It’s been a great start to 2016 here at Sapaad, and we’re thrilled to bring you updates that will make this year even more productive for your restaurant business! We’ve made further improvements to our bill printing and our Kitchen Display System (KDS), enabled customer grouping in our home delivery module, and introduced swipe login to public beta. In addition, Sapaad has launched a brilliant new Token Display System (TDS) that we call Tokenizer to optimise order fulfilment and queue management. Our goal has always been the same as yours – to create more happy customers!

FEATURE UPDATES

1. Queue Management with Tokenizer

We understand the challenges of managing customers across a crowded counter. And hence, Sapaad’s all-new Token Display System (TDS) is our brilliantly effective solution to queue management. This feature assigns easily readable token numbers to every order, and flashes these on a beautiful display screen above the counter when the food is ready. Your customers will be able to know instantly when to collect their meal. Click here to read more about this feature.

2. Enhanced Transaction Security with Mandatory Supervisor Approval

To further enhance the security of your transactions, we’ve introduced the mandatory use of a supervisor password each time an order is modified in all channels: Walk-in, Dine-in, Online Orders and Home Delivery Orders. This feature is enabled by default, however, your administrator can turn it on or off from Setup.

3. Security Fortified

We’ve improved our payment gateway and subscription management infrastructure for even better security and checkout experience for our customers. Watch this space for additional features such as viewing your invoices and billing history directly in your setup dashboard under Setup > My Accounts.

4. Better Insights, Analytics & Classification of your Customers: Customer Groups

Wouldn’t you love to reward your corporate and VIP customers with exciting discounts and promotions? Or how about running an analysis to see the kind of customers you are delivering to? We’ve just made it possible for you to easily identify and classify your home delivery customers using our all new Customer Groups feature! Your administrator can simply activate this feature in Setup > Global Settings and create your groups.

5. Super-quick Log Ins with Swipe (BETA)

We’ve made logging in even more easier with just the swipe of a card. This feature is currently in public beta, and has limited availability for now. If you wish to have it enabled for your account, contact us at support@sapaad.com to get involved before general release.

6. Bill Printing Enhancements

You asked and we listened! Your Kitchen Order Tickets (KOT) can now be configured to a larger font size. This means easier and faster readability of printed orders even during the busiest of hours in the kitchen. Your administrator can simply head over to Setup to activate this feature.

7. KDS Readability Upgrade

We’ve improved readability on the KDS screen making it even easier to identify modifier and combo items using remarkably distinguishing font and colour.

8. Improved Display of Price Modifiers

We’ve updated Sapaad to enable price modifiers to show up on customer bills. This gives your customers better transparency of pricing on their invoices.

BUG FIXES & PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS

• Addressed minor issues with gross profit for updated summary reports.
• Resolved issue with export CVS from dashboard to improve accuracy.
• Enabled alphabetical listing of categories in Inventory to improve usability.
• Enhanced usability of Pay screen wherein the entire payment cycle is completed using just the keyboard. Now you can hit ‘Enter’ on your keyboard on the last page allows you to proceed.
• Fixed an issue in Safari where Walk-In repeatedly reloads.
• CRM notes taking bug fixed.

Queue Management Simplified

A crowd of hungry customers at your counter is great for your business, but serving them in an organised way can be a challenge!

With Sapaad Tokenizer, bring order to your order fulfilment process! Manage waiting customers easily with our elegant new Token Display System (TDS).

Tokens!

Turn on Sapaad’s Token Manager to generate unique, short token numbers for every order.

The tokens are printed visibly at the top of every customer bill.

Food’s “Ready”

When the food is ready, your staff use Sapaad’s existing Service System (KDS) as usual to mark the order ‘Ready’ for collection at the counter.

       “Come And Get It!” 

Our all new Token Display feature flashes the token number on a beautifully designed page that you can mount on any high resolution screen above your counter.

Your customers will know instantly when their food is ready.

Sapaad Tokenizer is available today for all existing Sapaad customers and is absolutely FREE!

Running a restaurant is challenging. Serving great food is critical to your success, but, a restaurant is a business too.

You have to manage sales and marketing, food costing and inventory, home delivery, staff performance, and more, all this while keeping your customers happy.

