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Restaurant Manager Guide

Guide for restaurant managers - floor and table management, menu, food cost, Restaurant Intelligence, and Consumer App settings with Qvian Suite.

Running a restaurant in Qvian means keeping four things true: the menu is correctly configured, dishes are actually costed, the floor matches the room, and the day gets closed. The one that quietly decays is costing — a menu can look fully priced while half of it produces meaningless food cost figures.

Last updated

The costing chain

A dish's food cost is only as good as the chain behind it:

Supplier invoice → product cost → ingredient linked to it → conversion factor → recipe → menu item

Part-costed is worse than uncosted

A recipe with ten ingredients where six carry costs still shows a food cost percentage — a healthy-looking one built from 60% of the dish. An uncosted item shows nothing and gets fixed. A part-costed one looks fine and never does.

Weekly

How to Audit the Menu (menu health, check the menu, menu gaps)

The menu manager surfaces its own gaps as filters with live counts. Work them rather than reading every item.

Required permission: Menu management

  1. Go to Restaurant Setup → Menu Builder and open the menu
  2. Open Filter and work each gap in turn
  3. No tax set — fix in one bulk action; items selling without tax are a compliance problem
  4. No recipe — these have no food cost and do not deduct stock
  5. Part-costed — the food cost shown is understated
  6. Duplicate names — the same dish twice splits its sales history
  7. No photo — these render blank in the consumer app

Result: Every gap that distorts your figures or your customers' experience is closed.

Note: A small amber dot on the Filter button means gaps exist somewhere in the menu, even when no filter is active.

How to Review Food Cost (food cost review, margin check, cost percentage)

Weekly, and after any supplier price move.

Required permission: Restaurant read

  1. Go to Restaurant Setup → Food Cost Analysis
  2. Check Cost Alerts for items Over Target
  3. Sort Menu Item Food Costs by Cost % to see the worst
  4. Switch Food Cost Trends between 7, 30 and 90 days to tell a new problem from a long-standing one
  5. For anything bad, check whether it is Part-costed before concluding it is a margin problem

Result: You know which dishes erode margin and whether it is a data problem or a real one.

Note: Diagnose before re-pricing. Most bad food cost figures are a wrong conversion factor, not a wrong price.

How to Act on Supplier Price Changes (ingredient prices went up, price watch, cost increase)

Catch a cost rise before it shows up as a margin problem.

Required permission: Purchase order read

  1. Go to Replenish and open the Price Watch tab
  2. Review Biggest increase and Most volatile
  3. For anything used in recipes, re-check the affected dishes in Food Cost Analysis
  4. Decide: re-price the dish, change the recipe, or accept the margin

Result: Price movements reach your menu decisions rather than quietly eroding margin.

How to Read Menu Engineering (which dishes to keep, menu analysis, stars and dogs)

Cost alone does not tell you what to do with a dish — popularity matters too.

Required permission: Restaurant intelligence

  1. Go to Restaurant Setup → Restaurant Intelligence
  2. Read the menu engineering matrix — high and low margin against high and low popularity
  3. Promote what is profitable and popular; re-price or re-engineer what is popular and unprofitable; consider dropping what is neither
  4. Use daypart and kitchen efficiency reports to explain the pattern

Result: Menu decisions are based on cost and demand together.

Note: Restaurant Intelligence is an opt-in module. If you cannot see it, ask an administrator to enable it for the outlet.

Daily

How to Run the Restaurant Day (daily routine, opening and closing restaurant)

The rhythm.

  1. Open the registers for the tills trading today
  2. Mark anything you have run out of as Unavailable in the menu manager, so it stops being orderable everywhere at once
  3. Through service, watch the incoming order queue and throttle kitchen load if online orders outpace the kitchen
  4. Check the floor plan matches the room — released tables, no stranded sessions
  5. Cashiers close their registers with counts
  6. Run the Daily Reconciliation to close the day

Result: The day is closed, the books are posted, and the day's sales are in the tax period.

Note: Marking an item unavailable takes it off the POS, the staff app and the consumer app at once — far better than refusing it one table at a time.

How to Keep the Floor Plan Honest (tables wrong, floor plan out of sync, stranded session)

A floor plan that stops matching the room stops being useful.

Required permission: Restaurant POS

  1. Check for tables still showing occupied after guests have left, and release them
  2. Look for sessions on tables nobody is sitting at — usually a move done by re-opening rather than moving
  3. Merge any duplicate sessions for the same party

Result: The floor plan reflects the room, so it can be trusted at the busiest moment.

Related

Common questions

Food costs look far too good across the menu

Cause: Widespread part-costing — ingredients without costs contribute nothing.

Fix: Use Filter → Part-costed in the menu manager to see the scale of it, then work the missing ingredient costs in Kitchen Stock.

One dish costs an absurd amount

Cause: Usually a conversion factor out by a factor of a thousand, or a wrong recipe yield.

Fix: Check the yield first, then the conversion factors on its expensive ingredients. Re-pricing a dish to fix a typo pushes customers away for nothing.

A price change has not reached the till

Cause: Ordering screens cache the menu.

Fix: Refresh the POS. If it persists, check you edited the menu that outlet actually uses — click the menu name to see which menu you are in.

Sales are missing from the tax period

Cause: Days were never reconciled.

Fix: Counter sales only produce tax records when the daily reconciliation completes. Check for Pending days in Cash & Registers → Daily Reconciliation.

Should I delete a dish we no longer sell?

Cause: Deleting removes it from reporting.

Fix: Disable it instead. It leaves every ordering surface but keeps its sales history, so last year’s figures stay comparable. See Menu Builder.