ShiftNote Blog | Keep Your Shift From Hitting the Fan

Ready to add a little spark and boom to your restaurant profit? Independence Day is not only a fun holiday celebrating the freedom of the United States. It is also an excellent opportunity to increase restaurant sales. When you brainstorm and implement Independence Day sales strategies, you will both increase sales on the holiday

Here is the deal - often restaurants blame problems they are having on slow sales without looking at the reason for slow sales. Some restaurant owners even resolve themselves to believing that their restaurant just has an ongoing sales problem. But slow sales are

Restaurant employee scheduling can quickly become a nightmare trying to balance between shift planning, employee’s personal schedules and the restaurants needs. While the task of employee scheduling can become daunting quick, you can focus on the things you can control. With these employee

There is a number of ways how to increase restaurant sales, yet the profit-generating strategy many restaurant owners or leaders overlook is training. Everything comes down to teaching your staff how to succeed in your restaurant with excellent customer service, product knowledge, selling

Do you know what the root of a business’ problem is 90% of the time?

It’s employee turnover.

In manufacturing, a more efficient business means a safer environment, increased productivity, and potentially larger profits. Here are six ways to increase efficiency at your manufacturing business -- and see lasting results.

On Monday, August 21st, thousands upon thousands of people are going to be in prime eclipse viewing spots to experience the literally once in a lifetime occurrence. While this is an

When it comes down to it, every restaurant business should be profit-driven… Your restaurant needs to turn a significant profit to thrive as a business, and at the same time, restaurant staff want to earn a good income to build or maintain a comfortable standard

Hiring the right business operations manager can make or break a business, particularly in the hospitality industry.

Common duties for a business operations manager are wide ranging and multifaceted. Business operations manager duties

Mother’s Day was first celebrated in America in 1908, and it was commercialized soon after with cards, gifts and taking Mom out to eat. Though the spirit of this holiday is to honor our Mothers and Grandmothers alike for their selfless sacrifices and unconditional

Here is the deal - often restaurants blame problems they are having on slow sales without looking at the reason behind the dip in profit. Some restaurant owners even resolve themselves to believing that their restaurant just has an ongoing sales problem, blaming the

Training is one of the most important things you can do as a restaurant manager to make your team more successful, therefore seeing more sales. Many managers have their initial training programs and only hold team meetings sporadically to continue

Your wait staff is an integral part of your restaurant’s success. This goes beyond managing tables and providing excellent customer service, although those two actions are vital to leaving a positive lasting impression on your patrons. Your wait staff also acts as your

There are many things you can do to help in improving sales performance for your restaurant. You can try the age old tactics of offering happy hour drinks and appetizers during slower times. You can invest in marketing or restaurant and menu redesign. You can

Everyone wants to find the perfect place to celebrate New Years Eve. Since not everyone can fly to New York City to watch the ball drop in Times Square, you can offer an awesome way to kick off the New Year in your restaurant. To make sure you throw the biggest

For restaurants, the holidays are your best marketing opportunity. The focus during the holiday season for your restaurant is, of course, capturing sales. You may think this is cut and dry marketing, but your employees are the biggest part of growing your sales during the season. When you

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could have a crystal ball into your restaurant's future to see the sales that will come in? Think of all the planning you could accomplish - you would know how much staff to schedule, how much inventory to have in stock, and what you

It is officially the holiday season which means your restaurant is in full swing preparing for increased traffic and planning ways to beat out the competition. Everyone is searching for the perfect restaurant to host their work party, friend get-togethers, and out-

You have probably heard the saying “Sell the Sizzle, Not the Steak.” This essentially means you should be selling the benefits of your product instead of the features, or selling people what they want as opposed to what they need. Anyway you say it, this phrase

Halloween is one of the most fun holidays throughout the year. People are looking for the best place to go where they can dress up, spend time with friends, and enjoy great drinks and eats. When you celebrate Halloween as a restaurant, you can take advantage of an

Losing focus on different parts of your establishment is easy when you are busy with managerial duties. It may seem easier to quickly fill out a schedule last minute and send it out to employees without doing much research on staffing needs or employee availability, but

It is back to school season and families are busier than ever! Transitioning into the back to school routine takes some time. When you add in all the fall activities that kids are apart of or want to attend, parents spend most of their time shuttling their family with little time to

The perception of indifference from employees is the number one reason why a person will never do business with a company again. In a restaurant where a customer spends all of their time interacting with employees, this impression can make or break your business.