Sapaad is a powerful, user-friendly, cost-effective Cloud Point-Of-Sales (POS) solution designed to help you run your restaurant business efficiently. Trusted by hundreds of restaurants, cafes, and fast-food chains worldwide, Sapaad gives you tremendous benefits.

Here are top 5 reasons to get on board:

1. Designed Exclusively For Restaurants

Sapaad has been built from ground up exclusively for the restaurant business. We’ve designed Sapaad’s features to address the challenges and goals of running a restaurant. Therefore, Multiple Prints Per Order, Category Level Printing, Home Delivery Management, Bill Tokenization, Restaurant Loyalty, and much more help you optimise every part of your order fulfilment process.

2. Monitor Your Business Anytime, From Anywhere

As Sapaad is cloud-based, your dashboard can be securely accessed from anywhere and on any device so that you can monitor your business performance in real-time. You don’t need to rely on end-of-day reports from your staff anymore. You can now directly log in to your Sapaad account, even from your mobile phone, to get live insights into dozens of aspects of your business using Sapaad’s powerful mobile, tablet and desktop friendly dashboard.

3. Easy To Setup, Easy To Use

We’ve worked hard to make Sapaad supremely user-friendly. Unlike expensive, complex software that requires you to invest time and resources to get your staff trained, Sapaad is a modern app that provides phenomenal user experience. Your staff will be comfortable using Sapaad in minutes. No training costs and instant usability means it’s super easy to start using Sapaad in your business and to introduce new staff as you grow.

4. Accessible On Any Device

Sapaad is compatible with any device that can run a web browser. Traditional POS machines, desktops, laptops, tablets, even smartphones can run Sapaad easily! You don’t need an expensive server or complex infrastructure or an IT department; Sapaad can be up and running in minutes. What’s more, as Sapaad is hosted by us, you can focus on your business while we manage the rest.

5. Affordable Monthly Subscription

A great POS system is critical to running your business efficiently. Sapaad has been created to suit every restaurant size and budget! No set up costs, no expensive licenses, no hidden fees, no long term contracts. Our simple, transparent subscription model lets you pay an affordable monthly fee (starting at just 59$) to access all of Sapaad’s features instantly. Your POS is now part of your operating cost and not a heavy capital expenditure.

With Sapaad’s Inventory module, your entire purchase cycle – from raising purchase orders, sending them easily to suppliers, and receiving goods at your location – is remarkably easy!

Here’s a quick illustration on how Purchase Order management works in Sapaad’s Inventory module:

Low Stock Items With A Single Click

With a single click, Sapaad brings back all items that are low in stock. Simply click the “Get Par Level Items” in the ‘New PO’ screen to do this. You can also just use the search bar and quickly find individual items you want to purchase.

Save For Later

Need to save it and come back later to continue where you left off? No sweat: just hit ‘Save’ (instead of ‘Save and Send’) to save your PO for a later time.

Intelligent PO Splitting

You can add items from different suppliers in your PO;  Sapaad lets you focus on building your list of items, and takes care of the rest. Sapaad will intelligently send the right items to the right supplier. Not just that, we’ve updated PO management to make it even better: Sapaad automatically splits PO with multiple suppliers and creates a unique PO for each supplier.

 And that’s all there is to it. Your sent POs will now be in the ‘Sent Orders’ section. Simply hit ‘Receive’ when your goods arrive!

In addition, we’ve enhanced usability with cool touchups to the entire ‘Purchase Order’ process for a new and improved experience!

2. Stock Take – Auto Reconciliation & more

3. Other Inventory updates

Discounts on individual items on your menu are a great way to entice your customers with offers (“Buy One, Get One FREE”), giveaways, and deals.

Now Sapaad’s POS lets you easily add discounts and notes to each item in an order! It’s brilliantly simple to use.

Instant setup!

Create an “Item Discount”

To start, simply visit  Setup > Locations > Edit > Surcharges and Discounts, and add an item discount under the all-new Item Discounts tab.

Now apply it!

On your POS screen, click the item you want to apply the discount on and hit the all-new “Discount” button.

The  discount shows on the bill just like a modifier and applies on the item’s subtotal. You’re done!

Custom request? Add a note!

We’ve also added Item Notes to Sapaad. 

Need to inform your staff about a customer’s request or modification to an item in their order? Sapaad lets you do this easily with the new “Notes” field for each item.

Enter your note and it shows on the bill just like a modifier!

