Software subscriptions: the audit worth doing

Most restaurants pay for more software than they think. A booking system, a till, a kitchen display service, an email tool, a website builder, a review service, a rota app, an accounting package, a music licence, a design tool someone signed up for once, a delivery tablet subscription and a few others nobody quite remembers. Each costs a modest sum each month, taken quietly from the card, and together they add up to a real line in the accounts.

A software subscriptions audit finds out what that line really holds. It lists every tool the venue pays for, what each one does, what it replaced, who uses it and whether it still earns its place. Most venues find at least one tool they no longer use, one they pay for twice and one whose price has crept up without anyone noticing.

This guide covers how to run the audit, the three tools most often paid for twice, how to judge each tool's cost and value and what to do with the results. Every venue and figure in it is an example.

Subscriptions creep because each one is small and easy to start. A free trial becomes a paid plan. A manager signs up for a tool to solve one problem and leaves the venue a year later, but the subscription stays. A supplier raises the price at renewal, and nobody checks.

Unlike a large purchase, a subscription never asks for a decision again. It renews automatically, month after month, until someone looks. The audit is that look.

Start by finding every subscription. Go through the last three months of bank and card statements and list every payment to a software or online service. Check the email inbox for receipts and renewal notices, and ask the managers and the chef what they use.

Include the small ones: a stock photo service, a scheduling app, a link shortener, a form builder. Small subscriptions are the ones most often forgotten, and there are often more of them than expected.

For each subscription, write down what it does, in one line, and who uses it. "Booking system: takes online bookings, used by the hosts." "Email tool: sends the monthly newsletter, used by the owner." "Design tool: made a poster in the spring, used by nobody since."

If nobody can say what a tool does or who uses it, that is already an answer. Tools without an owner are usually tools nobody needs.

Write down what each tool replaced. The booking system replaced the paper diary; the kitchen screens replaced the printer; the email tool replaced nothing, because the venue did not send emails before.

This step shows which tools are doing a job that would otherwise have to be done another way, and which added a job the venue might not need. It also shows where two tools replaced the same thing.

Write down what each tool really costs, per year. Include the subscription itself, any per-user or per-device fees, any fees per booking or per order, any hardware it needs and any other costs, such as the time spent managing it.

The monthly price on the invoice is often the smallest part. A booking platform with a low monthly fee and a charge per cover can cost far more than one with a higher fee and no charge per cover, once the year's covers are counted.

Total cost of ownership is the full cost of a tool over its life: the price, the fees, the hardware, the setup, the training, the time to run it and the cost of leaving. It is a far better measure than the monthly price.

Work it out for the larger tools in the stack: the till, the booking system, the kitchen screens and any platform that charges per transaction. The comparison between tools often looks very different once every cost is counted.

For each tool, ask what it earns or saves. A booking system that fills tables online earns its place; one whose bookings mostly come from regulars who would have phoned anyway may earn less than it costs. An email tool that brings back lapsed guests earns its keep; one used twice a year may not.

This is the software ROI question: what does each tool return for what it costs? Our guide to software ROI: the sum before the subscription covers how to work it out.

Three kinds of tool are most often paid for twice. Booking systems, when a venue uses both a booking platform and its own booking system, each with its own fees. Email and marketing tools, when the booking or guest system can already send campaigns and a separate email tool does the same. And kitchen and order tools, when a till that already includes kitchen screens sits alongside a separate kitchen display service.

Check for each of these in the list. Paying twice for the same job is the easiest saving in any audit.

Many venues use a booking platform for discovery and their own booking system for direct bookings, and end up paying for both, with two diaries to keep in step. Sometimes both are worth it: the platform brings new guests the venue would not otherwise reach.

Look at where the bookings actually come from. If most of the platform's bookings are regulars who would book directly, the platform is charging for guests the venue already has, and the money might be better spent elsewhere.

A separate email tool is often kept out of habit after the venue's guest system gained the ability to send campaigns of its own. Two tools mean two lists, two sets of consent records and guests who may receive emails from both.

