Have you met anyone in hospitality who feels like they have enough time? Us neither.
Time is one of the most valuable resources in any industry, but especially in hospitality. Unlike food costs or staffing budgets, however, it’s often the hardest to measure.
Most hospitality managers know exactly what they’re spending on ingredients, suppliers and labour. Far fewer know how much time their teams lose every day because information is spread across multiple systems.
Every day, managers, chefs, front-of-house teams and finance staff spend time tracking down information that already exists somewhere within the business. Checking stock in one system. Looking up recipes in another. Reviewing supplier orders elsewhere. Pulling reports together manually.
Individually, these tasks feel small. Collectively, they add up to something much bigger.
Sound familiar? It should. Research shows that lost time is a growing challenge across every industry:
- Employees spend less than half their time on core work
Only 43% of workers’ time is spent on their primary job responsibilities. The remaining time is consumed by communication, coordination and searching for information. That’s over half of their time.
Source: TeamStage Workplace Distractions Statistics - Workers toggle between apps and websites 1,200 times per day
This number may feel surprising, but think about how many tabs, systems and platforms you use throughout a typical working day.
According to Harvard Business Review, the average worker switches between apps and websites around 1,200 times every day. That constant toggling adds up to almost four hours per week spent simply reorienting after switching tasks.
Imagine if everything you needed was in one place.
Source: Harvard Business Review - It takes almost 25 minutes to refocus after an interruption
Research found that it takes employees an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully return to the task they were working on after an interruption.
Whether it’s jumping between platforms, responding to a notification or answering a quick question from a colleague, every interruption carries a hidden productivity cost.
Source: University of California, Irvine Research - Employees spend 1.8 hours every day searching for information
Convoluted systems, unclear processes and information spread across multiple platforms mean employees spend a significant portion of their day simply looking for answers.
That’s almost two hours every day not spent serving customers, supporting teams or improving performance.
Source: McKinsey Global Institute via Cottrill Research
Cost of disconnected hospitality management software
The statistics are alarming, but they probably don’t come as much of a surprise.
Anyone working in hospitality already knows how quickly time disappears.
A catering manager reviews stock and supplier orders. A chef needs allergen information for a menu change. Finance teams are reconciling invoices. Operations leaders are trying to understand performance across multiple sites.
The challenge isn’t that the information doesn’t exist. It’s that it often exists in different places and not in one hospitality management software.
One platform for stock. Another for purchasing. Spreadsheets for compliance. Separate systems for reporting and finance. And a completely different approach for recipe and menu management.
Over time, these disconnected systems become part of everyday operations. Teams adapt, build workarounds and accept the extra steps as normal.
But every additional login, spreadsheet and system switch adds friction.
And when that friction is repeated dozens of times a day, across dozens of employees, the cost becomes significant.
Operators using multiple systems are losing 1–2 hours a day
One of our catering customers recently estimated that staff were losing between one and two hours every day simply moving between systems and locating the information they needed to do their jobs.
When stock management, purchasing, compliance, reporting and recipe information all sit in different places, even routine tasks can involve multiple logins, spreadsheets and manual checks.
The impact quickly adds up.
Across a team of 20 users, losing just one hour per day equates to more than 5,000 hours every year.
That’s the equivalent of over 200 working days spent:
- Searching for information
- Switching between systems
- Updating records manually
- Reconciling data across platforms
Not serving customers.
Not supporting teams.
Not improving performance.
Simply trying to find the information needed to get the job done.
What could your team do with that time instead?
Imagine giving every manager, chef, operations leader and finance team member back an hour each day.
Would it be spent improving guest experiences? Supporting sites? Developing teams? Strengthening compliance? Building stronger supplier relationships?
More time not only enables you to feel more organised but hopefully less stressed and happier as a result.
25 years of solving operational challenges
At IndiCater, helping teams work more efficiently through hospitality management software has always been at the heart of what we do.
As we explored in our recent article, the industry has changed dramatically over the last 25 years. From Covid-19, the digital shift of contactless payments, QR codes, and changes in Regulations such as Natasha’s Law.
Why disconnected hospitality systems are the real problem
You don’t need multiple hospitality management software. You need one that ticks all the boxes.
The hidden cost of lost time often isn’t caused by a lack of information. It’s caused by information being spread across multiple platforms, requiring teams to switch between systems to complete everyday tasks.
That’s where an integrated hospitality management platform makes a difference.
By bringing stock management, purchasing, recipes, allergens, compliance and financial information together in one place, teams spend less time searching and more time acting.
That means:
- Fewer duplicated tasks
- Less manual administration
- Faster access to information
- Greater consistency across sites
- Better visibility across operations
- More time focused on customers and service delivery
Most importantly, it gives teams back something they can never create more of… Time.
A real-world example: Coombs Catering
The impact of saving time isn’t to be underestimated.
When we worked with Coombs Catering to expand their business and increase the number of sites they served, one of the key outcomes was a significant reduction in administrative workload.
Coombs Catering faced a time-consuming menu planning process, especially over the summer, with operations teams spending weeks finalising menus. This process not only pulled valuable staff resources away from other important projects but also put extra pressure on the team, affecting their overall operations.
The solution? We streamlined Coombs Catering’s menu planning, significantly reducing the time and effort involved. With all menu items and recipes easily accessible through IndiCater, summer weeks were freed up for staff to enjoy some well-deserved time-off or focus on other important tasks, reshaping a manual, costly, and time-consuming task into efficient recipe and menu planning.
The result? Weeks of work saved and greater confidence in operational consistency across the business.
The question every hospitality leader should ask
When reviewing performance, organisations often focus on costs they can see:
- Food costs.
- Labour costs.
- Supplier costs.
But why not ask yourself about the cost of lost time?
Because every hour spent moving between systems, updating spreadsheets or searching for information is an hour that could have been spent improving the customer experience.
And over the course of a year, that hidden cost may be one of the biggest operational expenses of all.
Get in touch with our team if you’d like to know how IndiCater is helping hospitality organisations like yours save time with one system that does it all.
