Is bar management has become the biggest headache for you? Are you still spending hours on manually tracking the bar inventory and bookings? If yes, then switching to the “Bar Management App” isn’t just a good business move, but also an urgent demand for the success of your bar. 

With the projection that nightclubs and bars generate about $259 billion in revenue each year and expected to grow at 1.9% CAGR, undoubtedly clubbing and boozing has become a modern American culture.  

And we don’t have to tell you about the US’s nightlife and the constantly evolving competition you have to face everyday in the Bar and nightclub industry. But all we can assure you that while others are losing profits by using pen, paper, calculator or excel sheets to manage their business, you’ll be ahead of the game by having a bar management app for your nightclub or restaurant. 

A well-planned bar management app can bring all these benefits to your business from organised inventory records, innovative business insights to better business opportunities for operations and sales. With a strategically developed bar app, you can take complete control of your bar and make smarter decisions to ensure your bar runs profitably.

Are you still wondering how technology, bar and nightclub will get along?

Well, technology is everywhere and it’s a golden age for restaurants or clubs to take their business to new heights by simply integrating the right tech-stack or hiring a  mobile app development company. No matter whether it’s a pizzeria or casual dining, we can notice technology everywhere. As the competition grows at the fast-paced, restaurants, bars and nightclubs are looking for new approaches to retain the old customers and attract new ones. 

And creating the bar management app is one of the best ways to get your business ready for market changes and stay ahead of your competition.

Ready? Let’s Go!

Bars and Nightclub Industry Snapshot at Macro Level 

Before you directly dive into the app development process and learn how it could benefit your business, let’s have a look over a large picture of the market:

Essential Bars and Nightclub Industry Statistics

• Bars and nightclubs in the US generated about $24 billion in revenue each year.
• 7 million people regularly purchase wine at a bar or nightclub.
• Over 20 million people went to a bar or a nightclub located in Casino.
• Currently, 62,500 bars and nightclubs are active in the US-based industry. 
• The bar industry is growing at 2.9% YoY. 
• Taverns are making over 30% of the bars in the US, considered the most significant segment of bars.

In a nutshell: These trends and analytics portray that bars and nightclubs are booming- as revenues are boosting, customers are spending more, people have started visiting more frequently. On one side, the industry is growing at its best. On the other hand, new businesses entering this industry have to face all these challenges. 

While it’s already challenging to own a bar or a nightclub as it takes $850,000+ to start up this business, so make the best impact on the community by developing a bar management app.

What Exactly is a Bar Management App and How Does It Work?

Bar Management app is a simple software application designed with an advanced level of features to help you manage the daily operations of running a nightclub or bar more efficiently. So instead of spending hours on managing bar inventory or reservations, a single bar management app can assist you with everything right from announcing offers, happy hours, deals to pre-bookings. Technology-integrated bar management solutions are designed to cater to the nightclub industry’s needs and increase efficiency in all aspects. 

This app is ideally developed for restaurants, bars and nightclubs with multiple features yet simple enough to access even small bars. These point-of-sale solutions are developed for cross-platform (Android and iOS), making it mobile and convenient for your servers to use and enhance customer experience by eliminating the wait time. 

So, all you need is to hire app developers that can help you build the right app. By using the bar management app, you’ll have better control over your entire bar operations. It allows you to automate daily operations, keep track of tasks, and stay top of the shift changes..

How Does a Bar Management App Works?

Bar management app developed with an easy to navigate user interface to allow users to feel comfortable and manage admin, staff, and reservations in a hassle-free manner.

• The app’s admin feature provides all in-house statistics related to total bookings, reservations, sales, stock, and growth insights.
• The Reservation feature of the app provides a user-friendly display of all the reservations and their statistics. To manage all reservations, make sure the app is integrated with the scalable CRM solution to manage your customer database. 
• The staff feature will show all staffing schedules for assigned stations.

Apart, the app is integrated with multiple tools that allow bars, nightclubs and lounges to manage their events and reservations according to their table arrangements, floor plans, customer relationships, staff assignment, guest list and more. 

