EagleOwl Review

If you are a restaurant owner, you are not just responsible for counting profits. The job description is multi-faceted and requires you to wear many hats right from the very first day. Some days you may have to double up as the server if you are low on staff, and other days, count inventory to avoid theft in the kitchen. 

To help you stay on top of things and not get overwhelmed by the processes, you need to automate certain tasks. It enables you to avoid manual errors and monitor things effortlessly. This is where a restaurant management system comes to your rescue. It is your one-stop solution to keeping an eye on the most important aspects of your restaurant.

I tried my hands on the EagleOwl restaurant management software recently, and here is my honest review about it. This review highlights all its strengths & weaknesses, insights about its functions, its features & applications, capabilities, and it’s worth. You can easily request a Demo from their website to understand its features and functioning.

Why do you need a restaurant management system?

You need strong management skills to operate a restaurant business and make decent profits. One important aspect of management is keeping track of the expenses made by the restaurant. Not having an efficient system can keep you in the dark about how the cash flows in and out of your restaurant business.

A restaurant management system streamlines the process, takes care of all the complex calculations, and gives you instant insights about your earnings. It also makes it easy to keep track of your inventory which is paramount in reducing food costs and wastage. With better control over your food cost, you can increase your profitability.

What is EagleOwl?

EagleOwl is a powerful restaurant management software with inventory and BOH (Back Of House) as the focus. The very first thing you notice when you open the software is its easy-to-understand UI. Once you spend some time exploring the software, you realize how intuitive the UI/UX is. This is what their dashboard looks like:

dashboard

Once you enter your restaurant data into the EagleOwl software, it offers analytical insights for almost all aspects of the restaurant. For instance, it calculates the expected consumption for the month, giving you a basis to compare with the actual consumption recorded at the end of the month. This makes it easy to derive COGS(Cost Of Goods Sold) and spot variance.

Above all, the EagleOwl software helps you lower COGS and improve the bottom line. It includes POS and table reservations, too, which help in enhancing the customer experience. With the reporting and analytics, you can know which are your high-performing & high contribution menu items. With this information, you can design the menu for increased sales.

Pros

  • Cloud-based
  • Good UI/UX
  • Easy to use without any training
  • Fully secure POS
  • Detailed reports
  • Detailed insights about inventory
  • Automated tracking of food costs & sales
  • Provides accurate data for accounting
  • Quick & reliable tech support

CONS

  • Integration with fewer POS system
  • No mobile app

Top Features:

  • Automation of complex tasks

The software automates all tedious and time-consuming tasks and presents restaurant data in a simple format. This means if you need to see which are your best-selling menu items, it has the data recorded to show you with just a click. You will get detailed reports about everything related to your restaurant business – be it stock reports, variance reports, production reports, consumption reports, or financial reports. 

  • Insights about your business

One of the things that I liked the most about the software was that it offers many actionable insights about everything from cost control, high contribution menu items, recipe management, and food wastage. These allow you to take concrete steps to streamline your operations and get the most out of your business. In other words, it shows you what you are doing wrong and what can be improved for increasing your profit margins.

  • Lower COGS

The key to increasing profits in a restaurant business is lowering the COGS. On average, the COGS for a restaurant is 1/3rd of restaurant sales. To get accurate calculations of the expected COGS for a month, you need to enter the recipe and the quantity of all the ingredients used in the software. The software automatically calculates the actual COGS based on the opening stock, purchases, closing stock, and sales.

  • Engineer your menu

You can’t just price a menu out of whim. It has to be done based on the understanding of the actual cost of the menu item. To increase profits, you need to ensure the menu is designed in a way that encourages customers to order your most profitable items. The EagleOwl software automates food cost calculation and shows how much a menu item costs. This helps in creating a highly optimized menu with the help of appropriate pricing methods.

  • Easy and centralized monitoring

If you’re looking to spot areas of improvement in your restaurant, you need first to have an accurate account of your expenses. EagleOwl being a SaaS platform, makes it easy to keep an eye on every aspect of your restaurant and monitor it from anywhere around the globe. So no matter where you are or how many outlets you have to manage, you have the pulse of the business at any given point.

  • Intuitive interface

Many software are so complex that the staff has to be trained first to understand how it works. But not with EagleOwl. Its interface is intuitive and has clear navigation aids making it easy for everyone in the entire restaurant setup to operate it. So even if you are short on staff and don’t have a designated cost controller, your team can quickly learn how to use the software and help in keeping a tab on inventory.

  • Price alerts

Your top SKUs need constant monitoring, but it is impossible to do that manually for each outlet. EagleOwl’s SKU price fluctuation alerts make it easy to understand how the price of a menu item is getting impacted and to what extent the price is changing. For example, if the price of onions gets doubled and you have onion rings on your menu, it will become expensive to create them and will affect your profits for the given time frame.

  • Friendly support staff

Whenever you invest in restaurant management software, always research their customer support. You don’t want to be stuck with a customer support team that takes days to get back on an issue once you have bought the software. I found EagleOwl’s support staff very helpful, knowledgeable, and quick in resolving problems of all kinds. The team is approachable and makes sure you have all the guidance to make the most of the software.

Price Structure

The EagleOwl software is priced at just $199 and offers a wide array of features at that price.

Verdict

If you’re looking for a simplified solution for your restaurant that automates your most crucial processes, EagleOwl comes across as a reliable yet affordable solution. There is no excessive stuffing of unnecessary features, which saves a lot of time. You will quickly find what you’re looking for. For me, the best part was that it highlights all the inconsistencies in your restaurant setup and makes you pay attention to what needs to be corrected.

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