drive traffic to website and their statistics say it all (see Facebook statistics). Unfortunately, many restaurants do not design a strong landing page. This is one of the few places that you can brand your page in Facebook and allows for some freedom and creativity. Download the files below to create your own landing page. I’ve already configured the sizes all you need is your imagination.

How to create a dynamic Facebook page for your restaurant and offer coupons to those that “Like” your page

Several months ago I created a video on how to give your restaurant Facebook page a facelift. Today I created a new video on how to create a restaurant Facebook landing page using dynamic HTML as opposed to static FBML. If you don’t have an FBML app already installed and integrated, then you won’t have any choice but to build a dynamic html Facebook landing page since Facebook stopped it on March 11th, 2011.  

Don’t pay hundreds of dollars for a business plan download mine for $4.99

I worked on two business plans that you can use as a guide to writing your plan. These were the restaurant business plans I used in my packet to send out to landlords of shopping plazas, the malls, and the banks. The business plan is written with real world examples in Microsoft Word for easy editing. The first plan is a single restaurant build-out, and the second plan is for multi-unit build-out.

With the right tools and information you can remove the uncertainty of this business. Knowing your restaurant well allows you to promote your restaurant throughout the community. The community will support you; however, you need to manage your cost effectively in order to drive the business back to your restaurant.

Landlords are willing to help in the build out of your restaurant, but you have to ask and negotiate. In one of my locations, I was given $79,000 in tenant allowance. In my free eBook, I share my experience on how I got the landlords to do the build-out for me or pay me.