Did you know, loyalty programs are a proven effective and powerful marketing strategy to build your business and your brand, and to grow a loyal customer base. A well-designed loyalty program is directed at both existing and potential customers.

Here are top 4 reasons running a loyalty program is important for your restaurant – no matter the size, scale or budget.

1. Keep ‘em coming back!

A loyalty program rewards frequent customers and keeps ‘em coming back. It’s way smarter and more cost-effective to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. A good loyalty program is key.

2. Win back “lost” customers

Want to get back customers who haven’t visited your restaurant in a while? Loyalty programs let you reach out to “inactive” customers and entice them back with exciting and valuable rewards.

3. Create “Fans” and “Brand Ambassadors”

You can’t beat “word-of-mouth” as a marketing strategy. It’s far more effective than any promotional advertisement could be. Customers enrolled in a loyalty program spread the word to family and friends.

4. Build Relationships

Loyalty programs help you build long-term value-based relationships with your customers.

On location at Kebab Bistro

Kebab Bistro specialises in delicious, authentic Parsi cuisine that is rooted in both Indian and Persian culture. It is hugely popular among lovers of great food in Dubai, and for good reason: it was the first Parsi restaurant to open in Dubai. Parsi favourites like Dhansak and Patra Ni Macchi on the menu have earned quite the fan following in the city. At Kebab Bistro, everything from the food and decor, to the warm, community vibe, is a testament to the rich Parsi heritage.

Kebab Bistro also happens to be an avid user of Sapaad.

We caught up with Kebab Bistro’s proprietor, Oofrish Contractor, to know more about Kebab Bistro, and how Sapaad has helped them optimize their operations.

The proprietors on opening day, dressed in traditional Parsi attire

Tell us a little bit about Kebab Bistro.

We started Kebab Bistro back in 2012. After 26 years in the food industry, it was my husband’s dream to open a restaurant of his own. We loved this little place in Karama, and started out with kebabs, biryani, and Bombay-style chaat. It was challenging at first, but once we found our niche, we knew we wanted to do more. Being Parsis ourselves, we wanted to introduce traditional Parsi cuisine to the people of UAE. And that’s how we became the first restaurant in Dubai to serve authentic Parsi specialties.

How did you find out about Sapaad, and what was your goal when signing up?

At Kebab Bistro, we are firm believers in the idea of quality and authenticity. You see those values in the food we offer and in the way we operate our business. So obviously it was very important to us to select a solution that helps us achieve those goals. We knew that we had to find a way to stay connected to our business and keep a close eye on critical operational indicators. We learned about Sapaad while searching for a solution we hoped would suit our goals. With Sapaad, I get a complete overview of my restaurant’s sales anytime I want, even remotely. And lots more besides.

What do you love most about Sapaad? Would you recommend it to restaurateurs like you?

I find the Sales Summary report very impressive. I can access information on total revenue, discounts, category-wise sales, and even monitor my staff’s individual performance. Also, there is practically no after sales service required at all once you get started. Sapaad appears to be designed to be very user-friendly. Everything, from the POS screen used by the cashiers, to all the operation screens, such as the home delivery manager, reflect that user-friendliness. It’s great! Overall, Sapaad has been extremely smooth and effective; I can totally vouch for it.

Their signature dish Dhansak: Bone-in mutton cooked to perfection with mixed lentils

What has been your most memorable story of using Sapaad at Kebab Bistro?

We organise a lot of outdoor events and parties, and we’re at several charity events across Dubai. With Sapaad, the best part is that it’s incredibly easy to adapt even when we’re operating at these outdoor locations. We can operate from literally anywhere; we’ve even hosted a dinner party in the Arabian desert!

Finally, what’s a must-have on your menu?

Our Friday lunch buffet “Parsi Lagan nu Bhonu” serves everything you’d typically find at a traditional Parsi wedding. Try our Sali Boti, Chicken Farcha, Mutton Dhansak, and Lagan nu Custard; it’s a big hit!

Keeping track of your raw materials is critical to maximize profitability — regular physical counting of your stock ensures that your store is well managed, food costs are tracked, and raw-material consumption is in check.

Sapaad’s “Stock Take” feature lets you do all this and more, quickly and efficiently!

Top 3 Benefits!

Tablet-friendly: No need to print excel sheets and re-enter values into the system. Simply take a tablet into your store and tap away.

