You’ve signed the lease. The fit-out is booked. Your opening date is 12 weeks away. This is what your IT project should look like.

I’ve run new site openings for restaurant groups across London for long enough to know that the difference between a calm launch and a chaotic one is almost never the kit you pick. It’s the calendar. The teams that open well start their IT workstream the same week the lease is signed. The teams that open badly start it when the fit-out is two weeks from finishing and somebody finally asks who’s ordering the broadband.

What follows is the checklist I actually use. Print it, ignore the bits that don’t apply, and add the bits I’ve forgotten - but please, work backwards from the opening date and start now.

Phase 1: 12 to 8 weeks out - Survey and design

This is the phase where you spend almost no money but make almost every decision that matters. Get it wrong here and you’ll be paying to fix it for the next two years.

Site survey

  • Walk the site with someone who knows hospitality networks. Not just an electrician.
  • Identify where the comms cabinet will live. It needs power, ventilation, and to be somewhere staff can’t dump coats on it.
  • Note structural constraints - solid walls, listed features, ceiling voids, riser access.
  • Map power: is there enough on the comms circuit, is it on a UPS-friendly phase, where are the spurs for tills and kitchen printers.
  • Photograph everything. You will refer back to those photos a dozen times.

Landlord questions (ask in writing)

  • Who owns the comms riser and how do we get access for cabling?
  • What incoming lines already exist on the demise - copper, fibre, leased lines?
  • Are there restrictions on roof or external works for wireless backup?
  • What’s the upgrade path for circuits, and who pays for wayleaves if needed?
  • Is there a building-wide ISP arrangement we have to use, or can we bring our own?

I cannot count the number of openings I’ve seen delayed because the landlord question was asked too late. Get it in writing, get it early.

Connectivity options

  • Check OpenReach availability for FTTP at the exact postcode and unit. Our business internet page covers the options in detail. “The street has fibre” is not the same as “your unit has fibre”.
  • Get quotes from at least two carriers. Lead times for a leased line in central London can run 60 to 90 working days.
  • Specify a primary and a diverse backup. 4G or 5G failover is not optional for a venue taking card payments.
  • Consider SoGEA where fibre isn’t available, but go in with eyes open on speed and contention.

EPOS and licensing

  • Confirm EPOS choice and lock the licence count. Add 20 per cent for growth and breakage.
  • Confirm integrations: payments, PMS, reservations, stock, accounting, tronc.
  • Get the vendor’s hardware compatibility list in writing.

Hardware bill of materials

Build the BOM now, even if you’re not ordering yet. At minimum:

  • Tills and till stands
  • Kitchen printers and impact rolls
  • Payment terminals (PED count, base stations, charging cradles)
  • Switches (PoE budget matters - count APs, phones, cameras)
  • Firewall
  • Wireless access points
  • CCTV NVR and cameras
  • DECT base stations and handsets
  • Cabling, patch panels, patch leads, labels
  • UPS for the comms cabinet

Network design

  • VLANs for POS, back-of-house staff, guest WiFi, CCTV, voice, and management. Separate, segmented, with explicit firewall rules between them.
  • SSIDs: one for staff, one for guests. Never put a payment device on the guest network.
  • Plan a managed network topology that gives you remote visibility from day one - you cannot fix what you cannot see.
  • Document the design before you order anything. A page of diagrams now saves a week of arguments later.

Phase 2: 8 to 4 weeks out - Order and provision

Now you spend the money. The single biggest cause of NSO disasters is underestimating lead times.

Order broadband lines

  • Place the order the moment Phase 1 sign-off happens. Not the next day. The same day.
  • Track it weekly. Carriers slip dates and won’t tell you unless you ask.
  • Confirm the install date, the engineer slot, and who’s on site to let them in.

Order all hardware

  • Payment terminals: 4 to 6 weeks is normal, longer in Q4.
  • EPOS hardware: typically 3 to 4 weeks once the order is signed off by the vendor.
  • Switches, firewalls, APs: usually fine on stock, but check for the model you’ve specified rather than assuming.
  • Cabling and consumables: order more than you think. Returning a box of patch leads is easy. Running out at 9pm on installation day is not.

