Hartshorn Hook: The Hospitality Group Operating Smoothly with Lightspeed

Multiple locations with different missions

“With The Farrier we've got your classic pub serving amazing pints of Guinness and just providing really good value and good quality food that you expect from a pub. Then The Lucky Club is a bit more of a destination cocktail bar. With it being rooftop, we have very busy summers. We're smashing out loads of frozen margaritas, and generally giving people that really fun kind of Saturday afternoon that they want.” explained George Hartshorn, Food and Beverage Director.

Two different venues require different needs, but Lightspeed is a platform that suites both.

Data at your fingertips

“With the reporting feature of Lightspeed, we have great oversight and understand exactly how we've traded on previous dates. Being able to pull any data that we need from another week has been really useful, especially as we start forecasting for future business.” George explained.

“We can go back and find out how we traded on the same day last year. We can get that detail down to specifics such as our lunch service, our dinner service, and even hour-by-hour trading. That helps us with our staffing as we can predict how we're going to perform.” said George.

One point of contact for ePOS and Payments

After encountering major issues with the previous payment provider, Hartshorn Hook wanted a platform that was seamless from the get-go.

“When we started looking for a new payment solution, we were offered a number of different products. Lightspeed stood out for its competitive pricing, but the big bonus for us was the idea of having one point of contact and seamless integration with the ePOS which then saved us hours of staff time.” added George.

A reduced workload with Lightspeed Payments

“I was spending an hour a week going through things with our finance team. Our finance team themselves might have spent three or four hours a week going through all of the payments. We're talking in one week across two businesses, thousands and thousands of payments, and matching those up is no mean feat. With Lightspeed Payments, we really appreciated being able to reduce our workload, knowing that it’s integrated with our ePOS.” said George.

When it comes to the reporting, this has given the finance team peace of mind, too. “We never find ourselves scratching our heads trying to find anything. The reporting is quick, efficient and clear.” George added.

Hardware built to last

It’s not just the software that Hartshorn Hook loves, but the hardware, too.

“From a customer point of view, I personally think that every single part of the business needs to look and feel professional, and the Lightspeed Payments terminals do exactly that. They feel like a professional payment system, whereas some of the others don't quite feel like they belong in a high-capacity, busy restaurant. From a product and user point of view, they look very smart and they're very easy to use.” George said.

Forecasting for the future with Nory

The integration between Lightspeed and Nory is effortless, letting Hartshorn Hook prioritise their people and not the technology.

“With Nory, this instantaneous oversight that we're seeing is fantastic. I know exactly how many staff are working at any of our sites at any one time. I can see how many are meant to be working this week, and being able to check that against forecasts is really useful.” said George.

“When overseeing multiple sites, being able to have something that I can look at very quickly to check the progress of our sites is vital. Is our forecasting correct? Are our wage percentages where they need to be in terms kind of in relation to our forecast? Being able to do that saves me a lot of time.” George added.