Easy Unit Counter: Have a crate of coke plus a dozen loose cans? Sapaad’s stock take lets you count both by purchase units and recipe units.

Auto Reconciliation: Say goodbye to manual adjustments between counted and theoretical stock! Sapaad automatically adjusts stock discrepancies for you.

Let’s get started!

Take Stock

Visit Inventory > Stock Take to do a stock take of all raw materials in your inventory.

Need to do stock take for only certain ingredients? Simply use the ‘category’ filter or search for individual ingredients in the search bar.

Count ‘em!

Use the handy count fields to quickly enter your stock values. You can use both bulk purchase units and measurement units for truly granular yet accurate counts.

Automatically adjust variances!

Is your physical stock different from theoretical stock? No need to manually adjust it. Sapaad intelligently auto-adjusts all variances for you.

Simply select the items you want to reconcile and Sapaad does the rest!

Are you losing business because some of your customers haven’t come back in a long time? Want to know who they are and how to win them back?

Sapaad gives you a brilliant solution to identify and win back these “lost” customers. It’s easy and effective!

With just a single click, Sapaad identifies customers who haven’t placed an ordered at your restaurant in up to six months. You can then instantly reach out to these “inactive” customers via SMS, tell them they’re being missed and show them you value their business. Perhaps offer an exciting discount on their next order. It’s a sure-shot way to encourage them to come back!

How it works

1) Visit the Marketing tab on your dashboard and view the ‘Inactive Customers’ report.

2) Select a time frame for which you want to identify inactive customers – from 1 month up to 6 months. Sapaad instantly fetches customer information from your database.

3) Select “All” customers. Now, with a single click, you can send an SMS to all customers on the list.

Want to get started using this feature to win customers back?

If you’re an existing Sapaad user, simply visit Setup > My Account to activate an SMS package.

Not a Sapaad user? Sign up for a FREE trial

Have you signed up for ‘Sapaad Loyalty’ yet?

If you haven’t, we’re excited to fill you in on ‘Sapaad Loyalty’. We’ll tell you all about our brilliant feature and how it will help you run an effective, fun, and business-boosting loyalty program at your restaurant.

Sapaad Loyalty is seamlessly integrated with your POS. You don’t need a separate loyalty system or complex configurations. It is super easy to set up — you’ll be up and running in just minutes.

With Sapaad, we’ve made it incredibly easy for customers to join your Loyalty program! No lengthy forms, no plastic cards, no separate loyalty application. Sapaad manages everything seamlessly. All your customers need to enrol and start earning loyalty is a mobile number. What’s more, we’ve completely eliminated the points system used in traditional loyalty programs. No more complex loyalty formula calculations.

Sapaad Loyalty is foolproof, elegant and just plain fun!

Coming up in our next post, we’ll talk about how running a loyalty program at your restaurant will power-up your business.

Learn More About Sapaad Loyalty

Running a loyalty program at your restaurant is a proven effective and powerful marketing strategy to build your business and your brand, and to grow a loyal customer base. It is directed at both existing and potential customers. A well-designed loyalty program is right for your business – no matter the size, scale or budget.

We give you 4 reasons why you ought to start a loyalty program at you restaurant and sky-rocket your business!

1. Keep ‘em coming back!

A loyalty program rewards frequent customers and keeps ‘em coming back. It’s way smarter and more cost-effective to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. A good loyalty program is key.

2. Win back “lost” customers

Want to get back customers who haven’t visited your restaurant in a while? Loyalty programs let you reach out to “inactive” customers and entice them back with exciting and valuable rewards.

3. Create “Fans” and “Brand Ambassadors”

You can’t beat “word-of-mouth” as a marketing strategy. It’s far more effective than any promotional advertisement could be. Customers enrolled in a loyalty program spread the word to family and friends.

4. Build Relationships

Loyalty programs help you build long-term value-based relationships with your customers.

Learn More About Sapaad Loyalty

With Sapaad, once a customer joins your loyalty program, they automatically earn loyalty on their orders. No plastic cards, no stamps, swipes or manual punching of loyalty. Sapaad Loyalty is practical and hassle-free; both your customers and staff will thank you!

Moreover, keeping track of loyalty is super easy for customers – loyalty earnings are printed automatically on every bill.

Coming up in our next post, we’ll talk about how we’ve secured the redemption process while keeping it fun and simple.

