The Seven Steps for Restaurant Automation

The labor checks, the invoice audits, the review replies: every report that builds itself in my operation got built with the same seven steps, in the same order. The order is the whole trick. Most automations die because someone did step six first.

This is the concept layer. It won't walk you through your first build click by click; that's what Square One and the playbook are for. What this will do is put the process in your head, and in your AI assistant's. More on that at the bottom.

"Every morning at 7am, a report lands in my inbox showing yesterday's payroll leaks with a dollar figure and the exact fix." One sentence, naming three things: what lands, where it lands, and when. If you need two sentences, you're describing two automations. Split them and build the more painful one first.

List every place the automation will read from: POS, scheduling app, invoices, a spreadsheet, an inbox. Pull each one manually, once, yourself. Most automation failures are access failures: an expired login, a renamed report, an export that changed shape. Find that out on day one, when it costs five minutes, instead of on day thirty, when it's been failing silently for a month.

The instructions live in a written document your assistant reads every time it runs: what to pull, how to judge it, what the output looks like, what to do when data is missing. In Claude these are called skills. The schedule itself holds one line: run the document.

This is crash insurance, and I paid the tuition personally. My desktop app crashed last month and the reinstall wiped every schedule I had. Every written instruction survived, because documents are files and files get backed up. Rebuilding meant re-setting alarm clocks. Logic that lives only inside a schedule dies with the schedule.

Never schedule anything you haven't run manually. You're checking three things. Correct: the numbers match what you'd find pulling them yourself. Complete: it handles the weird day (the closed Monday, the missing punch) by saying so plainly instead of inventing data. Actionable: every line ends in a fix you would actually do. Two clean runs in a row earns it a schedule.

Before anything runs unattended, write the rules that make it safe to stop watching. Mine: drafts only. Anything aimed at a guest, a vendor, or the public waits for my approval, every time. Never spends money. Never deletes anything. A task built to read and report stays read-and-report; giving it the power to act is a separate decision, made once, in writing. An automation you have to babysit is a chore with extra steps.

Your sales data updates every minute. You make labor decisions Monday morning. Schedule the report for the moment you'll act on it. A report that arrives when you can't act on it trains you to ignore it, and an ignored automation is worse than none — it's noise wearing a uniform.

One document, stored somewhere a computer crash can't reach. One line per automation: name, the document it runs, its schedule, where the output goes, the date you built it. Ten seconds per task. When a machine dies, you hand the registry to your assistant and rebuild the whole stack in an afternoon. I know because that's exactly how I rebuilt mine.

This post is written so you can hand it to your assistant. Copy everything above into Claude and say: "These are my rules for building automations. Save them as a skill and hold me to the order every time we build one." Now the process lives on both sides of the conversation. You know it, and the machine enforces it.

Starting from nothing? Square One gets you set up in about 30 minutes. The full playbook is on its way to this list: building a review responder start to finish, in your voice, with your approval on every reply.

All problems in restaurants can be solved. The process is how you solve the same one only once.