Elavon provides all the right ingredients to independent restaurants
Mike and Harriet Daly run a highly successful pub and restaurant in Devon called The Lazy Toad. Their pub specialises in a menu that features locally sourced fresh produce and craft drinks, as well as delivering an excellent customer experience.
When they took over the existing business, they inherited an antiquated paper-based ordering and billing system. “The whole end-to-end system was inefficient and cumbersome,” says Mike. “Bulldog clips with scribbled orders in the kitchen, illegible carbon copies and piles of loose notes and receipts meant that just trying to get any kind of picture of stock control and ordering was impossible.”
"talechTM lets me spend more time managing my business and being with my customers and staff.” - Mike Daly, Owner, The Lazy Toad Inn and Elavon customer
Effective, efficient and enabling
Mike undertook a comprehensive search for an up-to-date system that was more effective, more efficient and enabled the business rather than hindered it. After extensive research, he chose the combined Elavon and talechTM system.
Mike adds, “I looked at just about every system on the market and realised I needed a cloud-based system that wasn’t reliant on hardware with bolt-on solutions. The Elavon and talechTM system stood head and shoulders above the others. I loved the simplicity, and I loved the iPad-based system. It is one seamless transactional system that would not only support more efficient and accurate ordering in the pub and restaurant, but would also help me with stock control.”
“It’s always great to sit down at the end of a busy week and see what’s been selling," says Restaurant Manager, Joe Reed. “We used to have a general sense of what was selling and what wasn’t; this system now allows us to check and confirm our assumptions exactly, at any time.
"This not only helps us with our stock management, bearing in mind a lot of is sourced fresh from our local suppliers, but it also means we can let service staff know exactly how many portions of any dish we have left at the point of order. This is another way that the system helps us deliver a higher level of customer service.”
Minimise waste and mistakes while saving time and money
Not only does the Elavon and the talechTM system save time and promote error-free service delivery, the staff love it because it is easy to use. Mike adds, “It’s so easy to train staff on how to use the system, and it really helps them process orders swiftly and efficiently, and our customers love that. And customers love its flexibility, too: everything from special dietary requirements to splitting bills amongst groups and fairly dividing the service charges too.
"But one of the best things is, I can now spend more time managing my business and being with my customers and staff, rather than poring over piles and piles of paper records and it's very clear that the system saves us time and money. Waste is minimised and mistakes are very rare. All that is good for business, our suppliers, our staff and, therefore, our customers.”
To discover more about The Lazy Toad, visit: