Getting Restaurant Orders Out of Your Phone and Into One Book

When the phone is the order book

For a lot of independent distributors, the order book is somebody’s phone. Texts, voicemails, photos of handwritten lists, the odd email. It works until it doesn’t: the phone is with the owner at a kid’s game, a text gets buried under a supplier’s reply, and on Thursday a restaurant gets two cases of romaine they never asked for.

The fix isn’t to make every customer change how they order. Some will, happily. Some never will. You need one place where every order ends up, however it arrived.

Two doors into one list

In Supligo every order lands in the same list, by delivery day. There are two ways in.

• Customers who will order online get your ordering page: their usual products, their prices, your cut-off. They place the order themselves, and you confirm it.
• Customers who won’t keep texting and calling. You press New order, pick the customer, and type it — at their prices — or hand Supligo the message itself.

Either way the warehouse packs from one list, and nobody scrolls through a phone at 4 am.

A photo or a screenshot in, an order out

The midnight notepad photo is the hard one. In New order you can paste the text, or attach the photo or a screenshot of the message, and Supligo reads it: it finds the customer when the message says who it is, matches “3 cs romaine” to your Romaine Hearts, and flags what it isn’t sure about — “a dozen lemons” when you sell lemons by the case of 115. Nothing is ordered until you look at it and press Accept.

Telling them it arrived

The real reason customers call twice is that they don’t know if the first message got through. Supligo emails the customer at every step: when an order placed online reaches you, when it’s confirmed or changed, when it is on its way, and when it’s delivered — with what they owe for what was actually handed over. The calls asking “did you get my order?” stop.

Your first week

1. Import your customers and products from the spreadsheets you already have.
2. Set your cut-off and delivery days.
3. Invite the five customers most likely to order online.
4. Put every other order in through New order, as it comes.

By Friday you will know which customers moved, and every order will have been in one place. Our step-by-step guide goes further, and the trial is 30 days free.