Running a successful restaurant operation—from 1 to 100 locations—requires rock-solid communication. That all starts with your management team. It's a delicate balance to strike between running great shifts and providing leaders with the information they need to grow their business, and managers need the right tools to communicate. Until recently, this has taken the form of a "red book" or a paper ledger that managers use to log critical business information.

But paper notes are a thing of the past—and there are new software solutions that can make manager communication easier and more effective, giving your business a competitive edge.

With digital, cloud-based solutions like 7shifts Manager Log Book, your team can take down instantly-accessible notes on staffing issues, operations performance, and more so owners can be alerted immediately. Here are just a few of the reasons that restaurants are using 7shifts in place of a traditional manager red book.

Empower managers and employees with the best tools

Centralize and share your shift notes

Keep tabs on your daily operations with a customizable log book that keeps daily notes, files, significant shift details, and follow-up tasks together for managers. Once the notes for the shift are in, they're effortlessly shareable. Managers can manually or automatically share daily log book digests with your management team to keep everyone aware of what's going on. Your team will never have to ask "who closed last night!?" again.

Integrate your log book with your operating data

7shifts integrates with the POS you use and trust. Restaurants can enrich log book entries with real sales data and labor costs that give context to what’s going on in their business and make more informed decisions.

Check manager communications anywhere, anytime

Restaurant work happens in the back office, in the walk-in, behind the bar, on the floor, and everywhere in-between—and your log book should, too. With an easy-to-use mobile app, managers can add shift notes anywhere, on any device, so nothing gets missed. Managers can’t be everywhere at once—but this is getting pretty close, especially if you run multiple restaurant locations.

Aggregate shift feedback

An engaged and happy team is the ultimate competitive advantage. And in this tough labor market, employee retention is absolutely essential. When employees use 7shifts clock out of their shift, they’re presented with the opportunity to rate their shift on a scale of 1-5. This data gets aggregated into an average shift score per day—and is recorded right in your log book entry. This can give you insights into how your team's happiness changes over time—and offer explanations for why one day is lower than another.

Complete customization

Every restaurant is different—and templated log books aren't one size fits all. 7shifts empowers operators to create custom log book categories to track only what's important to your restaurant—be maintenance requests, customer complaints, or 86'd menu items.

Create an archive of your operations

With 7shifts, daily manager log book entries create an archive of everything that's happened in your business. The best part? It's searchable, so you can find critical information, mentions of employees, or anything else you need to make better decisions. Never fly blind again when it's time to make an important decision.

How Manager Log Book Software is Saving Restaurants Time and Money

St. Louis-based coffee shop Kaldi's has been using 7shifts Manager Log Book to great effect across 13 locations. They utilize the 7shifts manager logbook software twice a day, every single day for each location—nearly 10,000 entries a year.

Each AM manager and PM manager fill out a log book entry with information like no-call no-shows, late arrivals, and more. 7shifts automatically generates a recap of each post to be sent to the leadership team and regional managers, so nothing gets missed.

Kaldi's also uses the log book to keep track of how trainees are progressing, so managers never miss a beat and new team members can get the attention they deserve. In the unfortunate case of termination or suspension, the team says that the search feature comes in handy to compile records relating to that team member. But this can work in a more positive way—too—when it comes to promotions, praise, and raises, ensuring that hard work gets noticed.