The last holiday before Thanksgiving, Labor Day, is approaching. This holiday presents an excellent opportunity to gain more customers, and therefore more sales and exposure, for your restaurant. Yet this holiday holds a bit of a double edged sword. Depending on the weather, you

Thanks to social media, we are seeing a huge rise in the quirkiest of holidays! From Pretzel Day to May the Fourth Be With You, everyone is ready to celebrate any holiday that pops up. You can pretty much call July the Food Month Holiday with all the tasty eats and treats that we

One of the most dreaded part of management is dealing with employee scheduling. Whether you have five employees or 50, trying to manage and organize everyone’s availability into a working schedule is a daunting and never ending task. Luckily, the process does not have to

One of the most difficult industries to work in is the restaurant world. From the precise timing of ingredient quantity purchases to keeping the customer experience strong with superior service, managing a restaurant requires a well-oiled machine approach. A fundamental way

Measuring the performance of your staff is one of the hardest parts of running a restaurant, but hard data can make it a lot easier. With the technology available today, you are missing out if you’re not gathering information from each transaction being made. Adopting technology,

Summer feeling is in the air! Everyone is breaking out their flip-flops and exchanging plans for summer vacations. With all this excitement in the air, you may already be getting time off requests from your waitstaff. Likewise, you are seeing a flood of former employees and new

St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone and the beer-filled holiday is unofficially known as the kickoff day for patio season for restaurants. There is no doubt your patio was up and running for the holiday, but you want to make sure you are prepared for the flow of people who want to

One of the hardest parts about operating a restaurant is controlling costs. A lot of things seem out of your control, especially as a new restaurant. For example, you have to buy enough stock of everything to meet demand, but not too much where the food becomes a waste of

Easter-table-setting-with-spring-flowers-and-cutlery-000086784279_Medium.jpg

Easter is a family-filled holiday that combines thoughtfulness on the holiday with fun activities like egg hunts and chocolate bunnies. This happy holiday can provide restaurants an increase in profits if you take advantage of some of the activities that happen during the holiday. Here

There have been many stories in the news about food health and safety lately. From Chipotle’s six foodborne illness outbreaks to the local Overland Park story of the New Theater norovirus outbreak, there seems to be more conversation about managing health safety in the

It’s that time of year again for college students and other 20 year olds to flock to the beach for a spring break getaway. While the vacation of partying and letting loose is a blast for your younger wait staff, dealing with a skeleton crew during the popular spring break period can quickly

Small business owners have a lot of challenges to overcome. In the recent years, healthcare changes have thrown many small businesses for a loop, causing them to set aside more cash flow to pay for the expense. Now minimum wage increases are the next big challenge that

Let’s face it – success for the wait staff is all about the tip count at the end of the night. Since their pay is based on tips, the great waiters will do everything they can to make the experience of the customer as great as possible in an effort to improve their tips every day. Besides triple

Piggy-bank-with-heart-sunglasses-standing-on-stack-of-money.jpg

Valentine's Day is this weekend, a holiday full of love and devotion. As a restaurant owner, the thing you love the most and can't live without are profits. There are many things about your restaurant that have the opportunity to make a big impression on customers to increase your

Great communication is the cornerstone of any successful business, especially for restaurants. With that many employees and shifts moving through the restaurant, communication often falls through the cracks. Yet shift-to-shift communication is an incredibly valuable key to success.

