From paper tickets to a restaurant that runs itself.

Where we started

Fatbacks started the way most restaurants do. Somebody took your order on a pad, tore off the ticket, and walked it back to the kitchen. Then they rang it up on a push-button register.

On a slow Tuesday that works fine. On a Friday night it falls apart. Everybody writes a little differently, so the kitchen was always asking “what does this say?” Tickets got dropped, got wet, got lost. And once an order was rung in by hand, that was it. There was no record of who ordered what, who took it, or where the money went. If a number looked off at the end of the night, there was nothing to check it against.

We didn’t realize how big a problem it was until we fixed it.

The first try, and what it cost us

In 2018 I started looking for something better. We compared Square, Toast and ShopKeep. Square had rough reviews back then, so we went with ShopKeep.

For us that was a big bet. Almost $3,000 in hardware: iPads, stands, receipt and kitchen printers, plus the monthly subscription. I programmed every menu item, set up inventory, wired up the printers and built out how an order flows from the counter to the kitchen.

And it worked, at first. We were faster. Every order was tied to a customer and an employee. The money added up. Sales tax got simpler. For the first time we could actually see what we were selling.

Then the cracks showed. ShopKeep went down too often and support was hard to reach. Every outage cost us sales. After all that money, we felt stuck: we’d just spent thousands on this, and now what?

The scary switch

Small businesses are careful with money for good reason. Starting over felt crazy. We did it anyway and moved to Square in early 2020, a few weeks before COVID hit.

That turned out to be the decision that changed the business. When everyone suddenly wanted to order from their phone, we could. Square stayed up even while half the internet was struggling. In about a year we added:

• Online ordering and order-ahead
• Drive-through, run off the same system
• Delivery, a whole new stream of revenue
• A bigger menu with stock tracked on every item
• Noticeably better tips, because the screen asks for them

That year the business grew by nearly $300,000. At the same time we were posting on Facebook and Instagram every day, running specials, holiday campaigns and ads. Put together, revenue almost doubled over two years.

Connecting the dots

The other half of the story was quieter. We had a payroll system, QuickBooks and Square, and none of them talked to each other. Every week someone re-entered the same numbers somewhere else, and every re-entry was a chance to get it wrong.

So we connected everything. Online orders flow into Square. Square flows into QuickBooks. QuickBooks ties into payroll. Now each number gets entered once.

That saved us money directly, but the bigger win was trust. The books were right. Customers got the same order every time. We could run lean and still get more done.

Building our own

Once the basics were solid, we started building the pieces off-the-shelf software couldn’t give us:

• Fatbacks Staff, our own dashboard for managing employees and inventory
• A custom online ordering site and a catering site, so we’re not paying a marketplace for our own regulars
• A mobile ordering app, in testing now

Each one opens another channel and takes another chore off someone’s plate.