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Comment by didgeoridoo | Hacker News Reader

First, some (unsolicited) feedback on the product: Itemizing & inputting your sales per item is a pretty hefty thing to ask if the restaurant isn't already doing it. If they are, what makes this solution better than Excel or Google Docs? Integration with a POS or other system that automatically tracks sales might be necessary to make this feasible from a "how much extra work does this force me to do" perspective.

As for the site... 1) "Try now" doesn't let me try it now... not a good start. 2) The site as a whole is pretty dry and unappealing, and gives me no idea what the product would be like to use. Typical best practice for something like this tends to be human imagery + shots of the interface in action. See: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes... 3) If you're going to promise plans and pricing, give us plans and pricing. If not, "learn more" or "hear about us when we're ready" is more honest.

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Your first paragraph makes an excellent point. No one is going to type all that in each day. And more importantly - you'd have to type in every ingredient and the quantity for each menu item in order to get the 'better inventory control' that the website suggests.

Knowing nothing about the food services industry, surely this is something you do once for each menu item and then forget about it. For instance, if you know a cake needs 100g sugar, 100g flour, 100g fat, 1 egg per portion then it's trivial that if you sell ten cakes, you need a kilo of each thing.

And actually this would be interesting to chart - does this actually correlate to your kitchen usage? Ideally there should be no wastage in ingredients, but what happens if you find out that each day you're selling 10 muffins but using 20 eggs?

I think an ideal-ish system would be either to integrate to the POS system or have some kind of iPad/tablet app so you can tap in orders as they come. Just needs to be a basic counter that tracks how much is sold throughout the day. If you have POS data, then you can be even more canny and see finer resolution data (e.g. early lunch vs late lunch).

I don't think you'd need to put in every ingredient. If you know you predict that you're going to be selling twice as many waffles this week, buy more ingredients for waffles. If sales for cheeseburgers are expected to be down, buy less cheese.

We're looking at integrating with POS systems but that isn't very easy. It will only require to enter the quantity of sales for menu items. Most POS systems will produce an overall daily count but won't be able to provide smarter analytics.

We're looking at integrating with POS systems but that isn't very easy.

http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

Do POS systems already calculate analytics? I was under the impression that they did.

Most do, but POS systems are a huge purchase for small independent restaurants.

You should add a page with these benefits and also some information on industry experience you or your team have so customer's know its not just some IT guy with no understanding of their business.

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