General Manager (GM)

The GM is where the floor, the kitchen, and the business meet. They set the standard at pre-shift, answer for the P&L, and hold the guest relationships that outlast any individual server. On a given night the room may be run by a manager on duty, and the GM still owns the result.

Who owns guest data in a restaurant?

The GM, in almost every independent restaurant and in most groups. Nobody hands the job over formally, and it arrives anyway, because every real decision about guest records is a floor decision. Which tags the team is allowed to use. Whether a note gets written after a bad table or the shift simply ends. Who is allowed to see spend. Whether the host stand is expected to check a guest’s history before seating a party.

Guest data quality follows those decisions much more closely than it follows the software. A restaurant CRM holds whatever the floor puts into it, so a house where somebody writes one line after every problem table ends up with a more useful guestbook than a house with a fully configured tag list nobody uses. The GM is the only person who can make that a standard and then enforce it at pre-shift. It is also the reason guest data tends to degrade quietly after a GM change, since the practice was never written down anywhere.

What guest reporting does a GM actually use?

Three things, running on three different clocks. Before service, the night’s arrival list with visit counts, tags, and notes attached, which is the raw material for the pre-shift briefing. Weekly or monthly, how many guests came back and how many stopped coming, because a full dining room and a shrinking base of regulars can look identical on a covers report. And in a group, whether a guest who is a regular at one venue is being recognized at the others.

That third question is the one a single venue’s systems cannot answer. A reservation platform counts visits inside its own book, and the point of sale reports revenue without knowing who spent it, so guest history across venues needs something that spans both. A restaurant CRM does that job: checks matched back to reservations, and one guest record for the whole group instead of one per venue.