Learn More About Sapaad Loyalty

With Sapaad, we use a simple yet secure process to ensure that redeeming loyalty is as fun as earning. All your customer needs is a regular mobile phone. No smartphones, no apps, no plastic cards, no complex gadgetry! It’s simple, fun, and secure.

We’ve also added all-new Loyalty widgets on your dashboard. You can easily monitor how your loyalty program is doing, how it’s boosting your sales, and you can keep track of your most loyal customers.

Sapaad Loyalty is available today from just $14 / month! If you’re an existing customer, simply visit Setup > My Account to enable Sapaad Loyalty for your business. Not using Sapaad yet? Sign up for a FREE trial.

Activate Sapaad Loyalty

Improved performance, a powerful new engine, an all new look.

We’re thrilled to launch our all new dashboard!

Dashboard 2.0 was designed to provide enhanced usability, performance and power. What’s more, we’ve completely revamped its look with cool design touchups and usability enhancements for an overall improved experience.

What’s new?

 The Sales Chart is back – and it’s better!

Our new-and-improved sales graph gives you an ‘at a glance’ real-time overview of your sales across any specific date or time range. Stay on top of your sales curve while making sure your business growth is consistent and on track.

 New, improved query engine

Our new query engine increases the amount of data you can access at any time. This means no more having to export reports to CSV for large date ranges. You can now access business information from up to two to five months right on your dashboard.

 Faster!

You’ll notice that your dashboard loads instantly, even for data across large date ranges.

Enjoy accelerated loading times and access your business reports faster than ever.

Beautiful new look!

We’ve completely revamped the look of your dashboard with design and usability touchups that enhance your experience.

We’ve improved readability and simplified the way you resize and move about widgets to customize your dashboard.

And more…

We’ve gone in and touched up individual reports with additional powerful features such as in-report search, caching, and more.

Dashboard 2.0 is FREE for existing Sapaad users and is available today. 

Get a FREE Sapaad Trial

It’s no secret: the customer is king. Keeping customers waiting for their food leads to frustration, lost sales, and a bad reputation for your business.

With Sapaad, you have the ability to be in total control of your restaurant’s home delivery process. Monitor every stage of deliveries in real-time, identify and control bottlenecks, and optimise your overall delivery efficiency.

Here are 7 brilliant ways Sapaad can help you take control of your home delivery management and keep your customers happy.

1. Boost Customer Engagement

With Sapaad, you can build a comprehensive customer database. So each time a customer calls to place an order, you instantly know their name, order history and favourites from the menu. This not only empowers your order-taking staff, it also boosts customer engagement.

2. Manage Phone Orders Centrally

Sapaad’s integrated call center module completely simplifies phone order management. You can take phone orders at each of your locations, or seamlessly set up a central call center to manage phone orders for all your locations. Orders are printed directly to the respective kitchen.

3. Monitor Deliveries In Real-time

Sapaad’s ‘Delivery Manager’ lets you track home deliveries as they happen — from the minute your customer places an order to when it is delivered at their doorstep. With great insights into how long your customer has been waiting, the order preparation time and the delivery time, your staff can operate keeping the most important aspect of your business always on high priority — your customer.

4. Keep Your Customers In The Loop

Keep your customers informed on their order status with Sapaad’s in-built SMS feature. Send out pro-active, instant SMS alerts at every stage of order fulfilment; a ‘Thank you for your order!’, or ‘Your meal is on the way. Enjoy!’, and so on. Your customers will appreciate knowing what’s happening while waiting for their meal, and save you the hassle of receiving follow-up calls.

5. Optimise Delivery Driver Communication

During busy hours, it’s essential to tighten communication with your delivery drivers. Sapaad’s ‘Delivery Assistant’ is an awesome mobile app that synchronises your POS system with your driver’s mobile phone. You can keep them informed on what orders to deliver and where, how long a customer has been waiting, and more.

6. Assess Delivery Personnel Performance

With Sapaad, you can assess which of your delivery personnel is getting more deliveries done on time, and making maximum sales. The ‘Delivery Report’ helps you identify and thus incentivize your top performing delivery personnel to increase the motivation of your entire team.