Many managers and owners despise the task of scheduling, but during the holiday season this hate-fire burns more brightly than any other time during the year. Holiday scheduling can absolutely be a stressful nightmare! As a leader, you want to balance the desire to make your employees happy by giving them time off for important events and the need for plenty of staff during this peak time. Here is

November, December and January are usually hectic months in the restaurant world. Without proper preparation for the increased traffic and inevitable scheduling conflicts that will occur, these next two months will be stressful. It is up to you to see if the mark the holidays leave on your restaurant is a negative or positive one. Here are three ways to prepare your restaurant for the holiday rush.

ShiftNote’s headquarters are located in the Kansas City metro, so you can imagine how insane the home office has been with the Royals winning the World Series! The Royals win is changing how baseball is played and a lot of that is due to the outstanding communication the team has.

The following article is a guest post by Tim Sunderland and our friends over at NetWaiter.

Raising prices isn’t the only way for a restaurant to increase sales. There are plenty of strategies you can take to reduce costs and attract more customers. Read on for six things you can do to increase restaurant sales without charging your customers more.

Our code ninjas have been hard at work improving ShiftNote Scheduling! They listened to your feedback about what you would like to see and have been training hard to make Scheduling a more awesome and efficient experience. We are ready to release the following new features to enhance your Scheduling capability.

As some of you might have noticed, we recently overhauled the ShiftNote home page (the first page you see after signing into ShiftNote on your computer.) It is available to all management level users, and you can currently switch back and forth between the old and new

We're throwing in the towel and will no longer be supporting the web browser Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and older versions. As the web continues to evolve, older browsers simply cannot support many of the technologies needed to provide a fast and user friendlyexperience for

There are a couple of new features we'd love to share with you all! We've been hard at work listening to your requests, and have implemented a few of them. We also have many big things on the horizon, this year is going to be very exciting! But for now, let's get to what's new!

The Daily Report has always been an important piece of ShiftNote, allowing users to get a summary of log notes, stats, events and weather from the previous day. Previously, you could only receive the information in the Daily Report once the day's shifts had ended. We havenow introduced a

We recently added a new feature to all ShiftNote accounts that will allow the calendar to automatically show holidays for the US and Canada. This means you no longer have to go in and manually add them to your calendar. Holidays can definitely impact business, and we wanted to

On Tuesday, January 14th, 2014, we will be releasing an updated version of our employee scheduling tool to all users. Over the past year, we've met with hundreds of customers to see how they use the existing tools and have listened to amazing feedback on changes we needed to

There is no arguing that Peyton Manning is one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game of football. He confirmed his place in history this weekend, setting the record for the most scoring throws in a season at 51 against the Houston, Texans. His no huddle offense is extremely effective in leading his team to victory, as he's able to quickly call plays without having a discussion with his team

We're so excited, and we just can't hide it! The ShiftNote Team has had a fantastic 2013 and we owe it all to our amazing customers. We decided to put together a little video to show our excitement and thanks.

It's the most wonderful time of the year! Well maybe for some, but for those that manage and work at restaurants, the holidays can be a very busy and stressful time. We came up with a list of tips and helpful suggestions that will help restaurant staff prepare ahead of time for the

At ShiftNote, we have some of the coolest and most amazing clients there are. The type of companies using ShiftNote to help with their daily operations vary, and are located all over the world! Some of those businesses include restaurants, bowling alleys, country clubs, churches, pr agencies, resorts and hotels, and

For those using the ShiftNote Scheduler, we've now made it easier to swap shifts between employees, and also to specify where an employee might be working within your business.

We've got a couple new features to share with you this week!

We've got some big updates for you this week! Employees can now see specific events on the ShiftNote calendar, they can send and receive messages from management, and they can set their own availability (if management allows it). These features are available if you have either

Need some inspiration or new ideas? Or want to keep up with what's going on in the industry? These 7 restaurant industry experts are thought leaders and power Twitter users, and thus worthy of a follow. Whether you're a restaurant owner, looking to open a restaurant, or just want to know what's going on in the industry, these guys and gals have it going on.

