Saturday, July 13, 2013
Money Tips
- Watch your funds carefully! Every year at the beginning of April you’re required to pay your staff’s salary for the entire previous 12 months. If you’re not paying attention to how many months each staff member worked and their salary, you can end up spending a lot more than you think. As in thousands of dollars more.
- Business slow or hired too many people? Put someone in the break room. They’ll “take time off” but aren’t fired and (so far as I can tell) don’t complain about not working for months at a time. It’s a good way to save money come April and salary time.
- Not sure if you have enough money to pay your salary? You can check via View Info –> Staff Members. You’ll have to do the math yourself, however. Not going to have enough money to cover salaries? Don’t worry too much–you can go into the red, and you’ll likely find an “emergency” fund of a couple thousand dollars available to you the first time it’s too much.
- April is when you pay your annual staff salary, and is also an ingredient hunt month. Remember that, especially if you’re late in the game and only have high-end locations available since you may not have enough money for the ingredient hunt.
- Though you may be able to expand your first store for around $12000 (or maybe it’s $18000), by the time you move it to another area and want to expand it again, you may pay $45000 or even $65000 just to go from a small restaurant to a medium one.
Staffing Tips
- Hiring “famous” chefs will potentially get you someone with high stats, but they come at an equally high price. Expect to spend $10000+ just to hire them by bribing them with ice cream and home-cooked meals. Then remember that you’re likely to have to also increase their salary a bit and that they start at a baseline of $100. Every salary bump is another $100 per month that they work–you can easily end up spending $3600/year, or more, on this one person’s salary. See the tips above for how this may affect you. (See the money tips for more on what to expect for salary.)
- When expanding existing locations or opening new stores, think about staffing first. If your existing store(s)’s area is busy and you need every single person on staff, consider waiting a few months before expanding or opening a new store. Instead, hire two new people (one chef, one floor person) and have them wait in the break room, then expand/open a new restaurant. You’ll be able to staff the expanded/new location immediately and your existing locations won’t suffer from a lack of staff.
Cooking Tips
- When developing dishes, the yellow arrow at the top of the window shows you the potential of combining that dish with the ingredients you’ve chosen. Changing ingredients and looking at the stats is a good way to maximize your possibilities.
- You can use ingredients on dishes to help improve them without developing dishes. Accomplish this by going to your dish selection, touch a dish you want to improve, and select Upgrade. You’ll get an immediate result that may or may not be a small improvement (usually on the scale of a few points, not the tens of points you can achieve via development).
General Tips
- The number of people you can send on your ingredient hunt is directly related to the size of the restaurant you have in the area you’re searching, and the number of staff in said restaurant. Therefore, a small restaurant nets you up to 4 people, a medium 7, and a large 13 (is 13 right?).
- The staff doing the ingredient hunt can cover more ground at a time if their energy is higher. It may be impossible to determine which of your stores has staff that has the most energy, but getting those treasure chests is important.
- The more expensive the area for ingredient hunting, the better your chances for finding higher quality ingredients or bonuses.
- Every 1st, 4th, 7th, and 10th month is an opportunity to gather ingredients. You pay a flat fee and get to send a specific number of staff out to “hunt for ingredients” or other things. You may find money, you may also find “special” things (these are displayed as treasure chests you receive when you max out the search bar) such as tables, recipes, or new dishes.
- The number of restaurants you have determines the number of “Plans” you can initiate at any given time. Have one store? Run one plan. Two stores? Two plans. Etc.
- Most plans are designed to bring you increased customers. I’m not 100% sure, but I seem to get better results starting those plans in the early morning hours compared to late in the afternoon or after business hours.Most plans take one complete day (read: month) to initiate. Reviewers only take a few hours, but only show up at your restaurant at 9 AM.
- Reviewers seem to pick a random store to show up. When they appear, take a moment to make sure you have a high quality item on your menu, because you want to serve them your best dish.
- Moving your restaurants to new areas or opening stores in new areas costs more money each time. The new areas can be looked at as progressively upscale, so it costs more to move in.
- Develop your existing dishes as much as you can initially, and focus on only a few of them. Quick development using quality ingredients can get their price up relatively quickly, which gets you more income. Once they’re fairly well developed, you can move on to working on new recipes.
