Let’s face it, in the Food & Beverage Industry it is very easy to lose track of time. With so many things to do in such a short space of time many businesses find tasks being left undone which often impact profitability or the customer.
That brings us to the question. As a Food & Beverage Business Owner, how can I save time?
Automate Manual Ordering to Save Daily Operational Time
If you want to free up time fast, start with how orders come in. Automating manual ordering just means letting customers place their own orders online instead of your team writing everything down from calls, texts, and emails. The order lands in your system straight from the customer, so nobody has to type it out again or ring back to check the details.
An online ordering website helps you to automate food orders. Customers log in whenever it suits them, place the order themselves, and it’s ready to pick up on your end. Your team stops acting as a transcription service and gets back to actual fulfilment. If you’re still taking orders by phone or text, it’s worth reading why you shouldn’t take orders by SMS or email, because sorting this out is often the quickest way to reduce admin work in the food industry.
Centralise Business Operations in One System
Streamlining food business operations means managing ordering, invoicing, stock, reporting, and deliveries from a single connected system, rather than juggling spreadsheets and a handful of separate apps. When it all lives in one place, the same order, stock, and customer details get used right across the business, and nobody’s copying information from one tool into another.
Scattered systems create a lot of double work, and it tends to sneak up on you. An order comes in through one app, someone re-types it into the invoicing tool, then another person updates a stock spreadsheet on the side.
An order management system brings those jobs together. You enter an order once, and the same data flows through picking, invoicing, stock, and reporting on its own. Good automation tools are built to do exactly that, and connecting these functions in one system is really how you streamline the whole operation.
Improve Inventory Visibility to Avoid Rework
Inventory visibility just means knowing your real stock levels at any moment, so you don’t sell what you don’t have or reorder what’s already sitting in the warehouse. Without it, you’ll often lose hours to rework, things like cancelling orders, sorting out refunds, and making emergency runs to cover what’s short.
Poor stock visibility shows up in some frustrating ways. Say you confirm 200 cartons for a customer, then the picker goes looking, and there are only 150 in the cold room. Now someone has to call the customer, apologise, change the order, and maybe set up a second delivery. The sale took two minutes. The cleanup takes an hour, plus a bit of the customer’s goodwill.
Live inventory tracking helps you avoid that whole cycle. When stock updates automatically as orders come in and deliveries go out, your team’s far more likely to be working from accurate numbers. So you order the right amount, only promise what you can actually deliver, and skip the panic restocks. With perishable lines especially, that visibility protects you from waste and from selling stock that’s past its use-by date. Tight stock control really is part of good time management, because every error you avoid is time you never have to spend fixing it.
Streamline Invoicing and Payment Processing
Streamlining your invoicing means generating invoices straight from the order and collecting payment automatically, so your team’s not making invoices by hand or chasing overdue accounts. When the invoice goes out the moment an order’s confirmed, and payment’s debited at the agreed time, you cut both the paperwork and the late payments.
Set up automatic customer payments through a payment gateway, and funds get debited at the point of order or on agreed terms, which can really bring down the number of overdue accounts. Then pair that with a live Xero accounting integration, so invoices and payments sync on their own with no double entry at month-end. Tools like Xero have made this kind of automated reconciliation pretty standard for Australian businesses, and once it’s connected to your ordering system, most of that manual finance work just goes away.
Optimise Delivery Routes and Scheduling
Optimising your delivery routes means planning the most efficient run for each driver and tracking it in real time, so you can fit more drops into the same day. Better scheduling also lets you get the next batch of orders ready before a driver’s back, which clears out the downtime between runs.
Delivery is where time savings turn into real money, because how well you deliver often decides whether a customer sticks around. Even so, plenty of distributors still plan routes by hand each morning, guess at the timing, and have no idea where a driver is until they call in. That guesswork leads to backtracking, missed windows, and trucks sitting idle back at the warehouse.
A driver app like MiniVend makes your deliveries much easier to see and manage. You can check where each driver is, confirm drops as they happen, and have the next load picked and ready by the time they pull back in. No standing around, no wondering whether a delivery got made. If you want to read more methods for improving operational efficiency in the food business, EasyVend has a handy guide.
EasyVend has put together 5 proven tips that you can use to save time at your business in 2023.
Let’s get into it!
1. Take Advantage of Online Ordering
Is your business still taking orders via phone, SMS, or Email? If so, you are seriously limiting your businesses performance. One of the fastest and easiest ways to save time and maximise customer satisfaction in 2023 is to implement an Online Ordering Website.
