The pasta, the wine list and the people on your floor are not in scope.
I pulled every Google review you have had since 30 January and checked each one for an owner reply. All sixty of them.
First, the part worth saying out loud. Three of your floor staff get named in those reviews by their own names, Poppy, Hazel and Gus, while a fourth diner called your French waitress a credit to the restaurant. Guests almost never bother doing that. Another spent a full paragraph on the pistachio ice cream and the chocolate hidden in the middle of it.
You have built something people want to talk about. Nobody is answering them.
Ten of the last sixty sit at two stars or below. Those 60 average 4.17 against your lifetime 4.5, and the lifetime number is only holding because 575 reviews move slowly.
“Drove 25 minutes to get there and found out their close even though the website says 12 am.”
One star · 25 June 2026“We were seated next to the woman managing the tables and had to listen to her repeatedly telling staff that people had to be out by certain times.”
Two stars · 2 April 2026Your contact page says dinner seven nights. The Subiaco directory says you are shut Mondays. A customer drove across the city on a closing time your own site had wrong.
Three versions of your hours are live in public right now, and each is a booking you lose or apologise for.
Spotting any of this takes no machine at all. It takes someone with the time to look, which during service nobody has.
From 1 July a Level 3 food and beverage attendant is on $27.97 flat. Add the 25% casual loading and the 175% Sunday rate and the same person costs $48.95 an hour before super, at 12% since July 2025.
| Classification | Base | Casual | Casual Sat | Casual Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | $26.44 | $33.05 | $39.66 | $46.27 |
| Level 2 | $27.08 | $33.85 | $40.62 | $47.39 |
| Level 3 | $27.97 | $34.96 | $41.96 | $48.95 |
| Level 4 | $29.45 | $36.81 | $44.18 | $51.54 |
Restaurants turning over $500,000 to $2 million run at 23% to 32% of revenue on wages alone under ATO small business benchmarks, with super and workers' compensation adding another 14.5% to 20.6%.
The two nights that fill your room are the same two that decide whether the week lands at 23% or 32%.
Nobody gets made redundant and nobody takes a pay cut. One shift, on one day, that your own booking history says the room never needed.
Rostering firm Shiftly names the same pattern: flat start times set by habit, and the service tail where three people do one person's work in the last hour. From the floor none of it looks like waste, yet all of it lands in the wage bill.
Payroll tax does not touch you. Western Australia's threshold is $1 million in annual wages at 5.5% and a single site sits well under it. Anyone saying otherwise has not checked.
I have run these against an illustrative $1.35 million turnover, drawn from what you publish and how you trade rather than from your accounts. Show me a P&L and some of them move down.
Strip out phone coverage, the one leaning hardest on assumption, and the other four still total $31,200. That is the number I am willing to be judged against.
| Lever | Mechanism | $ a year | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phone coverage | A voice agent answers while the floor is slammed, drops the booking into ResDiary, texts the confirmation. | 18,000–43,000 | Vendor claim |
| Roster precision | Forecast covers off your ResDiary history against weather, school terms and the Subiaco events calendar, then roster to that instead of habit. | 15,000–17,000 | From award rates |
| Owner admin time | Invoices captured and coded, weekly reporting generated, correspondence drafted, hours pushed to every channel at once. | 9,000–12,000 | Time, not cash |
| Food cost and waste | A waste log read weekly against sales mix. Australian venues waste an estimated 10% to 15% of what they buy. | 6,000–9,000 | Benchmark |
| Software audit | Every subscription checked for duplicate function and over-specified tier. Small, but it bills monthly regardless. | 1,200–2,000 | Checkable |
| Total identified · floor excluding phone: $31,200 | 49,200–83,000 | ||
Camera-based waste systems like Winnow report 2% to 8% off food cost, yet every published case is a Hilton, a Marriott or an IKEA, and the hardware economics do not work for one trattoria. At your scale the answer is a disciplined waste log and someone competent reading it every week. Duller, cheaper, and what I would actually build.
Your site runs bookings through ResDiary and gift cards through Square. The rest is what a venue of your size usually ends up carrying, priced off the vendors' own Australian pages this week.
| Tool | Plan | Status | Monthly | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ResDiary | Express, to 500 bookings | Confirmed | $170 | $2,040 |
| Xero | Ultimate 10 | Assumed | $143 | $1,716 |
| Deputy | Core, 15 staff | Assumed | $131 | $1,572 |
| Square | Plus, restaurant POS | Confirmed | $40 | $480 |
| Square Loyalty | Entry tier | If on | $49 | $588 |
| Square Email | Entry tier | If on | $20 | $240 |
| Before card processing | $553 | $6,636 | ||
Card processing sits on top and barely budges. Square takes 1.6% in person, so on $1.35 million you are forking out roughly $21,600 a year and no software makes that go away. Better you hear it from me than find it quietly padding someone's savings number.
Subscriptions are a different story. If you are on ResDiary Pro at $220 without needing unlimited covers, Express at $170 or Connect at $115 is real money for a ten-minute switch.
You are off the delivery aggregators and should stay off. Uber Eats marketplace commission runs to 30%, its Lite tier went from 15% to 20% in March, DoorDash runs 15%, 25% and 30%. Menulog quit Australia on 26 November 2025 after losing north of $400 million since 2022, which tells you what the economics are doing to the platforms themselves. A 30% cut on a 4% margin is not a growth channel. It is a donation.
None of this survives unless someone in the building owns it. Pick two, ideally whoever builds the roster and whoever handles suppliers and the inbox, because between them sits most of the time worth winning back.
Automating anything that touches pay is where small venues get into trouble, and the law has moved twice recently.
Intentional underpayment of wages, entitlements or super has been a criminal offence since 1 January 2025, carrying fines, prison, or both. Honest mistakes are excluded, and employers under 15 staff who follow the Voluntary Small Business Wage Compliance Code cannot be referred for prosecution. Getting you demonstrably inside that Code is part of the job, not a bonus.
Contributions must now reach the employee's account within seven business days of wages rather than within three months, under the Payday Super rules that started on 1 July. Any gap between roster and payroll now surfaces fortnightly instead of quarterly.
Privacy Act transparency requirements for automated decision-making are already legislated and commence on 10 December 2026. Under $3 million turnover you sit outside the Act for now, and removal of that small business exemption remains a stated policy objective with no commencement date announced. Either way, any voice agent I set up says it is one in its first sentence and hands to a person on request. I am not building something that pretends to be Poppy.
Nothing here replaces a person on your floor. Your recent complaints are about feeling rushed and front-of-house tone, and both get worse if you thin the room out. Every saving here comes from the back office and the rostering calendar. Anyone pitching AI as a way to cut service headcount in a restaurant where service is the product has not read your reviews.
Published Australian comparables run $1,500 to $3,000 for an automation audit and $4,950 for a two-week sprint. Implied day rates on federal AI consulting contracts start at $1,959 for Deloitte and reach $20,524 for McKinsey. Almost no Australian firm publishes a price, which is why this page does.
Thirteen years a business journalist in Perth, bylines at Forbes and Reuters, north of three thousand published articles. The part that matters here is the last masthead, where I built and ran an AI-assisted production system end to end and cut average cycle time by about 70% while still filing five to ten pieces a week myself.
I have run the thing I am proposing to build you. Daily, on deadline, with my own name on it when it was wrong.