Fourth understand the importance of listening to customers and ensuring that each sector is catered for. With that Fourth have introduced new user group forums initially targeting the Hotel sector with Restaurants, Bars and Pubs to follow.

The meetings cover specific subject areas and will allow customers to understand current functionality, discuss demands and requirements of the sector as well as giving the opportunity to explore ideas for Fourth future solutions. The outcome of the forums is to help grow a customer influenced development roadmap, providing absolute solutions for Labour, Stock and Purchasing.

If you would like to be part of the Hotel user group sessions then read more here.

David Heath,
Customer Success Team

Success story

Gaucho Grill, the Argentinian restaurant specialist is renowned for its high quality steaks and wines.

With 14 sites in the UK and 2 international locations, Gaucho's dedication ensures that every time you visit, you experience the true essence of Argentinian life. Its food, its wine, its culture and importantly the passion of its people.

Success were asked to help Gaucho with best practice for their overseas locations:

Our people

Hi! I'm Manoj Sangany. My role as Head of Service is to be responsible for the service delivery across all of our products for our customers, and I am responsible for the Service Team in ensuring we consistently provide a high level of service for our customer base, both internal and external.

My background is 5 years in a electronics, split 2.5 years each between 'operations' and 'warehouse team leader', 7 years in a call centre, working as 1st, 2nd line, Technical Team Leader, Technical Service Manager where I managed teams in excess of 100 across U.K and Malta and account management for top 20 ISPs in the U.K, I then went on to work for Websense leading their support team, after which I joined their competitor Scansafe (Cisco) leading their technical support teams and was responsible for managing their channel VARs, before I was lucky enough to join the team at Fourth on December 1st 2009, as Service Manager.

The main reasons that attracted me to join Fourth were that my previous company were the pioneers in web security for SaaS, so there was a natural synergy to join Fourth, the pioneers in SaaS for the hospitality industry, at the time I was also impressed by the explosive growth and Fourth being awarding the Sunday times Microsoft Tech Track 100 award for the 13th fastest growing company in the U.K.

I quickly learned that Fourth was genuinely a 'people company' and this has always been a big USP for me, we have some exceptionally talented people at Fourth.

About me outside of work: May 6th it was my 11 years wedding anniversary, I have 2 beautiful boys Shaylan 7 and Anay 4, which some of you have met. Things I am very passionate about in life are: passion for creating a customer service culture both inside and outside of work, creating and launching new business ventures, playing poker (Texas Hold'em), actively involved in charity work and supporting my football team L.F.C. YNWA!

I am very proud of how the service team has developed, and have seen them grow in many ways and they for me are the unsung heroes at Fourth as they work tirelessly to ensure we provide the best service possible to our customers, and every year the 'bar' is raised through various initiatives we work on and the talent we attract in the team. At Fourth my day is never the same, as I work with many different teams in the business and customers, and it's this that makes it so exciting and rewarding for me and to turn challenges into corrective actions improving process and customer satisfaction whilst developing talent this is what drives me the most.

I am looking forward to being part of the future milestones at Fourth, be it us entering the USA market or acquiring our next big client.

Get involved

There are still spaces on our Success workshops in Macclesfield; our offices are located less than 1 mile from Macclesfield station.

Training

Payroll reporting workshop

June 26th 10am-1pm Covent Garden

Sarah Edmonds will be covering the reports tab in the payroll module as well as how to create custom reports. Recently added exports will be highlighted demonstrating how to extract data from the system. At the end there will be a chance for Q&A's for any payroll module questions.

Best practice

It's best practice to ensure your sales figures in fnb manager match what is reported on the till before entering your stock counts or the stock reconciliation may show unrealistic differences.

To ensure all the sales have imported to fnb and are matching, go to Stock Management, under Action click on Import POS figures.

You will see a row with Raw File next to it; this is the total from the till, check to see if the Net total matches what the till reports. Beneath the Raw file is the Verified Sales and this is what sales fnb can read in the raw files from the PLU's from the recipes. If there are any differences between these two rows these can be amended (where applicable) by seeing what PLU's are missing or what menu items have no cost. To view the list of missing or zero cost price PLU's click Verify and Process PLU Data.

Either you or your administrator must add or amended the PLU's so the net sales match to ensure the stock reconciliation is more accurate.

Top tips

people system
Un-tick the Hide Tronc Rate from Employment Details Screen? within the HR module's Global settings to enable you to assign a Tronc rate when creating the employee. This will save you time when allocating tronc.

fnb manager
When you have a menu item available in different size (e.g. large and small glass of wine), use the copy menu item functionality. You can then use the ingredient ratio to select 0.5, 1, 2 or 3 times the quantity of the original recipe.

trade simple
Forgot your password to trade simple? No problem! A password can be requested by following these easy steps: Go to your login page http://customername.tradesimple.net/ Click on Forgotten your password? link under Membership. Enter your username and click on Request New Password.

A new password will be sent into the mailbox. Once you have received it, login to trade simple and change your password immediately.

star chef
For new ingredients to be created (uploaded) using the template, all the required data fields on the ingredients template must have data in them. These required fields correspond to cells under columns C, F, G, J, K, L and M on the ingredient template.

Legal corner

Should employers be able to legitimately ask candidates for their Facebook passwords during their recruitment process?

Recent reports from the USA have sparked controversy as employers have been accused of requesting Facebook passwords from candidates to access their profiles.

Would it seem suspicious if employees refused to provide such personal details? Or is such a request a clear invasion of employee privacy?

Some practical guidance for employers would be to tread carefully to avoid employment claims for acts of discrimination, for breaching the duty of trust and confidence or for processing sensitive personal data in breach of the Data Protection Act 1998.

For further details, please read this article.

Fourth Hospitality is the leading provider of Software-as-a-Service solutions for the hospitality industry for core cost control of labour, payroll, stock and purchasing.