I think you're getting too focused on the food and drinks, I have seen nothing in the manga suggests the guild themselves are doing the serving themselves, if you did, point me to the page. And that's beside the point anyways.
I'm using the guild pub/cafeterias to illiterate the multifaceted nature of the typical guild hall portrayed in fiction. Which is only one facet of the many jobs that adventurer guilds would have to handle in your standard fantasy novel.
Client fills out order form. Guild staff checks for errors and correct or acceptable reward, posts the quest.
Adventurer party takes the quest form to counter, guild staff verifies they can take it and approves.
????
Profit
This whole process was shown in Chapter 2
https://mangadex.org/chapter/fd821e81-56f9-44ed-938c-a74618ec0a13/11
And to simplify it better, if they failed they don't get paid and the quest goes back up on board.
Still requires time. Both for those as the front facing counter, and for the secretarial staff and bean counters in the back end. Multiple that by a few thousand repetitive reports that typically need to be filed by hand. Even if they are simple interactions, it ammounts to a mountain of paperwork that needs to be processed.
How about this, can you give an example of the paperwork itself; what it would be for, who fill out to, what would it have to contain, instead of saying "there's so much paperwork". Again, I think you're overcomplicating it.
This honestly depends of the level of clerical magic, mechanical and or magetech support. If neither are available, everything would need to be hand written, including the form you assume are prepared ahead of time.
Something like a printing press or photo copy magic would speed this up, but would still require a couple staff a number of hours a week to "print" the thousand of forms they would need.
Then there are likely different forms for the different quests. Granted they might go with just one form, but it makes even more sense from organizational standpoint to have separate forms for subjugation quests, gathering requests, escort missions and manual labor referrals. Not just because it would be easier to identify quest types, but because they all require different information.
Then there is quest completion, possible after action report, issuing rewards, and then accounting department takes over to keep a handle on the flow of currency for tax reasons. No surer way to to loose your head then stiffing the government of their fair share of the profits. Also employees tend to get a little pissy when they don't get paid.
Emergencies are emergencies. They're out of the ordinary and not part of a normal work day at a guild. The last dungeon deviation occured over 50 years ago according to the manga. That paperwork is not going to be affecting day to day ops. Same with rogue monsters, if they popped up that frequently, they wouldn't be "rogue".
The dungeon shuffle is only one example, but the guild would also need to plan for and potentially issue quests for bandits, monster swarms, natural/magical/manmade disasters, wars between nations/lords/guilds, and any number of other miscellaneous event the government just pushes off on the guild.
Great, back of house, not front desk responsibility. Doesn't seem to prevent the reception desk from processing hundreds of adventuGuild.
Except that the receptionist acts as a middleman between adventuerers and the backend staff. Often times carrying the quest items to those that process the materials. Then personally collects the rewards to hand to the team after fully appraising said items. A process which would take much longer then the brief moment described in your typical story.
Are you assuming the staff is just processing the adventurers individually? Nearly every single one has entered as a group, the smallest being a pair.
If not then give an example of what that paperwork would look like other than "it's alot of paperwork".
While true most adventurers act in teams, the interactions with the receptionist utterly fails to show how much time and effort is spent to serve each team. True some could be a simple quest acceptance, with a brief overview to make sure they know what they're accepting, other interactions won't be as simple.
Not only the clichéd disputes where the belligerent asshat disputes the receptionist's claim of some incompetence on the adventurers part, but also instances where the receptionist needs to take the team into the side room for whatever reason. And that not being enought, most stories only have two to three people manning the front counter....
The scale is just too different. The comparison is no where close. Even if you assume modern levels of computational convenience, you would be better off asking someone who works in a DMV what their work flow looks like rather then something that is so hyper specialized like a fast food restaurant.