By using the bar management app, you will have more control over your operations. Here’s how it generally works:

• Place an order by the user with a simple touch on the app.
• Make a reservation at the bar or nightclub, or restaurants by using valid coupons or during happy hours.
• Payment processing can be done in advance by leveraging multiple payment gateways.
• Provide an electronic receipt to confirm the payment and reservations.
• Using advanced features such as HD quality image gallery, 360-degree view of the venue, the bar’s live location, and more.

Rest, it all depends on your business requirements and budget and how complex app structure you would require for your venture. 

How Bar Management Software Makes Your Business More Profitable?

The bar management app is much more than managing your bar and provides you with the best platform to generate better yet potential business revenue generation opportunities. 

While bars and nightclubs are the most alluring industries to get started, what if you cannot engage customers in your business? How do customers know about the best performing menu items? How much shrinkage do you have in the bar? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you might probably be missing out on the market’s potential segment. So before you proceed to hire developer, let’s understand how it can add a competitive edge to your business and give you real insight into the market.

Here’s how a bar management app can help your business grow:

Minimise the Risk of Error in Database

Keeping track of bookings and inventory with pen and paper can lead to human errors and end you with a business loss. However, with a single click on the application, you can get the exact insights of your bar at the end of every shift. Through admin access of the app, you can determine how much product was used, sold and how much stock is left in the house for the next shift. 

Analyse Business Performance

Tired of keeping weekly records of your nightclub with excel sheets? If yes, then a bar management app will be an excellent option for you. It comes with a unique report feature that tracks all the valuable information such as the amount of spillage happening at the bar, your monthly bookings, sales and more. With a bar management app, you can access the data to reduce cost and improve customer services. 

Save Valuable Time

As running a bar itself isn’t enough challenge, you also need to handle and manage the bar data manually. Doing calculations, reservations and tracking business progress manually take up the valuable time you indeed don’t have. Instead of entering each item and its details manually into a spreadsheet, it is better to let your bar management app automatically manage the data while adding the stock, the inventory, processing orders, reservations and more.

In a nutshell: If you are all convinced to get started with your bar management app, then it is simple to hire a mobile app development company and start rolling into this thriving industry. But only having the best app development team will not work for you. You must have an app idea and the feature sets and technology that you want to leverage in the application. So let’s proceed to know how to get your app developed.

How To Develop a Bar Management App?

There are several guides available on the internet explaining the lifecycle of app development, but before falling for that idea, keep in mind that every business has different app requirements, target audience and budget. So let’s understand how to create a bar management app that helps you stand first in the competition. 

Here are is the step-by-step guide to build a bar management app for your business:

1. Do Market Research and Determine Your Business Goals

No matter how brilliant an app idea you have, it doesn’t make any sense if it has no users. So before starting building your bar management app, make sure to do market research and analyse the data to get an idea of what exactly it is, whether it helps you meet the end needs of the users and how it will help your business grow.

Pro Tip: As you are planning to develop Bar Management App for your nightclub, bar or restaurant, so you need to focus on these question:

• Are you developing a business bar management app or looking for the aggregator model?
• If you are looking for an aggregator business model, then decide the parameter of collaborating with the other business owners.
• How complex your app will be, and how much time it takes to launch an app?
• What budget are you willing to invest in the app? Will it be only for customers or managing the staff shift or tracking inventory as well?

App development planning is the key to success; therefore, it is worth hiring a mobile app developer that can quickly help you gather information and enables you to get started in the right way. 

2. Choice of Operating Platform

Next step is to decide the platform to launch your app: Native Android/iOS or both. Generally, Java, Swift, C++ are used to develop native iOS or Android applications and Flutter, React Native, Xamaric, Ionic are majorly used to create cross-platform applications.

Pro Tip: If you are confused about how to make the right decision of choosing an appropriate platform, then firstly understand your audience. Since, people from the age group of 25 to 45 are regularly visiting bars or nightclubs; therefore they must be iOS and Android users. And introducing your app only on a single native platform means you are losing the potential user segment of the other platform. So it makes sense to hire a software developer for a Cross-platform application development that enables you to build an application that seamlessly runs on multiple platforms with a single codebase.