7. Analyse & Identify Bottlenecks

Sapaad’s ‘Delivery Report’ gives you brilliant insights into your entire home delivery process. Analyse the elapsed time between order placed and delivered, track time spent on the road, identify late and on-time deliveries. This helps you detect obstacles in your operations so as to take necessary action and improve your overall delivery process.

Learn more about Sapaad’s Delivery Manager

The month of August introduced lots of exciting enhancements to Sapaad, including powerful new inventory reports, additional in-report columns and search fields for enhanced visibility of your business, a new billing section to keep track of your Sapaad subscription, and much more!

In case you missed it, here’s a look back at some of our recent improvements.

1. NEW: Stock On Hand Report

We’ve introduced an all-new, powerful inventory report that gives you a LIVE comprehensive account of your stock on hand at that particular instant. View the quantity and value of stock on hand for all your ingredients and finished goods, as well as that of pending purchase orders corresponding to each item.

2. NEW: Stock Transfer Report

Our all-new ‘Stock Transfer’ report on the inventory dashboard gives you a complete overview of Stock Transfers between your locations. Monitor the quantity of ingredients and finished goods transferred in and transferred out due to stock transfers between locations, and get a detailed insight into each of them.

3. ‘Total Purchases’ Report on Dashboard

We’ve updated the ‘Total Purchases’ report on your dashboard with a new search field called ‘Search for a Supplier’. Now, when analysing your completed purchase orders, you can instantly filter purchase orders corresponding to a particular supplier.

4. Inventory Setup Improvements

a. When defining a Recipe as a Finished Good, you will no longer need to enter supplier details. We’ve eliminated the ‘Suppliers’ section for recipes defined as finished goods in order to minimise potential errors including ones like raising purchase orders for recipes defined as finished goods.

b. We’ve updated the new ‘Sub Recipe’ icon to display details of Sub Recipe Ingredients. This means, when editing a recipe that has a sub recipe, you can get a quick glimpse of ingredients used in the sub recipe by simply placing your cursor on the icon.

5. Purchase Orders Update

We’ve updated the Open Orders and Sent Orders section under Inventory > Purchase Orders with a new search field called ‘Supplier or Email’. You can now do a quick and easy search for purchase orders corresponding to a particular supplier by simply entering the supplier name or email address in the search field.

6. “Change Due Date” ability for Sent POs

We’ve introduced the ability for your staff to easily update the due date for a sent purchase order. A new ‘Change Due Date’ button now appears in the Due Date column of the Sent Orders section under Purchase Orders. Your staff can instantly change the due date for a corresponding sent PO.

7. New ‘Receive Date’ column for Purchase Orders and Stock Requests/Transfer

We’ve updated the ‘Total Purchases’ report on your dashboard, as well as the ‘Received Orders’ section under Purchase Orders, and the ‘Received Stock’ section under Stock Requests/Transfer with a new ‘Received Date’ column. You now have the ability to easily determine the date of receipt of items into your inventory against a particular purchase order and stock request.

8. New ‘Stock On Hand’ column

a. We’ve introduced a new ‘Stock On Hand’ column under Batch Production. Now, when producing a batch, you are able to view stock on hand for the batched item before processing it.

b. In addition, we’ve introduced a new ‘Stock On Hand’ column for Issue Stock. This means, when issuing out stock at your location, you now have the ability to view stock on hand for that particular item before issuing it out.

9. ‘Stock Takes’ Widget Update

We’ve updated the ‘Stock Takes’ widget on your dashboard to now display the total number of completed stock takes at your location during the selected date range.

10. ‘Item Notes’ displayed in order details

We’ve updated Sapaad to display ‘Item Notes’ in order details. This means, notes informing your staff about a customer’s request or modification to an item in their order now show up in the order details, just like modifiers.

11. New features added to Sales reports

We’ve updated the ‘Sales By Location’ and ‘Orders By Location’ reports on your sales dashboard with new columns ‘Orders’, ‘Sales’ and ‘Average Per Cheque’ as well as a powerful graphical representation of your sales trends. Now, get a daily breakdown of total number of orders, total sales, and average amount per cheque at each of your locations.

12. ‘Top Selling Items’ Report Enhanced

The ‘Top Selling Items’ report on your dashboard can now be filtered by a combination of filters. This means, you can now identify and upsell menu items with high profitability across a combination of Staff, Tags and Categories selected from the respective filter dropdown buttons.

