Overview

Compliance means ensuring your business stays on the right side of the law, and that your venues are being run safely, consistently and effectively. Ensuring compliance used to mean reams of spreadsheets, documents, checklists, post-it notes and more. Nowadays, we can use software to take the strain out of ensuring compliance, and report on performance in real time. This is just as important for independent operators (so you can ensure compliance on your day off) as for remotely-managed companies with lots of branches.

Critical functions

You can expect compliance software to help your teams manage:

• Food safety, temperature checks, stock rotation

• Fire and health & safety checks

• Incident reports

• Audits and inspections

• Opening and closing checks (like music levels, posters, lightbulbs)

• Cleaning checks

You can use the software to assign responsibilities, set up a schedule, take photos of work done or problems to report, and monitor progress.

Important integrations

Compliance software is useful on its own, though you could explore integrations to automate tasks even further. For example, you could link to your labour scheduling software to assign tasks, or reassign them if people swap shifts. You could link to your guest experience / mystery shopper programme to automatically create tasks (like changing lightbulbs) based on the latest audit. It would also be a good idea to feed your compliance data into any regular reports or dashboards you use to manage the business.

Users

Whoever is responsible for health & safety is likely to be most interested in compliance software, so it makes sense for him/her to take the lead in configuring, trialling and deploying the software (with an operations lead to ensure it is workable).

Your venue teams are likely to all be involved in compliance to an extent, and involving them in the compliance application ensure they take responsibility for working in a safe and effective way. The key to success (as is often the case) is to show users the project is being done for them, not to them.