COMPUTING
BUSINESS
PUBS AND RESTAURANTS – NEXT CHALLENGES By Jim Rayner
It’s never been easy to run a profitable pub, restaurant or café. Even in normal times the failure rate of hospitality businesses is around three times higher than most other sectors. Success has always depended upon hard graft, attention to detail and a firm grasp of some important numbers. The last of the COVID restrictions should soon be gone but hospitality businesses now face a new set of challenges: • Costs are rising – particularly food plus dramatic increases in energy costs • Government support being withdrawn – the temporary VAT cut to be scrapped in April • Staff shortages – increasing the cost of attracting and keeping good people • Tax rises – National Insurance paid by employers rises by 1.25% in April
Some of these changes – food and drink increases and the VAT change – affect variable costs. Those are the costs that vary according to how many meals you serve. Others affect fixed costs, which don’t change as you sell more meals. And let’s not forget, restaurant customers are facing their own cost of living squeeze with increased gas bills, a 1.25% rise in NI and possible mortgage rate increases on the horizon. All of which means hospitality businesses are facing big cost increases just at a time that many customers have less cash to spend. Setting profitable prices is never easy but it’s now even more challenging.
cost of ingredients (food and drink). That’s what you have available to cover your overheads and leave you with a profit.
probably won’t object to small incremental changes but may be shocked by a big price rise. 2. Don’t cut prices (or fail to pass on cost increases) in response to falling demand; it will nearly always make your business even less profitable. Restaurants that cut average prices by 5% typically need to attract at least 8% more business to be better off. And price conscious customers are not loyal.
4. Know your breakeven level, the number of covers you need to serve to avoid making a loss. 5. Look at ways to make more use of your capacity by attracting budget-conscious diners at off-peak times. To help pub, restaurant and café owners set profitable prices, I’ve put together a free interactive calculator you can access on my website www.james-rayner. co.uk.
3. Don’t concentrate on your total sales. The key income measure to focus on is the margin after taking off the
Here are some golden rules: 1. Don’t be tempted to put off reviewing prices. The longer you delay, the larger the increases you will eventually have to make. And your regular customers (who are of course your best ones)
STAY ON TOP OF THE NUMBERS PROTECT YOUR BUSINESS SAVE LIVELIHOODS BUSINESS NUMBER EXPERTS WWW.JAMES-RAYNER.CO.UK
EMAIL SET-UP AND SYNCHRONISATION (PC, MOBILES AND TABLETS) By James Flynn, Milborne Port Computers We get asked a lot to resolve email issues, especially where the user wants to use multiple devices like a PC as well as a laptop, smartphone and tablet. By the time they get to us they’ve usually managed to tie themselves in knots and we have to start back at the beginning. To help understand the difficulty, let’s take a look at how email works. Email, just like a text message on a mobile, is a piece of written text maybe with attachments that gets bundled up and sent to an email address elsewhere. Your device (PC, laptop, etc.) sends the message to your 18
SMTP server (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol for those that are interested!). The email then whooshes off to the intended recipient via the internet where it arrives at the incoming mail server and drops neatly into the recipient’s mailbox on that server. So far so good? Now comes the more complicated bit … The recipient has basically three ways of getting that email: 1. WebMail – all mail is stored on the server and is viewed as a webpage. Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo were the pioneers of this technology and are
probably still the most common. Most ISPs now provide this functionality with varying degrees of success but nearly all have on-page advertising that can be a real pain! 2. POP Mail – via a mail client like Outlook, Windows Mail, MAC Mail, Thunderbird, etc. POP stands for Post Office Protocol for those that are interested, and this is where the client goes to the incoming mail server and says ‘hello, any mail for me?’; the server then sends any mail to the client and the mail is then viewable by the user. Importantly, this is a one-way transaction and having
been completed, the server is then cleared. Most ISP-based email (BT, Tiscali, TalkTalk, Virgin) traditionally used this method. 3. IMAP Mail – again via a mail client but using Internet Message Access Protocol that allows multiple connections via multiple devices using twoway transactions. The mail is always stored on the server and each client replicates that information. In this way if you ‘read’ an email on one device, it shows as having been ‘read’ on another device. Equally, if you send an email from one device then that sent email
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