13. Improved ‘Total Orders’ Report

We’ve updated the ‘Total Orders’ report on your dashboard to display a new ‘Ready At’ column when exported to CSV. This means, for Walk-in, Dine-in and Online orders made ready from the bump screen, you can now determine the time at which the orders were ready.

14. Delivery Report Update

We’ve updated the denomination of time in the Delivery Report on your dashboard, when it is exported to CSV. Now, data in columns ‘Preparation Time’, ‘Pickup Time’, ‘Delivery Time’, and ‘Total Time’ are displayed in the denomination of “minutes” and not “hours”.

15. New ‘Tax’ column added to reports

If you’ve enabled Tax at your location, a new column ‘Tax’ will be displayed in the ‘Total Orders’ and ‘Sales Summary’ reports on your dashboard. It’s a great way to account for total tax at your location.

16. Account for your Sapaad subscription invoices

We’ve made it easier than ever to keep track of your Sapaad subscription billing. You can now view all your monthly invoices by simply visiting the ‘Billing’ section under Setup > My Account.

We’re always working hard to make Sapaad more fun and useful for you. This week, we’ve introduced several exciting enhancements. We’ve polished areas of Sapaad for greater clarity and consistency, we’ve introduced additional in-report columns and filter abilities, and we’ve revamped a few aspects of the Inventory module for a much-improved Inventory experience!

Here’s a quick round-up of our latest updates and performance improvements:

1. “Current Stock” Improvements

Under Inventory > Current Stock, when viewing the history of stock movement for a particular ingredient or finished good, you now have the ability to view complete details of all stock movement for that item.

2. “Purchase Orders” Enhancements

a. When raising a purchase order, the search field now auto-predicts supplier names, so you can easily search for and add items to a purchase order for a supplier.

b. Under Sent Purchase Orders, you now have the ability to ‘Print’ a sent purchase order.

c. We’ve made additional improvements to sending purchase orders: we’ve got an all-new design for the purchase order email, and we’ve also added a ‘Preview’ button; do a quick preview of a purchase order before hitting send.

d. For the search field under Received Purchase Orders, in addition to searching by order and invoice number, you can now do a search by Supplier as well. Fine-tune your searches to get all received purchase orders corresponding to a particular supplier.

3. Enhanced “Batch Production”

We’ve redesigned the batch production experience for enhanced clarity and visibility into the stock requirements and stock availability to process the batched item.

4. “Stock Issues” Update

We’ve introduced a ‘Sales Return’ dropdown option when issuing out stock. This ensures all damaged and expired items that are returned to the supplier are accounted for.

5. Top Inventory Modifiers Report

The ‘Top Inventory Modifiers’ report has a new column called ‘Menu Item’. Now, easily identify menu items with the most frequently-ordered inventory modifiers.

6. Table Wise Sales Report

The ‘Table Wise Sales Report’ can now be filtered by ‘Dine-In Areas’. A great way to identify which of your dine-in areas are generating the maximum business in a day.

7. Theoretical Stock Report

When exporting the ‘Theoretical Stock Report’ to a CSV file, you now get complete visibility into total stock moved in and out of your inventory, with the new Total In and Total Out columns.

8. New and Improved In-app Consistency: In this update, we’ve polished areas of Sapaad for greater clarity and consistency.

9. Other fixes and performance improvements:

+ Due Date is non-editable when creating a new purchase order.
+ Resolved issue of deleting default supplier when adding a new supplier for ingredients and finished goods.
+ Inventory Modifier stabilisation.
+ Improved display of stock movement type in Theoretical Stock Report.
+ Fixed an issue when saving Stock Takes with a large number of items.
+ A new location now adds all ingredients for a newly-created location.
+ Resolved issue in Finished Goods and Recipes to correctly calculate COGS.
+ Fixed data mismatch issue in ‘Cancelled Orders’ report.
+ Stock issued out due to stock adjustment is correctly accounted for in the Wastage Cost Report.
+ Fixed issue of repetition of ingredients when displaying a recipe.
+ Fixed issue of repetition of supplier names when displaying a purchase order.
+ Information pop-ups are now displayed correctly.
+ In ‘Total Purchases’ report, fixed issue to correctly display the Received Quantity.
+ We’ve disabled the Order Types filter dropdown from specific inventory reports where order types is irrelevant.

