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Running the venue
Admin scorecard for restaurants and pubs: how many office hours a week could AI prepare for you to check, job by job
Enter the hours a week your venue spends on enquiries, the rota, reviews and invoices to see which jobs AI could prepare and what stays with you.
The office in a restaurant or pub is usually a laptop on the end of the bar, opened after close. Function enquiries wait there, along with the rota, a stack of supplier invoices and the reviews nobody has answered since the weekend. The work is small in each piece and never finished. This scorecard asks how many hours a week each of those jobs takes in your venue and shows which could be prepared by a tool for a manager to approve, which stay with a person, and what that time costs you.
Free tool
Admin scorecard for a restaurant or pub: the office hours a week that could be prepared by AI and checked by you, job by job
Works in your browser. Nothing you type leaves this device unless you ask us to email you the result.
The jobs it asks about
Six of the eight jobs are writing and matching from information the venue already holds. A function enquiry reply needs availability, the menu and the deposit terms; our function enquiry template shows the layout that gets a yes or a no quickly. A rota is built from availability and bookings, with the wage cost set against forecast sales as the rota cost calculator does. Review replies follow a pattern that the review reply writer sets out. Supplier invoices are matched to deliveries and price rises listed. Confirmations, reminders and deposit requests go out on fixed days. Allergen sheets are updated from recipes for the chef to check.
How the score is worked out
There is one assumption and you can change it. For every job a tool prepares, the scorecard keeps a share of the time for a person to read the draft and approve it. We set that at a quarter. So a job that takes four hours a week by hand is counted as three hours handed over and one hour kept. Jobs that stay with a person are counted in full on your side. The yearly figure is the handed-over hours multiplied by the hourly cost and the number of weeks you enter. It is a cost of time. It becomes money only if the hours go on paid work, or a role you were about to fill is not filled.
Where the line sits
Two jobs stay with a person. The phone during service is the first: tools that answer restaurant calls exist and our review covers them, but they are a separate purchase from office drafting. The second is judgement about the menu, the team and the suppliers. Allergens need a careful line. A tool can rebuild the matrix when a recipe changes, and it can flag that a supplier has swapped a product, but the chef checks it before it reaches a customer, because a wrong allergen sheet is the one piece of paperwork here that can hurt someone. The same applies to deposits and no-show fees: the message can be drafted, but the terms have to be ones the customer saw when booking.
A worked example
With the example hours left as they are, the scorecard shows 22.5 hours of office work a week, 15.5 of them on the six jobs a tool can prepare. Keeping a quarter for checking leaves 11.6 hours a week handed over, 52% of the total. At £15 an hour over 46 weeks that is £8,021 a year. The three largest are booking and function enquiries (3 of 4 hours), the weekly rota (2.3 of 3) and supplier invoices (2.3 of 3). What stays with a person: the phone during service, and menu, hiring and supplier decisions, 7 hours. The example hours are ours, chosen to be plausible for a small restaurant or pub; they are not survey figures, and the point of the tool is that you replace them with your own.
The three readiness questions
The hours say what could be handed over. The last three questions say whether it would work in your restaurant or pub this month. First, are the rules written down? A tool follows a page that says what a good reply looks like, what must never be said and when to stop and ask; it cannot follow habits that live in one person's head. Second, does the work arrive in writing? Jobs that come by email, web form or from a system with an export can be drafted from. Jobs that come by phone or on paper have to be typed in first. Third, is there one named person who approves drafts every working day? Without one, drafts queue, and a queue of unapproved drafts is slower than doing the job by hand.
What to do with the result
Start with the job at the top of the list and no other. Write its rules on one page, run it with a person approving every draft for a fortnight, and count how many drafts went out unchanged. If most did, lower the checking share for that job and move to the second. If few did, the rules page is wrong, not the idea.
Overlyft sets up AI assistants for restaurants and pubs built around drafted jobs like the six above; the work is priced after a fixed-price audit, and you pay the AI provider directly for any subscription. The scorecard works the same whichever tool you buy, or if you buy none and give the top job to a part-time administrator instead. Our comparison of the AI tools sold to restaurants and pubs sets out what else is on the market and what each costs.
Short answers from this page
Can AI handle bookings and admin for a restaurant or pub?
The written side: booking and function enquiries by email, confirmations and reminders, review reply drafts, rota costing and supplier paperwork. It does not replace the person on the door or the phone at service. Overlyft can set up an AI assistant that drafts and files, and the manager approves anything that goes to a customer.
Where this comes from: Arithmetic on the hours entered; the checking share is our stated assumption and can be changed. Rules behind what a person checks: Food Information Regulations 2014 (allergen information); Consumer Rights Act 2015 (fairness of deposit and cancellation terms)
AEO Lookup editorial team
We write practical guides for people who run small UK firms, and we check every fact against its source on the date shown. Read how we review, or tell us if something has changed.
