“In the summer the patio almost doubles the restaurant,” says Florence Fortin-Houle, one of two managers at Vin Papillon. “We need more staff in the summer, but obviously we don’t want to fire anyone at the end of the summer so managing staff needs to be very tight.” Besides this, service needs to run like clockwork. With a small kitchen that can’t fit more chefs, efficient workflows and seamless communication between the back and front of house is non-negotiable. “For me, when we get bigger, the biggest challenge is to delegate tasks,” says Jeanne Seguin, the yin to Florence’s yang. “I tend to keep everything on my own shoulders. [But] being able to delegate will make you a better leader, get your team more involved and help things run more smoothly.”

With Lightspeed Restaurant, Jeanne and Florence have the sales and labor data they need to forecast staffing needs, keep a close eye on labor costs and see where they can tighten up. As an integrated, cloud-based POS solution, menu and inventory changes update across devices in real time. “When it’s really busy, you don’t really have the time to [tell everyone on the floor] when there’s no more of something,” says Florence. With Lightspeed, “we can put the count at zero and then people can't order it. It really helps to get the information out faster.”

“And at the end of the day, if you want to be able to delegate some tasks, [the system] has to be simple and easy to use,” says Jeanne. “I want to be able to tell any staff member, ‘hey, could you go change that in the backend’ and not have to say, ‘so you click here, you open a parenthesis, you put that term in and then…’ I don’t want to have to do that.” Even for the managers, “once someone had shown us how it worked once, it was pretty self-explanatory,” says Florence.

Using Lightspeed to forecast staffing needs, streamline communication across teams and simplify its offering, Vin Papillon is able to keep a firm grip on costs and safeguard its financial health. “Lightspeed makes it easier to keep track of inventory and wastage and to make sure that we optimize what we sell,” says Jeanne. “It makes it so much easier to see if a dish is performing very well or very poorly, to keep track of costs, and to see if dishes are respecting the [COGS] ratio. Knowing how much is supposed to be left in the system versus how many I count on the shelves makes a huge difference. And I think that over the course of the year, financially, it's incredible.”