If the guest system can send the campaigns you need, moving them there removes a subscription and keeps the guest list in one place. If it cannot, keep the separate tool, but make sure the two lists stay in step.

Kitchen display services, ticket printer services and order management tools sometimes sit alongside a till that already does the same job. Each one added solved a problem at the time, but together they may overlap.

Check what the till can already do. If its own kitchen screens cover what the separate service does, one subscription can go, and one connection that could fail goes with it.

Free tools often cost something else: the guest data they collect, the adverts they show your guests, the time they take to manage or the paid upgrade they push towards. A free booking widget that sends your guests to a marketplace may cost more in lost direct bookings than a paid tool would.

List free tools in the audit too, with what they really cost. Some are genuinely free and useful; others are worth replacing with a paid tool that keeps your guests and your data in your own hands.

Every audit finds tools nobody uses: a trial that became a subscription, a tool bought for a project that ended, a service a former manager relied on. Cancel them, after checking that nothing depends on them and that any data worth keeping has been downloaded.

Keep a list of what was cancelled and why. If someone later asks for a tool that was cancelled, the list shows why it went and whether the reason still applies.

Many subscriptions rise at renewal, sometimes sharply, and few venues notice. Compare what each tool costs now with what it cost a year or two ago.

Where a price has risen, ask the supplier about it. Many will offer a better rate to keep a customer who asks, especially one who is ready to move. If not, compare the alternatives.

Many tools offer a discount for paying a year in advance. It can be worth taking for a tool the venue relies on and will certainly keep, but it removes the flexibility to leave if the tool stops earning its place.

Take annual plans only for tools you are confident about, and note the renewal date well in advance. For newer or less certain tools, monthly plans cost a little more and keep the decision open.

Hardware rentals, such as tills, terminals, screens and printers, are subscriptions too, and often long ones. A lease signed with a till system may run for years after the system itself has been replaced.

List every hardware rental with its end date, monthly cost and what it covers. Where devices are owned outright or run on ordinary tablets, the audit has less to find; where they are leased, the end dates matter as much as the software's.

Per-user and per-device fees grow quietly as the team and the venue grow. A tool priced per user costs more every time someone joins; one priced per device costs more for every tablet added.

Check how many users and devices each tool charges for, and whether all of them are still needed. Former staff who still count as users, or old devices still registered, are common and easy to remove.

Fees that grow with trade, such as a charge per booking, per cover or per order, deserve particular attention. They seem small on any one night, but they rise with every busy week, and they take a share of exactly the trade the venue works hardest for.

Work out what they cost over a year, using the year's real figures. Compare that with tools that charge a fixed fee, and decide whether the per-transaction fee is still the better deal.

The audit is also a chance to look at the restaurant software stack as a whole: how many systems the venue uses, how they connect and where jobs overlap. A stack with many small tools, each joined to the others, costs more and fails more often than one with a few tools that each do more.

Draw the stack on a page, with each tool and the connections between them. The drawing often shows where one tool could do the work of two.

Software tools add features every year, and over time some of them grow into each other's jobs. The till adds online ordering; the booking system adds email campaigns; the website builder adds a booking form. Tools that once did different jobs now overlap.

Look for these overlaps in the audit. A feature you pay for twice, once in a tool that added it and once in the tool you bought for it, is a saving waiting to be made, as long as the newer version does the job well enough.

Ask the team which tools they actually use, and which they would happily drop. The people who use the tools every day know which ones help and which ones are a chore, and they often know about tools the owner has forgotten.

Their answers also show where a tool is badly set up rather than unnecessary. A tool the team dislikes may simply need a better setup or some training, not cancelling.

Software is part of restaurant operating costs, usually a modest one beside rent, labour and food. But it is one of the easiest to reduce without guests noticing, which makes it worth reviewing every year.

Our guides to restaurant operating costs, listed and ranked and cost cutting that does not reach the plate set software alongside the other costs a venue can review.

