As a restaurant owner in UAE, and especially if you are running multiple outlets, you may not be able to oversee the entire operations yourself. Further, it would be even more tedious if you were to do it manually. Even if you are not present at the restaurant yourself, you can still ensure the success of your business if you use the right technology and restaurant analytics to evaluate the operational processes and challenges.
A competent restaurant management system will be able to provide you with detailed sales, inventory, billing, waste, CRM and variance reports which will help you with your restaurant analytics in the best way possible. Simply receiving these reports and not analyzing them will not do you any good. On the contrary, on receiving the reports, you should analyze them diligently and look for the areas of improvements and work on them to further bolster your restaurant business.
How Restaurant Analytics Give You Detailed Insights About Your Business
One of the biggest challenges of restaurant reporting is that there is too much noise and mind-boggling data. A smart restaurant analytics software will enable you to cut through the noise and only look at the numbers and reports that are important for you.
- Custom Reporting – You can easily create custom reports that are relevant for you through simplified yet powerful graphical reporting feature. From the sales reports to see how much revenue was generated in a day to view the performance of your menu items, you can create custom reports to suit your business needs.
- Real-time Reporting – Real-time reporting enables you to keep track of all your restaurant operations from anywhere, anytime. You can view the hourly, daily, monthly phones right on your mobile. This enables you to gain complete control over your business and eliminates the dependence on your restaurant manager for reporting.
- SMS Updates – You can set SMS alerts and updates for reports that you wish to receive on your mobile. For instance, you can get the daily sales report through an SMS keeping you updated about your business without any hassles.
- Anti-Theft Reporting – Internal thefts and pilferages are widespread in the UAE restaurant space. You might not even be aware of where and how the theft is happening at your restaurant. With Anti-theft reporting, you can set roles and permissions in the POS and set alerts that notify you about the number of Void Bills generated, the number of items deleted in the bill, fake discounts offered and more.
5 Restaurant Analytics Reports You Should Monitor Religiously
Restaurant analytics gives you detailed insights into your business and helps you find the loopholes on which you can work on to further enhance your restaurant profits. Further, real-time reporting enables you to keep track of your restaurant business anytime, anywhere.
1. Sales Report
The report is essentially a comprehensive data that reflects the total sales that happened at the restaurant on a particular day or a specific period. A sales report clearly states the total number of bills generates and the discounts conferred.
From this report, you can analyze the performance of your restaurant and all your restaurant outlets if you are running a restaurant chain. Once you can gauge what works well and what does not for a particular restaurant, you can bring in the changes that will increase your sales exponentially. The sales report also states the best selling and the least selling items, following which you can revamp your menu to include more variations of the most sold items and scrap the items that aren’t performing as per your expectation and unnecessarily increasing your overall cost.
2. Inventory Report
Internal theft and pilferage are rampant in the inventory section, and this makes it all the more important for you to keep a check on the inventory reports. The inventory reports will give you the details of the beginning and the closing inventory, the amount of each item used on a particular day or a specific period across all the outlets.
Once you have these numbers, you can tally these numbers with your sales report to track any misappropriations that might be happening behind your back at the restaurant inventory. Food costs are pretty high in the UAE since a majority of the raw ingredients are exported. Keeping track of daily consumption would help you control your food costs.
3. CRM Reports
The importance of having a loyal customer base cannot be stressed enough, and customer retention is even more important in UAE owing the stiff competition. The number of tourists and overnight visitors is pretty huge in UAE. Thus, it makes sense to focus on customer retention for a steady stream of business.
This is where you can utilize restaurant analytics to gain an understanding of your audience, and CRM reports would help you do just that.
It is imperative for all restaurants to build a comprehensive CRM report. This report must consist of all your customer details, contact details and ordering history.
However, a rich repository of customer information will not do you any good unless you use them smartly. You can run personalized SMS, and email marketing campaigns from the information garnered from the CRM database. While increasing the customer trial base is essential, it is more important to focus on growing a band of loyal customers. And running targeted marketing campaigns will come in handy and will help you achieve your dream of customer retention massively.
Since the CRM reports will also help you tack the ordering history of the customers, you can comprehend the items which are high on demand and strategize with your executive chef to make the menu more appealing to your customers.
4. Waste Reports
Waste reports will contain the details of all the item wasted, why it was wasted, the quantity of the item that was wasted and the price of the amount that was wasted. This report will help you ponder into the areas where your restaurant staff needs to be trained further, that will reduce the unnecessary generation of kitchen waste.
When you start keeping track of the waste generated, it will automatically make your restaurant staff more conscious when handling raw materials. Such reports will encourage your restaurant employees to follow the recipes diligently which will again reduce the instances the generation of restaurant waste. You can create your own waste sheet depending on what all you would like to monitor that will reduce the generation of waste and will keep the rising food cost under control.
5. Variance Reports
The variance report in a restaurant primarily consists of the difference between the ideal stock that should be consumed during a day and the actual physical stock that remains at the end. Recipe management feature is that integral feature of inventory management which keeps track of the amount of stock consumed while preparing a dish. When integrated with the POS, this feature will give you detailed accounts of the amount of the actual stock consumed. Following which you can view and monitor variance reports that provide the difference between the ideal stock that should be consumed during a day and the actual physical stock that remains at the end of the day. This will help you track misappropriations in the most definite way possible.
Having these reports handy and creating restaurant analytics around them will help you track your restaurant business rather well and hone the operations further. Hence, if you are still not monitoring your restaurant analytics diligently, it is time you reconsider. Get a restaurant POS on board that will streamline this operation immensely.
