Managing an Employee Dining Program is a Piece of Cake

The Challenge

With several unique concepts and 35 locations throughout the United States, our client needed to streamline its employee dining program, which offers a monthly dining allowance to employees based on their individual role in the organization. The program was established to not only provide an extra employment perk, but also to enable employees to dine at the different concepts within the chain. While dining, employees are trained in best practices and acquire a good perspective on the chain’s brand philosophy and products. In addition, the restaurant group receives a continuous stream of feedback regarding the quality of its service and menu items from employees who dine within the brand.

In the previous system, servers would comp the meal at the POS and employees were instructed to turn all of their dining receipts into accounting for reconciliation. Accounting would then run 30 individual restaurant POS reports and reconcile each dining receipt against them – an arduous task to say the least.

The program carried a host of challenges besides reconciliation and the labor to implement the program. One of the biggest challenges was identifying who had dining privileges and who did not. Servers had no way of knowing how much comp dining was authorized for each individual employee, and had trouble knowing when an ex-employee’s benefits had been revoked. 

 

The Program

The employee dining program operates with a unique 8-tier card template. Each tier contains attributes for different employee types (e.g., management trainees, regional managers, etc.) that identify how much money is automatically loaded on the dining cards each month.

The new, Paytronix-powered employee dining program has three key benefits.

 
1.     Program reports are mapped to the restaurant group’s specific accounting needs. The accounting group simply views or downloads a consolidated report from the web-based merchant interface. Employee dining reports display card use, amount spent by individual, by location, and more.
2.     Centralized control of card funds allow administrators to assign funds on a monthly schedule based upon the cardholders position within the organization. The program administrator quickly and easily moves users between tiers as employees migrate between concepts and roles within the organization. At the administrator’s option, funds are automatically reloaded onto cards at the beginning of each month.
3.     For fraud prevention, a magnetic strip card is used to identify the user and track specific cardholder activity; capped, monthly dollar allowances prevent overspending by cardholders; management has the ability to immediately disable lost cards and cards held by ex-employees. Since the employee dining behavior is stored within the system, administrators can quickly access aged data to detect trends or reconcile against POS data, if necessary.
 

The Results

Management and the accounting group rave about how much easier its employee dining program is to operate. With centralized reports that are easily accessible via the web interface, program administrators can quickly reconcile spending each month.

 
To learn more about how you can save time with a streamlined employee dining program, contact us.
 
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