Franchisee Uses ChatGPT Work for Restaurant Operations

Independent franchisee Ted Taylor is using ChatGPT Work to handle back-office tasks across three co-branded Schlotzsky’s and Cinnabon restaurants in New Mexico.

After a 25-year career in the semiconductor industry, Taylor entered the restaurant business, where he now uses OpenAI tools to handle menu pricing, staffing, cash reconciliation, and policy drafting.

In menu pricing, Taylor uses ChatGPT Work to evaluate recipe costs, item popularity, portion sizes, competitor pricing trends, and delivery economics. The software generates pricing recommendations in 1 - 2 hours, a process that previously took 5 days. That represents a 95% reduction in time required for pricing analysis.

For back-office financial tasks, monthly cash reconciliation across all three locations previously took three hours. By uploading transaction data and bank records into ChatGPT Work to compare sales with deposits, the process now takes 5-10 minutes, representing a 94% reduction in time. In addition, Taylor uses ChatGPT Work to summarize payroll inputs, saving 4 hours of manual work every payroll cycle.

Labor scheduling and tracking also rely on the software. ChatGPT Work reviews sales and labor data alongside historical data from the previous 12 weeks to flag overtime, long shifts, and coverage gaps. For weekly scheduling, the software processes employee roles, availability, pay, and sales-based staffing needs to build location schedules. Taylor estimates that optimized scheduling could reduce hourly labor costs by one to two percentage points of sales, potentially freeing up $50,000 to $100,000 in annual cash flow.

Taylor also applied ChatGPT to administrative tasks. When New Mexico started requiring restaurants to keep a written bodily-fluid incident procedure, ChatGPT generated a draft in about 30 seconds. A draft social media policy for the employee handbook created with ChatGPT was later reviewed by an outside HR firm without any changes.