3. Features & Functionalities For Developing a Bar Management App

Though the app’s features and functionalities eat up the most significant segment of the app development cost, it’s also a significant element determining how successful your app will be in the competitive market. While there are various mobile applications already available in the app store, so you need to step ahead in the market by integrating the unique feature set in your app:

Here are the essential features that you need to integrate into the bar management app. But to go beyond these features, it is recommended to hire a mobile app development company that can better understand your business requirement and budget and create an application that perfectly fits your goals. 

Key Features For Bar Management App

• Table Reservation: Add the option to reserve the table at a convenient time to avoid long waitings.
• Booking tickets for the event: Add the provision to book a slot for the bar counter and purchase the ticket for the event that most of the lounges, bars or nightclubs usually arrange it on weekends such as DJ nights.
• Photo and Video Gallery: Provide a glimpse of your venue through high-quality pictures so that customers get an idea about the ambience of the place and reserve a table without any doubt.
• Push Notifications: Keep your customers updated with the latest offers such as happy hours, discount on pre-booking, cashback offers, deals and more.
• Social Media Sharing: This feature will help users share their experience with others on social media networks and enhance your branding.
• Payment Gateway: Encourage users to pay in advance by using multiple payment options, including credit/debit card, in-app wallet and more.
• Loyalty Points: To encourage users to make an advance payment, you can reward them with loyalty points on every booking and that points can be easily redeemed on the next billing.
• Geo Auto-sharing Message: Add the feature in your app to automatically send the message to customers when they are near your location and book a table with the best offers.
• Sending Auto Reminders: Send reminder messages to customers before their appointments and bookings.
• QR Code Scanning: If the customer refuses to make advance payment and asks to pay on the table, then add the option to scan the QR code for quick access. 

4. Hiring a Mobile App Development Team

Now you have an app idea, list of features and choice of platform- all you need is to hire mobile app developer that can easily transform your app idea into a scalable, robust and flexible product by integrating the right methodologies, technologies, and tools. 

Many of you are wondering whether you should develop an in-house app development team or outsource the developers. Well, the fact of the matter is, 40% of organisations choose to outsource software development company as it helps them get a perfect solution and enables them to focus on their prime goals. 

To develop a bar management app, you need a team of:

• Project manager
• Business analyst
• Backend/Frontend Developer
• UX/UI designer
• Quality Assurance Engineer

The hourly cost to hire programmers, designers and developers are usually starting from $20, $100, and $150+ in India, Europe and the US respectively.

5. How To Monetize Your Bar Management App?

How to make a profit from your application is one of the pressing concerns of organisations. So here’s the best monetising strategy that you can apply for the bar management app:

Aggregator Business Model

The aggregator business model is a network model where you can collaborate with several bars, lounges, nightclubs and restaurants to provide services under your brand name. Using this model, you can provide uniform quality and price to the customers offered by the different partners. 

Using the aggregator model is a win-win monetising strategy as it helps you market your brands and allow you to make money on the services offered by other nightclubs. 

Integrating the aggregator model in your app can be a little confusing for startups, so they can consider hiring a cross-platform app development company to get started with the product quickly.

6. How Much Does It Cost To Develop a Bar Management App?

It is always hard to provide an app development cost estimation as several factors affect the final app development cost. Right from the complexity of the app, features and functionalities, app development team to technologies to be used in app development, there are hundreds of things that add up the cost to your project.

According to the statistics, the app development’s starting cost can be anywhere $37,000 to $50,000+ and that can go anywhere $100,000+ depending upon the various factors.

So the simple way to get the real-life estimation is to hire a software development company with a team of experts that analyse your project requirements and accordingly provide the estimation. 

Else, you can apply this formula to calculate the final app development cost:

Per hour cost of the developer * Total number of development hours = Final cost estimation

Conclusion: Way To Go!

Bars and nightclubs have become a staple to the American culture. With this blog, you have understood how progressively this industry is stepping forward and increasing competition among nightclubs and bars. Therefore, we have explained all the parameters in detail to help you understand the baseline of the app idea, its life cycle of development, the cost of the development and how it will help you expand your business. By partnering with a mobile app development company, you can easily get started with your bar management app.

Still, if you have any doubt at any point of this blog, then you can go through with our profile and Contact Us for expert assistance and solution.