Why I Built Restauranteur: A Tool for Restaurant Owners, By a Restaurant Owner

I didn't set out to build software. I set out to fix my own restaurants. When you run more than one restaurant, the small problems multiply. Two sets of sales to log. Two rosters to build. Two stacks of supplier invoices on the desk. Two payrolls to reconcile. Two different chefs ordering the same item at slightly different prices. And every week, the same question I couldn't answer fast enough: am I actually making money this month? I tried the obvious things. Spreadsheets. A POS that promised analytics. A separate rostering app. A separate stock-control tool. A bookkeeper. Each one solved a slice of the problem and left the rest worse, because nothing talked to anything else. I'd log wages in one system, sales in another, invoices in a third, and once a month sit down for three hours to copy numbers between them just to find out where I stood. The breaking point was a Sunday night. Two of my places had a quiet week. The wages on Friday had gone over because I'd stuck to the "usual" roster without checking forecast sales. A supplier had quietly raised the chicken price 9%. A cleaning item we'd run out of had cost us a Saturday night service. None of these were caught when they could have been fixed — Friday morning, Tuesday delivery, Wednesday afternoon. They were all caught at the end of the month, when the money was already gone. I looked at the existing restaurant software market. The good stuff was built for chains, priced at €300–500/month per location, locked behind 12-month contracts, and required a consultant to set up. The cheap stuff did one thing and didn't talk to the others. Nothing was built for the people I knew: independent owners running 1, 2, 3 places who wanted real numbers without a sales call. So I built it myself. The rule was simple: everything has to be in one place, and every number has to be calculated from every other number. Sales feed labor cost percentage. Invoices feed food cost. Wastage feeds stock target. Roster templates pull live hourly rates. Cleaning, temperature logs, and staff clock-ins all live next to the sales and wages they're tied to. Role-based access so I could give my managers what they needed without exposing the financials. It worked. My labor cost dropped because I was watching it daily instead of monthly. I caught two supplier price hikes within a week instead of a quarter. My evenings got shorter because Sunday admin became Tuesday morning admin in 20 minutes. My managers got more autonomy because they could see what they needed without me. And then people started asking. Other owners I knew — single-site operators, second-generation family businesses, a couple of new pizzerias — wanted the same thing. None of them could justify enterprise pricing. All of them deserved the same visibility I'd built for myself. So here we are. Restauranteur is what I use every day for my own places, offered to anyone who runs a restaurant, bar, cafe, or food truck and wants their evenings back. One price. Everything connected. Built by someone who actually has to use it. If you're an independent restaurant owner drowning in spreadsheets, missed invoices, surprise wage bills, or end-of-month margin anxiety — this is for you. Same problem I had. Same fix. Start free at restauranteur.app.