How to Automate Slice

Slice is where an independent pizzeria takes its orders

Slice is ordering and marketing software built for independent pizzerias, and deliberately not for restaurants in general. The menus assume pizza: sizes, halves, toppings priced by portion, the special that only exists at lunchtime.

Orders arrive from your own website, from Google, Facebook, Instagram and TripAdvisor, from the Slice app and from slicelife.com, and Slice Register takes the ones that come to the counter or over the phone as well. The Owner's Portal is the shop's side of it: the sales, the menu, the categories, the Customizations that make a half-and-half work, and the promo codes.

Behind all that is a family business. One or two people who know the ovens, a driver, somebody answering the phone at six on a Friday. Nobody in the building was hired to sit in front of a laptop.

The tablets on the counter do not agree with each other

There is a Slice tablet by the till. Next to it, most likely, sit two more from the delivery marketplaces, and each has its own menu, its own prices and its own idea of what you are open for.

So a price rise happens four times, on four screens, on four different evenings, and one of them gets forgotten. An item runs out and is switched off on two of them. Holiday hours are updated everywhere except the one taking the most orders.

Then the counting. Last night's total is the Slice orders, plus the marketplace payouts that land a week later net of commission, plus the cash in the drawer. The cheese invoice went up and nobody has worked out what that does to a large pepperoni. A one-star review from Saturday is still sitting there on Tuesday.

It is an hour a day that has to happen after service, done by whoever is still standing.

Slice

One number for the whole night Slice orders, marketplace payouts and the cash drawer added up together, then checked against what the bank actually received.

Menus that stopped matching Every item compared across the tablets on your counter, so a price that only got changed in three places is caught the same day.

This week's cheese against the menu Distributor prices read before the order goes in and set against what a large pizza sells for, while the price can still change.

Slice Register counts one tablet's worth of the night

Slice does more for a pizzeria than most independent shops manage alone, and none of it needs setting up twice.

Slice Register takes online, phone and in-person orders into one system, with Caller ID so the name and the order history come up when the phone rings, and consolidated reports covering online and offline sales together. The Owner's Portal lets you edit the menu yourself: add an item, group it into a category, set when that category is available, and build the Customizations for toppings, halves and required choices. Slice also runs marketing on the shop's behalf, with automated text and email campaigns, a loyalty programme, seasonal promotions and win-back offers aimed at customers who have not ordered in a while.

For a shop with no marketing person, that last one does real work.

The limit is written into the design. Slice reports on what came through Slice. The marketplace tablets are separate businesses with separate dashboards. The distributor's ordering site, where cheese and flour are priced this week, is connected to nothing. Neither is the bank, the payroll system, or a review posted on a site Slice does not run. Every one of those decides the week's profit, and every one sits behind a different login.

The same pizza can be priced against what it costs this week

The hour after service could start with the comparisons already made instead of a row of logins to work through.

The menu compared across every tablet on the counter, item by item, so the large pepperoni that is a dollar cheaper on one marketplace is caught the day it happens rather than a month later. This week's cheese and flour prices read off the distributor's ordering site and compared with last week's invoice and with a menu price that has not moved since spring.

Last night's takings pulled from each channel into one figure with the marketplace commission taken off, then compared with what the bank actually received. Items marked out of stock on one tablet and still selling on another. Holiday hours checked everywhere before the holiday. Reviews from every site collected into one list, so three complaints about the same driver look like the pattern they are.

Reading is safe. The other half is not. Changing a menu price, texting a customer, replying to a review in public or refunding an order should be prepared and then approved by somebody who runs the shop.

The make line is not the place for arithmetic

A pizza's real margin is spread across the register, the marketplace tablets and the distributor's order page. Nobody sees the number until someone has been to all three and done the subtraction.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the Owner's Portal, the marketplace dashboards, the distributor's ordering site and the bank, reads what is on each screen, and sends the comparison to your phone before you open up.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Menu changes, customer messages and review replies are drafted and wait for a person.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.