Before cancelling, check each contract: the notice period, the renewal date and any fees for leaving early. Some subscriptions renew annually and must be cancelled weeks before the renewal date; others can be stopped at any time.

Note the renewal dates of the larger subscriptions in the venue's calendar, a month before each one, so the decision to renew is made deliberately rather than by default.

Before cancelling any tool, download what you need from it: guest lists, past bookings, reports, designs, documents. Once a subscription ends, the data may be deleted, sometimes quickly.

Check what each tool lets you export, and do it before giving notice. A guest list lost with a cancelled subscription is a far larger cost than the subscription ever was.

In a group, subscriptions multiply: each venue may have signed up for its own tools, sometimes the same tool on separate accounts, sometimes different tools for the same job. The group pays more than it needs to and gets less consistency.

Audit the group as a whole. Where several venues use the same tool, one group account may cost less and keep the data together. Where they use different tools for the same job, choosing one is often both cheaper and simpler.

Decide in advance what the savings will fund. A subscription cut that pays for better staff training, a repair that has waited, or simply improves the month's margin is a saving the whole venue feels.

Without a plan, savings tend to disappear into new subscriptions. Agreeing where the money goes keeps the audit's benefit visible, and makes next year's audit easier to justify.

Give each subscription an owner: the person who uses it, checks it is still needed and approves its renewal. Tools with an owner are reviewed; tools without one drift.

Keep a simple list, in a shared document, of every subscription, its owner, its cost and its renewal date. Update it whenever a tool is added or cancelled.

Repeat the audit once a year. It takes a few hours the first time and less after that, because the list already exists. Each year, look for tools no longer used, prices that rose, fees that grew and jobs now done twice.

A yearly audit keeps the software line in the accounts honest, and often pays for the time spent on it many times over.

An invented bistro's owner finds fourteen software subscriptions in three months of statements. Two are unused: a design tool and a scheduling app a former manager chose. The bistro pays for a booking platform and its own booking system, and for a separate email tool alongside a guest system that can send campaigns. A kitchen display service duplicates the till's own kitchen screens.

The owner cancels the two unused tools, moves the newsletter into the guest system, drops the separate kitchen service and keeps the booking platform only for its discovery, after checking where its bookings come from. The software line in the accounts falls by more than a third, and the stack has three fewer connections to keep working.

servearound is one subscription for the service jobs, priced per venue, per month, with no fees per cover, order, screen or user, and bookings carry no commission, so it does not grow with trade. Depending on the plan, it covers bookings and the room, the till and the kitchen screens, guest records, email campaigns, feedback and analytics, so an audit often finds a separate booking system, kitchen display service or email tool it can replace, with no connections between those parts to keep working.

It does not replace accounts, payroll, rotas or stock, which stay in their own tools; inventory tracking is coming. It runs in a browser on iPhone, iPad and Android, so devices the venue already owns can often be used. See pricing.

A list of every tool the venue pays for, with what it does, who uses it, what it costs and whether it earns its place.

Go through three months of bank and card statements, and ask the team what they use.

Booking systems, email and marketing tools, and kitchen and order tools.

The full cost of a tool over its life, including fees, hardware, setup, training and leaving.

Yes, after checking nothing depends on them and downloading any data worth keeping.

Work out what they cost over a year with real figures, and compare with fixed-fee tools.

Once a year.

The person who uses it, who checks it is needed and approves its renewal.

A software subscriptions audit lists every tool the venue pays for, what each does, who uses it, what it replaced, what it really costs over a year and what it earns. Most venues find tools nobody uses, prices that crept up and three jobs often paid for twice: bookings, email and the kitchen.

Judge each tool by its total cost of ownership and its software ROI rather than its monthly price, watch fees that grow with trade, draw the restaurant software stack to spot overlaps and give every subscription an owner and a renewal date. Download data before cancelling, repeat the audit every year and keep this part of the restaurant operating costs as lean as the rest.