RestoDesk: Bringing a 35-Branch Restaurant Chain Online — POS, Kitchen, and Inventory Unified

A National Restaurant Chain operates 35 restaurant branches across Dhaka and Chittagong. When their CEO first described the operational state of the business to us, the picture was consistent: paper Kitchen Order Tickets (KOTs) that got lost, misread, or delayed in busy service periods; a decade-old POS at each branch that could not communicate with any other system; no centralised inventory tracking; and zero real-time visibility into which branches were performing, which were struggling, and why.

The food cost problem was the most financially damaging. Industry standard for an F&B operation in Bangladesh is 28–32% food cost as a percentage of revenue. The client's internal estimate — and they were not certain of it — was 35–40%. Inventory was tracked by kitchen managers on paper at the beginning and end of each day, with no recipe-level costing to correlate what was purchased against what was sold. Wastage, theft, and over-portioning were all happening, but there was no data to quantify where or how much. Management guessed at the problem; they couldn't measure it.

Online ordering represented a different category of missed opportunity. The client had no delivery app presence beyond Pathao Food, where they paid a 25–30% commission on every order. They had no owned digital channel. Customers who wanted to order directly — which many preferred for regular orders and catering requests — had no option but to call a branch and hope someone picked up. The CEO's stated goal was straightforward: "I want to know what's actually happening in my restaurants, and I want to own the customer relationship."

We proposed RestoDesk over a bespoke build for the same reason we always do: 80% of the functional requirements of a restaurant management system are identical across F&B operators. The unique elements — The client's menu structure, bKash/Nagad payment integration for the Bangladesh market, their specific wastage tracking workflow, and the multi-branch reporting format the CEO needed — were handled as configuration and lightweight extensions.

The rollout strategy was the most important decision of the project. Deploying all 35 branches simultaneously would have been operationally reckless. We agreed on a pilot: two branches in Gulshan, chosen because they represented the two extremes of The client's volume range (one high-traffic, one moderate). The pilot ran for three weeks. Kitchen staff and floor managers received hands-on training during service — not classroom training, which gets forgotten. We stationed a RestoDesk implementation specialist at each branch for the first week to resolve issues in real time. The pilot produced 11 product adjustments, most of them small UX improvements identified by kitchen staff during actual service. Those adjustments were shipped before the wider rollout began.

Recipe-level inventory costing was the technically and operationally complex piece. It required building a costing database: every menu item broken down into ingredient quantities, linked to purchase unit prices from the most recent supplier invoices. When a sale is processed through the POS, the system automatically deducts the theoretical ingredient usage from inventory. The gap between theoretical and actual inventory — measured at each branch closing — is waste. This gives management a precise waste figure by ingredient, by branch, and by shift rather than the previous end-of-day guess.

RestoDesk went live across all 35 branches over a 14-week phased rollout with zero branch downtime during transition. Each branch runs React-based POS terminals on tablets (with a desktop option for the cashier station), kitchen KDS screens that display orders in real time and track ticket times, and a branch manager mobile app on Flutter for real-time stock checks and shift reporting.

The online ordering channel launched three weeks after the initial POS rollout, once kitchen operations had stabilised on the new system. The Flutter mobile app (iOS and Android) allows customers to order for delivery or collection, track order status in real time, and earn loyalty points on purchases. bKash and Nagad are fully integrated for cashless payment — the primary digital payment preference in the Bangladeshi market. Within 60 days of launch, the owned digital channel was processing 280+ orders per week across all branches, contributing 28% of total revenue without the 25–30% commission Pathao was taking.

The central analytics dashboard — the piece the CEO had been waiting for — provides real-time P&L by branch, food cost percentage by branch and by ingredient, ticket time performance, waste variance, and daily sales against target. The CEO reviews it from his phone every morning before leaving for the office. In the first 30 days, the dashboard identified four underperforming branches where food cost was running at 38–42% — two due to over-portioning, two due to a specific supplier's ingredient weight inconsistency. Both were corrected within the month. The overall food cost reduction of 19% was reached within 90 days.