Do you have content in your ShiftNote account that you only want certain users to see? After many requests from existing ShiftNote customers, we have implemented a way to hide certain content areas in ShiftNote for specific users. Before the enhancement, all ShiftNote

After a brief discussion on the origin of the word "tip," I was instantly curious as to how and when the process of leaving a tip began. And so I put together an infographic on the history of tipping. Enjoy!

Three big enhancements were added to the ShiftNote scheduling tools this week to continue our mission of creating the best employee scheduling tools in the world for restaurants, retail stores, hotels, and more! As always, shoot us a note if there is a feature you would like to

As we continue our mission to make the best scheduling software available, we've added a handful of new features that will make your life much easier! We will continue to release new features as fast as we can build them, and always welcome your thoughts and ideas on how we

New feature alert! The ShiftNote employee scheduling tools now includes a color coding option so that it's easier to distinguish different positions when building a schedule. To choose colors for each position, go to Schedules > Settings > Manage Positions. Then select

Social media can be an easy and inexpensive way to bring new customers to your restaurant. One social media outlet that is extremely effective for restaurants is Instagram, a photo sharing app for your mobile phone. Instagram is even more effective when it is tied to your Facebook

We're in the home stretch! Day 4 of the NRA Show was a little hectic in the morning, but things smoothed out and the day turned out great. We had a lot of traffic in the booth and enjoyed visits by ShiftNote users from Jack Stack BBQ, The Original Pancake House, Fresh Brother's

The third day for the ShiftNote team, 2nd day for attendees, of the National Restaurant Association Show has been crazy!!! Crazy good of course. I would have to think that today is going to be the busiest day of the show. We had people streaming into the ShiftNote booth left and

We've had another fantastic day at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago. Today marks day 1 for attendees of the show, but day 2 for the ShiftNote team. We came to the convention center bright and early to finish off the final touches of our display. And as soon as the

We made it through day 1! The whole team arrived in one piece to Chicago. I've been to Chicago many times, but this is my first ever National Restaurant Association Show. Several of the ShiftNote team members have been before, so they're helping me to prepare for what

We've added a new feature to the ShiftNote employee scheduling tool which will help managers to set overtime to manage the risk of Pay or Play Penalties. Currently managers could select from 40 or 50 hours worked in a week to be considered overtime, but we have added an

ShiftNote is heading to Chicago May 18th-21st for the National Restaurant Association Show 2013 or NRA Show - not to be confused with the National Rifle Association. That's cool if you're down with that, but we're more into food and stuff.

Are you a current user of our employee scheduling software? If so, we've got new features!

New to our scheduling notification options, is the option to be alerted via text message about shift changes or pending shift requests. Previously employees were notified via email about open shifts, approved or denied requests, and schedule changes. Now they have the option to

There are now multiple currency options for individual locations in each ShiftNote account. The currency format used to show as United States Dollars in the Stats section of the Daily Log, and you can now choose between the Pound, Riyal, or Australian Dollar.

We are so very excited to announce that we have released a new add-on product for the ShiftNote Digital Logbook that is going to make your life as a manager so much easier! Our employee scheduling software will allow you to create and edit schedules right from your ShiftNote

The ShiftNote team has been working hard on some much needed site updates. We have completely redesigned the Admin Area and have added in some exciting new features as well. You can access the beta version of the fully functional new Admin Area by clicking on the Admin

We are experiencing some networking issues due to our web hosting service with RackSpace, which is causing slower than normal load times. We are working on the issue and hope to have it resolved as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. Sorry for the inconvenience.

On a day where it is tradition to tell the ones you love that you care about them - we wanted to give a quick shout out to all those who use ShiftNote (and those thinking about it), and say....

