Six years ago I did probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done. I bought a restaurant and started a jazz club. What’s crazier is that I started this club in the small town of North Bend Washington. Never heard of it? Well, Twin Peaks was filmed here. That’s probably our claim to fame. Plus now, Boxleys is rated one of the Best Jazz Clubs in the World by Downbeat Magazine, 5 years in a row.
So here is the deal. I have a full time job. This jazz club thing is both a hobby and a passion for me, sharing the music that love along with some great food and wine. People ask me all the time, “why did you start a Jazz club here”. My answer is simple, “I live here”.
Now six years into this endeavor our restaurant is community owned by a non-profit organization called the Boxley Music Fund. That’s pretty cool. But what I think is really awesome is that our venue is managed almost entirely by part time staff using Google Spreadsheets and Cloudward CloudSnippets. That’s correct. Let me run down the list of things that Boxleys uses Google Spreadsheets for.
Who’s playing at Boxley’s Tonight?
If you visit Boxleys website, the first thing you are greeted by is who’s playing tonight. This is a rotating banner starting with today and goes through the next couple weeks. If you click on any image, you can make a reservation for that night.
This banner is a Google Sheet powered Cloud Snippet. (Maybe I should say that the other way around).
|
|
→ |
|
Clicking on the banner takes to you reservations for that night.
This content is all managed by a Google Spreadsheet that a part time assistant updates 1 to 2 times a month. The Spreadsheet looks like this.
All the content is in the sheet. The images usually come from the musicians website and she just pastes the URL in the right column for them. The start and end dates determine when the banners show up.
Scrolling through the Month
Visitors on our website can see descriptions of everyone thats coming, on the Music Tab. This is the same format for the data, but in list format not a rotating banner. Just scroll down the page and see.
Here it is:
http://www.boxleysplace.com/web/music.espx
The cool thing is that my assistant updates 1 spreadsheet and the content is updated in multiple places using Cloud Snippets. Yay!
What’s for Dinner?
Want to know what’s for dinner? Our chef updates the menu every day and he uses a Google Sheet to do that.
Here is the spreadsheet.
But wait… it get’s cooler.
Our point of sale system is Web Based. Servers carry iPad’s around the restaurant and take orders at the table. The same menu is loaded into the POS via a snippet we customized.
Chef updates menu, goes on website and into the point of sale.
Cloud Snippets and Sheets in action. This is Nancy taking an order on her iPad.
Printed Menu’s?
You guessed it. We made another snippet that outputs the same spreadsheet data so we can print menus.
Awesome? Yeah!
More Snippets… More Sheets!
Other ways we use snippets and sheets.
- Our Time Clock
- The staff timeclock is a snippet that saves data to a Google Sheet.
- Sending payroll to PayChex is a snap!
- Scheduling
- The floor manager uses Google Sheets to do staff schedules
- Special Events
- Special event requests are a Cloud Snippet that saves to a Google Sheet and sends an email to the special events manager and a confirmation to the requestor
- Sponsors
- We are a non-profit and our sponsors banners and advertisements are displayed using Sheets and Snippets just like the upcoming musicians
- More?
- Any interim thing that I need done or managed – I use a Cloud Snippet and a Sheet
What Does Dinner Look Like?
So our latest addition is a photo gallery powered by Cloud Snippets and a Google Sheet. I may change that to just use one of the Google Drive Cloudward Snippets. Regardless, it’s cool.
How Cool is That?
The ability to use Google Sheets and Cloud Snippets makes it so we can have several people manage different content when it’s convenient for them. These are real time saving and super practical solutions. Just one example is updating the Point of Sale. It used to take lots of time. Now it’s only minutes. And the same sheet updates the website, printed menu’s and the point of sale. Really awesome!
Check out Boxleys here.
Also, here are some of the snippets I use from Cloudward.
Danny Kolke 