Almost every IT problem that ruins a service was detectable that morning.
The card machine that fails at 8pm was already struggling at 4pm. The printer that stops sending tickets to the kitchen had run out of paper before anyone opened the doors. The Wi-Fi that collapses on a full room had been sitting on a router that quietly rebooted overnight and never came back properly.
None of that is bad luck. It is timing. Problems surface when the system is under load, which in hospitality means the worst possible moment, in front of a full room.
This restaurant IT checklist covers ten checks a duty manager can run before service. Most take under a minute. Together they catch the overwhelming majority of issues that would otherwise land at 7.30pm.
Why pre-service checks matter more in hospitality
In most industries, an IT problem means someone raises a ticket and works on something else for an hour.
In a restaurant, an IT problem means guests are sitting in front of you with no way to order and no way to pay. There is no working on something else. There is no rescheduling. The revenue for that hour does not come back, and the guest who waited twenty minutes for a card machine to reconnect remembers it far longer than they remember the food.
That asymmetry is why hospitality benefits from a pre-service routine more than almost any other sector. Ten minutes before doors open is worth an hour of firefighting during service. It is the same principle behind checking the gas, the fridges, and the floats. Technology deserves a place on the same list.
The 10-point restaurant IT checklist
Run these in order. Assign them to the opening manager and make them part of the standard opening routine.
1. Test a card payment on every terminal
Not just one. Every terminal on the floor.
Run a low-value transaction or use your provider’s test function. A terminal that has lost its connection will often look completely normal on screen until someone tries to use it. Finding that out with a guest waiting is the expensive version of this test.
2. Print a test ticket to every kitchen printer
Send one ticket to each printer and physically walk the pass to confirm it arrived.
Kitchen printers fail quietly. They run out of paper, drop off the network, or jam without anyone noticing. The failure only becomes visible when a table’s food never appears, by which point you are twenty minutes behind.
While you are there, check the paper. Every printer, every day.
3. Confirm the EPOS is talking to head office
Open your reporting or sync screen and confirm the last successful sync was recent.
An EPOS that has stopped syncing will usually keep taking orders locally, which is why nobody notices. Then a week of trading data is missing, stock figures are wrong, and someone in finance is trying to reconstruct it manually.
4. Check the internet connection, properly
Do not judge this by whether a phone shows bars.
Run a speed test on a device connected to the venue network. You are looking for two things: that it works at all, and that the result looks like a normal day. A connection that has failed over to a backup line will often still work, just slower, and you want to know that before the room fills up rather than after.
5. Check guest Wi-Fi from the guest side
Disconnect from the staff network, connect as a guest, and load a page.
Guest Wi-Fi runs on separate configuration from staff Wi-Fi, so testing one tells you nothing about the other. The landing page can break, the daily reset can fail, and the network can look perfectly healthy from the office while being unusable at table twelve.
6. Confirm the booking system is live and synced
Open the booking system and confirm today’s covers are showing correctly.
Booking platforms sit between your website, third-party channels and the floor. When the sync breaks, the diary looks fine but the covers are wrong, and you find out when two parties arrive for the same table.
7. Glance at the CCTV feed
Load the viewer and confirm every camera is showing a live image and recording.
Cameras fail silently and nobody looks until something happens and the footage is needed. Ten seconds a day is a very low price for knowing the system is actually running.
8. Check the back office machine and any tablets are charged and online
Handheld ordering devices, manager tablets, and the back office PC all need to be awake, charged and connected before service, not during it.
Devices that spend the night on a shelf rather than a dock are the most common cause of a mid-service scramble for a working handheld.
9. Confirm music and screens are running
Background music and digital screens are not critical systems, but a silent room at 6pm is noticeable and reflects on the venue.
These usually run on their own devices and their own subscriptions, which means they fail on their own schedule and nobody owns them. Add them to the list.
10. Log anything unusual, even if it fixed itself
This is the one most teams skip and the one that pays back the most.
If a terminal needed restarting twice, or the Wi-Fi dropped for a minute, write it down. Intermittent problems are almost always early warnings, and a written record is what lets your IT provider find the cause instead of guessing.
A short shared note or a channel in your messaging app is enough. It does not need to be a system.
Make it a standard, not a good intention
A checklist only works if it belongs to someone.
Put it in the opening routine alongside the fridge temperatures and the float count. Name the role responsible, not the person, so it survives holidays and staff changes. Keep it to ten minutes, because a check that takes half an hour will quietly stop happening within a fortnight.
For a group, run the same checklist at every site. Consistency is what turns ten separate routines into useful information: when site four reports the same intermittent fault three days running, that is a pattern worth acting on rather than an isolated annoyance.
What this checklist cannot fix
Pre-service checks catch problems. They do not prevent the underlying causes.
If terminals regularly need restarting, that is usually a network or configuration issue. If printers keep dropping off, that is often a cabling or Wi-Fi coverage problem rather than a printer problem. If the connection fails over weekly, something upstream needs attention.
A good checklist gives you the early warning. Fixing the root cause is what stops the warning appearing every week, and that is where a provider who knows your site earns its place. More on that in our post on The Importance of Technology in Hospitality, and on our approach to managed IT for hospitality operators.
The goal is simple. Nothing your guests notice, ever.
Want this as a printable checklist?
We can send you the ten-point pre-service checklist as a one-page PDF for your opening manager to work through.
Request the checklist → or call 0330 313 0966 and we will send it over.