Are you tired of spending hours updating your accounts? Accounting shouldn’t be a chore. Introducing the all-new Sapaad and Xero integration!

Now, managing your back-office accounts is easier than ever. No complicated accounting systems, no piles of paperwork, no accounting headaches. Connect Sapaad and Xero for a better overview of your finances and a much-improved workflow!

What is Xero?

Xero is a beautiful accounting software that makes it incredibly easy to run your back-office accounts. Designed exclusively for small businesses, Xero, like Sapaad, runs on the cloud, and works anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

4 Awesome Benefits of Integrating Sapaad and Xero

1. Seamless Integration

As Xero is cloud-based, connecting your Sapaad account and Xero is incredibly simple and only takes a few minutes. All your business transactions including sales, discounts and payment types can easily be linked to the correct accounts.

 2. Automatically Sync Daily Sales

Sapaad automatically posts sales data to Xero at the end of your business day. You can even customise the time you wish to schedule the daily sync, and we take care of the rest!

 3. Multi-location Friendly

Got multiple locations? No problem! With just a single click, you can effortlessly map sales data to the right location.

 4. Save your business time, money and effort!

With Xero, spend less on your accounting, and more on growing your business!

Learn More

Nicky Ramchandani, a young entrepreneur based in Dubai, is the creator of Zen – an authentic, uber-popular Oriental restaurant in the heart of the city’s central business district. Nicky’s passion for great food and his dream to bring authentic Thai and Chinese cuisine to a city thriving with food lovers led to a career switch back in 2005.

We caught up with Nicky at his restaurant just before the busy office lunch hour. Nestled amid Business Bay’s towering skyscrapers, this charming little space is big on authenticity. It’s no surprise then that Zen is one of the top-rated Asian restaurants in Dubai.

Excerpts from our meeting.

Can you tell us a little bit about Zen and what inspired you to start it?

Zen is a product of my passion for food. I’m very passionate about food. I love researching new trends and fads in the cooking world.

Back in 2005, it was hard to find a restaurant in Dubai that served authentic yet great food that could be eaten everyday at a reasonable price. There weren’t many Thai and Chinese restaurants at that time. Most restaurants were into fusion, and compromised on ingredients, altering tastes to suit customers’ palates.

This inspired me to start a concept that served food the way it’s traditionally done on the streets of Thailand and China. We fly in our ingredients like chillies, herbs and noodles every week from Thailand and Hong Kong. We make our curry paste in-house. This is what makes Zen stand out from the rest. We stay true to the core of Asian culture and flavours.

What are the challenges you faced in starting up and running a restaurant in Dubai?

The biggest challenge in Dubai is sourcing the right ingredients. In Dubai, most of the produce are imported. So every six months, the ingredients available are of a completely different variety or country. This makes it very difficult to maintain the quality and taste of food.

Also, as a single-owner small business, another challenge was to put in place the right technology to keep me competitive. And to give me business intelligence to improve my customer engagement. Typically, such systems are unaffordable for start-ups. Luckily, I found Sapaad. Sapaad gave me all of that and because it’s a monthly subscription, it was affordable for a new business. A lot of our initial business challenges were addressed.

What has Sapaad’s role been in helping you achieve your business goals?

With Sapaad, I have instant access to critical sales information. This has helped me make informed business decisions in our year-round assessments. Last year, we were able to knock off 20 items from our menu that weren’t gaining us high profit.

Sapaad gives us great insights into sales trends in our home delivery areas. It helped us carefully-target our marketing efforts, and even cut down our monthly marketing budget.

I love Sapaad. I would, without a doubt, recommend Sapaad to other business owners.

What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs looking to make their mark in the restaurant business?

Focus on customer service. Because at the end of the day, the whole restaurant business revolves around your customers. We have over 10,000 customers in our database. When a customer calls, we have all the customer’s information at our finger tips. We address them by name. We know what they like, what’s their favourite food. Customers love this type of engagement. These little things go a long way.

I also advice to keep a record of your accounts from day one. And put aside 5% of your sales from day one, regardless.

Finally, what are the top three must-haves at Zen?

Our BBQ Chicken is a top favourite. Also, there’s the Spicy Papaya Salad, the Red Curry Based Stir Fry, and the Pad Kee-Mao Noodles (pictured here) made with noodles flown in straight from Thailand.

Follow Zen Dubai on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @zendubai or order online zendubai.com.