AI and automation for hospitality groups
Every rota and every stock order is a bet on what each site will sell. In most groups that bet is made by a GM, from memory, differently at every site, and never checked against what actually happened. It surfaces as overtime, waste and jagged supplier orders, and it is an admin problem long before it is a people problem.
Book the free AI consultationAstraeus builds this for multi-site food and drink operators, restaurants, bars, cafés and food-led groups with two or more sites in Ireland and the UK. The work sits around the systems you already run, whatever the till: joining sales data to the rotas and stock orders it should be driving, reconciling supplier invoices and delivery notes before they reach the accounts, catching the booking calls that ring out during service, and giving group level one view of forecast against actual across every site instead of twelve different guesses.
The founder spent nine years in kitchens and event catering, two years supplying 100+ hospitality accounts, and five and a half years selling EPOS and ordering systems to Irish operators. The pattern from all four jobs is the same: the data is already in the building, and nobody has joined it up. That is the job.
Workflow catalogue
Each row is a pattern to assess, not a claim that every business should implement it.
Before
Each site’s rota and stock order is a private guess, and nobody compares the guess with what the till actually took.
After
Sales, rota cost and order value sit in one weekly view per site, so the gap between the bet and the reality is visible while it can still be acted on.
Human checkpoint
Managers still write the rota and place the orders. The system shows the gap; it changes nothing on its own.
Before
Paper delivery dockets and emailed invoices are checked line by line when someone has time, and price creep gets through unnoticed.
After
Invoices are read automatically, matched against delivery notes and agreed prices, and only the exceptions land on a person’s desk.
Human checkpoint
A person approves every exception and every payment. Nothing is paid automatically.
Before
The phone rings through a busy service; the booking goes to the place down the road.
After
A missed call gets a text back within a minute, and booking requests from every channel land in one list for the team.
Human checkpoint
The team confirms every booking; nothing is scheduled automatically.
Before
Price increases arrive quietly inside invoices and are discovered at the end of the quarter, if at all.
After
Line prices are tracked against history, and a genuine movement is flagged the week it happens, per supplier and per product.
Human checkpoint
What to do about a price rise, renegotiate, switch or absorb, is a decision a person makes.
Hospitality runs on people and on trust in what is served. Both sides of that are protected by design.
Nothing changes anyone’s hours, shifts or pay automatically. The system can show a manager what demand looks like; the rota decision, and every conversation about it, belongs to a person.
A message that asks about allergens, ingredients or dietary safety routes straight to a person, unanswered by the system. That is a routing rule, not a policy.
Whatever EPOS you run remains the source of truth. Automations read from it and write around it, never over it, and your data stays in EU-hosted tools that do not train on it.
Invoice matching surfaces exceptions and prepares the approval; a person authorises every payment, every time.
The first step is a free 45-minute consultation, not a project.
We walk through how each site forecasts today, how invoices actually get checked, what happens to a booking call at 8pm on a Saturday, and where the admin hours go.
Within 48 hours you get a one-page note with one recommended next step and its price, including a rough figure for what the current gap is costing you a year.
Usually invoice reconciliation or the forecast-against-actual view, because both prove their value inside a month from your own numbers.
The honest boundary
The question worth asking before any of this is how far out last week’s forecast was, per site. Most groups cannot answer it, and the answer decides whether there is a project here at all. Automation will not fix a menu that does not sell or a site that should not be open on Mondays. And for larger groups, from roughly ten sites up, a dedicated hospitality operations platform can be the right answer rather than a custom build; if that is what the consultation finds, the findings note will say so and name it, because recommending the right tool is part of the job even when it is not ours.
Direct answers
No, and it is a design rule rather than a setting. The system can show a manager what the demand picture looks like, but hours, shifts and pay are decisions people make about people, and every one of them stays with a manager.
Most tills report sales well. The leak is between systems, not inside one: sales on the till, the rota in a spreadsheet or a scheduling app, orders on supplier portals and paper dockets. The work that pays is joining them, and the findings note will say if your current stack can already do it with configuration.
They will, and the point is not to make them identical. It is to make the same few numbers visible the same way for every site, so group level can see which differences are deliberate and which are drift.
Tools are EU-hosted and configured so nothing trains on your data, each workflow carries the minimum it needs, and the data path is documented end to end so it can be shown to anyone who asks.
Then most of this is more machinery than you need, and saying so is part of the job. The missed-call and booking capture can stand alone for a busy single site; the forecasting and group visibility work earns its keep from two sites up.
The consultation is free. Everything after that is a fixed, quoted price agreed before work starts, and the findings note only ever recommends one next step rather than a menu.
If you run two or more food and drink sites and the forecast lives in each manager’s head, book the free 45-minute consultation. You get a one-page findings note, a rough annual cost of the current gap, and one priced recommendation, implemented by Astraeus.
Book the free AI consultation