Identity and tenancy

  • Provision Microsoft 365 accounts for the new site’s managers and back-of-house roles.
  • Add the site to your tenant structure, conditional access policies, and MFA enforcement.
  • Create the shared mailboxes, distribution lists, and Teams channels you’ll need.

Monitoring and RMM

  • Stand the site up in your monitoring stack before any kit is on the floor.
  • Pre-create the device groups, alerting rules, and dashboards.
  • Make sure your cyber security baseline - endpoint protection, patching, log collection - applies to the new site automatically when devices come online.

Pre-stage everything off-site

  • Configure switches, firewall, and APs in the office. Apply the design, label every port, take a config backup.
  • Pre-image POS terminals where the vendor allows it.
  • Build a kit list for the install day with serial numbers against locations. The engineer should never have to guess where a device goes.

Phase 3: 4 to 1 weeks out - Install

This is the loud phase. It’s also where IT collides with every other trade on site, so coordination matters more than technical brilliance.

Structured cabling

  • Get cabling in before ceilings close. If you wait, you will cut holes in plasterboard and somebody will be unhappy.
  • Test every run with a proper certifier. Keep the test results.
  • Label both ends of every cable. Future you will be grateful.

Mount the kit

  • APs, cameras, DECT base stations, kitchen printers, till stands.
  • Comms cabinet built, patched, powered, and tidy. A messy cabinet is a fault waiting to happen.
  • UPS connected and tested with a real power-down.

Test the lines

  • Once broadband is live, test throughput, latency, and failover.
  • Confirm static IPs, reverse DNS, and any firewall rules that need to come from the carrier side.
  • Run payments through the live circuit - not just a ping test.

POS and integrations

  • Install POS hardware, load configs, sync menus from head office.
  • Pair payment terminals and run end-to-end test transactions: sale, refund, void, tip, split bill.
  • Test kitchen printing from every till to every printer. Pull the network cable on a printer and confirm the till handles it gracefully.

Phase 4: Week of opening - Commission and train

Everything works in isolation. Now make it work together, under load, with real people using it.

  • Run a full end-to-end test at realistic volume. Put 60 transactions through in 30 minutes and see what breaks.
  • Train every front-of-house and back-of-house staff member on the POS. Not just the managers.
  • Test payments end to end: sales, refunds, splits, tabs, pre-authorisations, tronc allocation.
  • Test the PMS integration if you have one - room charges, folio postings, group bills.
  • Test kitchen printing and KDS routing for every section, every prep area.
  • Test WiFi capacity at realistic device counts. 80 guests with phones is a different load to one engineer with a laptop.
  • Confirm CCTV is recording, retained for the right period, and viewable by the right people.
  • Walk the site with the GM and sign off, line by line, against the original BOM and design.
  • Hand over to the BAU hospitality IT support team with a full as-built document, credentials in the password manager, and a contact list.

If you skip the sign-off, you’ll end up with the project team carrying issues forever and the support team blamed for things they were never told existed. Sign-off is the moment the project ends and BAU begins. Make it formal.

Phase 5: Post-launch - Stabilise

The opening is not the finish line. The first two weeks of trading will surface every issue the test scripts missed.

  • On-site IT cover for the full first week of trading, including Friday and Saturday nights. Not on-call. On site.
  • Daily 15-minute standup at 11am with the GM, head chef, and IT lead for the first five days. Issues raised, fixes assigned, status of yesterday’s items.
  • Keep a single issue log. One spreadsheet, one source of truth, ruthlessly closed out.
  • After two weeks, run a lessons-learned session and write the next site’s plan against it. Every NSO should make the next one easier.

If you’re opening in central London, having a support partner who can put feet on the ground in 30 minutes matters more than any SLA on paper. We do this from our office on Tottenham Court Road for venues across Soho and the West End - proximity is the whole point.

The honest summary

The difference between a smooth opening and a chaotic one is rarely the hardware - it’s whether the project started 12 weeks out or 4. Plan accordingly.

If you want a hand running the IT workstream on your next opening, or you’d like a second pair of eyes on a project that’s already in flight, talk to our hospitality IT team. We’ve opened a lot of restaurants in this city, and we’ve made enough of the mistakes that you don’t have to.