We've entered an age in which many restaurant goers will do a web search for specific eateries before taking the plunge to visit them in real life. Having a well designed, easy to navigate, and informative website is going to help give potential patrons the push they need to come dine

I've always been interested in the history of how things came to be, and since we've been doing a lot of fast food trivia lately for Trivia Friday on Facebook and Twitter, I decided it would be fun to put together a history of fast food infographic. It was hard to include every notable event that has occurred, so if you see something I've missed, please feel free to add

We're pleased to announce that we have reached 14 million managers logbook user entries to date! In 2012 we had just over 5 million entries entered by managers, owners and other employees. The number of entries in the ShiftNote daily log has doubled almost every year since formation in 2002. We're very excited about continuing this growth into 2013, and we have some pretty exciting new features that we will be

ShiftNote is a useful online log book that many of you sign into each day to log notes and communicate with team members. So we thought it might be nice to point out some tips and ideas that you might not be aware of to help you better manage your workforce and save time and

During the past few years, a new breed of consumer has been fast growing - those that prefer quality over quantity, and locally sourced over mass produced. The top two menu trends for 2013 as stated by the National Restaurant Association are locally produced meats and seafood, and locally grown

ShiftNote is an amazing communication tool for workforce management that will help save you time and money. You know it, we know it - but what about your team? A tool like ShiftNote will work best if your entire team is on board, as the saying goes, there's no I in team. So how do

We've made a minor update to both the Home and Search sections of ShiftNote to make communicating with your team even easier! Before the update you could see entries that were unread or that were filtered based on a search, but you could not see the entire conversation thread that resulted from that entry.

We're so happy to introduce the ShiftNote mobile website, 2.0! We've completely redesigned the entire mobile version of ShiftNote, so that it is faster, easier to use, and loaded with most of the same great features available on the regular website. This includes viewing unread entries in the daily log, replying to and

Tell us that you love us on Twitter, Facebook, and/or comment below, for a chance to win a beautiful new ShiftNote t-shirt! You've got until next Friday, the 12th to enter. We will pick 5 winners at random, and mail you out a shirt. If you give us love on all three websites - Twitter, Facebook and this

Saving money is at the top of everyone's to-do list! When you're running a business, it's especially important to run as efficiently as possible and save costs wherever you can to maximize profits. It can be difficult to find ways to cut cost when you are trying to please customers and employees alike. To come up with the best money saving ideas for

Currently ShiftNote users are unable to reply from a log post in the Daily Report email. This is because of a third party DNS issue, and unfortunately we do not have a time line on when this should be fixed. We apologize for the inconvenience and will continue to monitor the situation. In the meantime, you can still reply to log posts by going directly to the ShiftNote website.

We've added some brand new features to all ShiftNote accounts that will help keep your team on track and accountable for the things that are going on in your business. With our new tools, you can show that you've read your team member's notes, and in return see who has read

There's no denying that the boom of the smartphone age is changing the way we live and do business. More than 80% of smartphone owners are using their phones to access the web, yet only 4.8% of retailers have a mobile based specific website. 80% of people will search for a

Whether you're a part of a restaurant or retail store, your staff is the face of your business. Staff that is happy, knowledgeable about your products, and eager to please the customers, will ultimately result in increased sales and customer satisfaction. A great way to get your staff

We've added a few new features to ShiftNote this month, including the long awaited - announcements! Now you can post a note to the daily log that is not specific to one day. The message can span multiple days as specified, and can also be shown as a popup message when you

We're very excited to announce some updates and enhancements to the ShiftNote website, as well as some features within the software itself. We decided that we were in need of a design overhaul in order to better convey our messaging, and to help better support new and

We've recently added in event color coding to the ShiftNote Calendar! Now you can more easily track important events by quickly scanning. The colors will automatically show up when you add an event to your calendar and select an event category. If you have suggestions or ideas to make ShiftNote better, please share them with us! We're always looking for ways to make the best product possible to

Matt Thompson

Recent Posts

Keep Your Shift From Hitting the Fan: Subscribe Below and Stay Informed!

Topics

Site Map

Sign Up Now!!

Contact Us