Creating A Restaurant Customer Database - Part 3: Sorting Information

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It was mentioned in a previous restaurant database creation article, but I want to emphasize again that the best way to get in the game is using a very simple program like Microsoft Excel.

If you’re on a tight budget, and don’t already own Microsoft Office (which includes Excel), I recommend downloading the FREE application OpenOffice. OpenOffice is 100% compatible with Excel, it’s just missing a few of the bells and whistles… which is fine for what you need to start.

After you have an application open, you’ll be making columns for the information to be collected. The information itself will go in the rows.

This is basic… basic… stuff. And that’s good because it means you have NO REASON to avoid doing it! And everything you create by doing this will be capable of being imported into any fancy system you get in the future.

You can see in this example that I’m asking for:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Address 1
• Address 2
• City
• State
• ZIP Code
• Phone Number
• Email Address

Some might consider this to be ambitious… but if you’re providing enough UP FRONT value to receive the information, any customer that’s serious about your restaurant will give it. I think it’s fair to hand a $5 Gift Certificate to every guest that is willing to fill out such a card. (That’s actually very low cost!)

Regarding the two address boxes — this is thinking long term. You can probably get away with only one box, but having two will let you split off Apartment numbers, Suite numbers and other secondary information.

This can make things easier when migrating to a database system later because you’ll be able to sort by streets and have the secondary numbers come up separate. (There are other, more technical reasons too.)