It takes a lot to run a successful restaurant. While offering good food and great customer experience is essential, you also need to constantly analyze and work upon the strengths and weaknesses to stay ahead of the competition. This is where the role of data and reporting and analytics come into the picture. While most restaurant POS software provides multiple restaurant reports, it is important to know which are the most crucial ones that you need to monitor on a daily basis.
Restaurant reports will enable you to keep a very keen eye on all your restaurant operations and make the necessary changes in the fields which are not performing that well, which will further boost your business.
Restaurant Reports That You Need To Measure And Monitor Religiously
Since keeping a tab on all the restaurant operations manually is a task that not all are able to perform diligently, it is highly recommended that you have a robust restaurant POS on board that will help you have reports of all your restaurant operations at one central place.
While finalizing a restaurant POS make sure that they are empowered to provide you with the below-mentioned restaurant reports:
1. Restaurant Sales Report
Sales report should consist of the comprehensive data of the total sales that happened at your restaurant on a particular day. It should tell you the total number of bills generated and the discounts conferred.
If you are running multiple outlets, then the report should give you the data of all the outlets in one central place. This will help you compare the sales happening across all the outlets. Such comprehensive data will help you to understand what works the best for different outlets and take steps accordingly to bolster your total sales across all the outlets.
As per the data gathered you can revamp your menu, or bring in outlet specific marketing strategies that will bolster your overall sales.
2. Inventory Report
Since it is the raw materials that help you run your restaurant and since it is the inventory where internal thefts are rampant, it becomes necessary for you to keep a check on your inventory rather closely.
An inventory report should tell you in details the beginning and the closing inventory of each item, the amount of each item used on a particular day across all the outlets. Inventory report also includes the Variance Report that tells you the difference between the actual stock consumption and Ideal stock consumption. A Variance of 3-5% is acceptable, however, anything over this implies that wastage or even internal pilferage may be happening at your restaurant.
This will help you tally the reports and track any misappropriations that might be happening behind your back at the inventory section. Since the costs of the raw materials are soaring, you hardly can compromise with your inventory anymore.
3. Menu Performance Reports
Analyzing menu performance reports would not just give you deep insights about your business, but also help you understand what your customers are liking about your restaurant. You can identify the items that are contributing the most to the sales, and the items that are not popular with the customers. Based on these reports, you can eliminate and add new items on the menu to boost sales.
By removing the items that are not generating sales, you will be able to reduce your Food Costs, and the operating costs involved in preparing those items and maintaining inventory.
4. Expense Reports
Unexpensed expenses crop up, every day, and this makes it all the more important to keep track of all the expenses keeping in mind the fixed cost, that will help you maintain some budget at the standby. Hence, an expense report must include, the rents, the electricity, phone, wifi, water bills, the salaries of your staff, costs of the inventory, the maintenance of the equipment, the budget required for hosting different events, and the miscellaneous expenses include the replacement for the broken crockery, the spoilt tablecloth and the like. An expense report should give you a comprehensive understanding of all the expenses that your restaurant incurs on a daily basis and over a period of time.
The importance of having this report is, you can allocate your budget well, and know where exactly you need to cut down. This will help you reduce unnecessary expenses, which will bolster your overall profit.
5. CRM Reports
Keeping a comprehensive CRM database will help you have all your customer reports at one central place. Since the retention of customers is more important than increasing the customer trial base, CRM reports will come in handy.
The CRM reports will tell you about the customer orders, the date and time of visits, and the bill generated at the table. This will help you understand the best and the least selling items, and accordingly, you can sit with your chef and do your menu engineering. It will also help you to tap the customers who you think has the potential of becoming your loyal customers. Harping on the customer data you can run loyalty programs, or you can run robust marketing campaigns; that will help you in customer retention.
6. Outlet Performance Reports
If you are running multiple restaurant brands and outlets, monitoring operations and keeping track of the sales can be very difficult. Consolidating reports from different sources, and relying on the restaurant manager for updates hampers decision-making. Thus, you need a centralized restaurant management system, that gives you a comprehensive view of all the brands and outlets at one place.
Here are the things that you should be looking at while reviewing outlet performance restaurant reports –
- Outlet level sales
- Brand level sales
- Outlet and Brand Comparision
7. Staff Performance Reports
Analyzing the performance of your staff is also critical if you want to run a successful restaurant business. You can set individual goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for each staff member and measure their productivity on a weekly and monthly basis. You can create these KPIs basis the restaurant reports generated from the POS software. For instance, you can set a goal for the kitchen staff to keep the Food Cost under a certain percentage. Similarly, you can measure the productivity of your wait staff by analyzing the number of tables served, total sales in a week, etc.
Restaurant reports give you a detailed understanding of your restaurant business and enable you to make data-driven decisions. All these reports must be able to give you real-time data. And you will be able to fetch these data from any part of the world, using any device. Such technology will help you to control the complete restaurant operations remotely as well.
