Systems and processes to set up before you open

Licensing: get professional advice, not an article

Hong Kong food business licences (General Restaurant Licence, Light Refreshment Restaurant Licence and others) are issued by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, alongside separate requirements for business registration, fire safety and drainage. These requirements change, and much depends on your specific premises and scale.

This section deliberately gives no figures or timelines: an out-of-date number in an article that you rely on is genuinely costly. Ask FEHD directly, or engage a licensing consultant. What follows is everything else, the part nobody warns you about.

Four weeks out: load the menu first, not last

Many operators load the menu a few days before opening and then discover a pile of problems: set menus that will not model, option groups that need rethinking, prices that take ten edits each. The menu is the foundation the whole system sits on, so build it first.

While loading it, settle three things: which items route to which kitchen station, which items carry options (less sugar, extra noodles, no spring onion), and whether dine-in and takeaway are priced the same. These three decisions shape everything downstream, so make them early.

• Every dish, price and category entered
• Set menus and option groups built, tested on your hardest items
• Each category assigned to a printer or station
• Dine-in, takeaway and platform prices each set

Three weeks out: walk the kitchen ticket flow on site

Printer placement, cabling and which station receives which ticket all have to be walked through physically, after the kitchen fit-out and before opening. Planning it at a desk and doing it in the kitchen are never the same thing.

Test the failure cases, not the happy path. Unplug a printer: where does the ticket go? When it jams, how does anyone find out? These things happen during your first lunch service, and that is when you will wish you had tested them three weeks earlier.

Two weeks out: run every payment method with real money

For every payment method you intend to accept, complete a real transaction and then a real refund. Do not rely on the provider saying it is enabled.

At the same time, test whether one bill can be split across two methods, whether the daily report separates them, and how a refund appears on that report. Discovering these details during your first real incident is a bad way to learn them.

• A real transaction and a real refund on each method
• One bill settled across two payment methods
• A full day-end run, checking the report reconciles
• Delivery-platform orders landing in their own settlement bucket

One week out: train the exceptions, not just the happy path

Most training covers taking an order and taking payment. But a new shop’s first week is dominated by exceptions: guests changing orders, sending dishes back, splitting bills, moving tables, printers not printing, delivery orders that must be rejected.

Reserve the end of training specifically for these, and be explicit about which need a manager and which staff can handle themselves. Doing this properly makes the first week dramatically calmer.

• Amending, cancelling and voiding: who is allowed
• Splitting, merging and moving a table, each done once
• What to do when a printer stops
• Accepting, rejecting and marking ready on delivery platforms

Soft opening is not about taking money

The real purpose of a soft opening is to surface the problems you could not predict, under a volume you can still control. So do not optimise it for revenue. Deliberately create mess: have friends order simultaneously, change orders on purpose, split bills on purpose.

Then keep the following day clear for nothing but fixes: menu corrections, station routing, permissions, extra training. That day is usually worth more than the soft opening itself.

The numbers to watch in month one

Do not watch revenue alone in the first month. Watch order volume by time of day, which tells you how many staff you need; your best and worst sellers, which tells you how to edit the menu; average ticket value, which tells you whether you have pricing room; and the split between delivery and dine-in.

Your POS should produce these automatically rather than making you build a spreadsheet. If it cannot, you are running the business on instinct.