The benefit of having your own Online Ordering Website is you limit the amount of time you spend manually taking orders. Customers can place orders online at a time that suits them best. Streamlining your business’s ordering through a designated online ordering website will give your team more time to focus on fulfilling customer orders.
2. Automate Customer Payments
How long do you spend chasing customers for payment? Chasing customers for payment isn’t a fun job, it’s time consuming and costly. Your business shouldn’t have to assign or employ someone for the sole role of chasing customers for payment, it will set you back.
Another very effective way that your business can save time and increase cashflow is by Automating Customer Payments using a Payment Gateway. The benefit of implementing a payment gateway to your business is customer payments are automatically debited at the time of purchase – thus significantly reducing debtors.
3. Utilise Technology
It’s no secret that technology is changing the way that businesses operate. Every day new technologies are being released that both increase efficiency and reduce operational costs. To save time at your business it is important that you utilise industry specific technology like an Order Management System (OMS).
Using industry specific software like an OMS gives your business the power to automate many daily operational tasks like Ordering, Invoicing, Stock Management, Reporting, Route Management and more in one central application.
Automating daily tasks will give your business back more time to focus on the more important roles like fulfillment and accelerating growth.
4. Track Drivers
Delivery Speed often makes or breaks a Food & Beverage Business. To acquire and retain customers, it is absolutely vital that your business does everything to increase and fulfill delivery deadline promises.
The best way to save time during the delivery process is to Track Driver Routes. Using a Driver App, your business can predictively fulfil orders whilst your drivers are on a run. Your team can have the next batch of orders ready to go for pickup by the time they arrive – no down time!
5. Invest in New Equipment
When was the last time that your business updated it’s equipment? The Food & Beverage Industry changes rapidly, the equipment that you are using now, may not be the best solution available and it could be holding you back from fulfilling your potential.
To achieve sustained success, it is important that your business researches and continues to invest in new equipment when it becomes available. The benefit of investing in new equipment is they may speed up your process, save you money and increase your order capacity.
Final Word,
In the Food & Beverage Industry it can often feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to get jobs done. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are strategies that you can use to save time and get more tasks done! The 5 Tips presented are a few proven ways Food & Beverage businesses can save time in 2023.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article. To read more articles like this, please visit the EasyVend latest news page here.
FAQs
How can food businesses save time in daily operations?
The biggest time-saving tips in the food business usually come from automating the repetitive admin: taking orders, raising invoices, collecting payments, and tracking stock. Move your customers onto online ordering, run everything from one central system, and you cut out the manual re-keying that eats whole mornings. The idea is simple: you stop your team from handling the same information three times over.
What is the best way to reduce manual work in food distribution?
One of the most effective things you can do is capture each order once, then let the data carry itself through the rest of the process. Online ordering removes the transcription, an order management system removes the re-entry between tools, and automated payments take the chasing off your hands. Cut the handoffs, and you cut both the busywork and the mistakes that come with it.
How do food business automation tools save time in food businesses?
Automation saves time by handling the routine jobs consistently, with barely any input from you. An order placed online quietly becomes an invoice, a stock update, and a delivery instruction, so nobody’s re-typing anything. That leaves your team free to spend their hours on fulfilment and customers, which is usually where the real value sits.
Why is inventory management important for saving time?
Good inventory management saves time by stopping the rework that comes from selling stock you don’t actually have. When your stock levels update in real time, you avoid the cancelled orders, refunds, and emergency restocks that each take far longer than the original sale. Accurate stock also makes reordering easier, so you’re not stuck fixing shortages or trying to shift surplus.
How can food distributors improve delivery efficiency?
You improve delivery efficiency by optimising routes, tracking your drivers in real time, and getting the next batch of orders ready before the truck’s back. A driver app shows where each run’s up to and confirms drops as they happen, which clears out the guesswork and downtime. More often than not, that means more deliveries from the same team, without anyone working longer hours.
About EasyVend,
For Supply Chain Businesses, EasyVend supports and automates every part of your business, freeing you up to grow your sales simply, unlike other ERP systems.
EasyVend includes key everyday features like Inventory Management, Online Ordering, Invoicing, Receipting, Automatic Credit Card Payments, Xero Accounting Integration, Route Management, Business reporting and more.
Using the latest technologies, EasyVend removes common frustrations making business more streamlined today!
To learn more about EasyVend or to get a no-obligation Trial EasyVend of the software, call us today on 1300 473 744 or submit the form below.