Imagine this: you wake up one morning, wishing that your restaurant receives a footfall of a thousand customers, and that every dish on your restaurant menu receives the proverbial chef’s kiss unequivocally. You chuckle at the thought, knowing the odds of this happening are absolutely minimum. However, as you open the doors to your restaurant, you’re baffled by the bustling crowd, bedazzled by the best staff in the whole wide world. You’re wondering which genie is working for you!
This genie is of another kind – information boards in the form of numbers, graphs and charts, et al. that will definitely help you make insightful decisions. These are called restaurant reports.
Why are restaurant reports so important?
Before we delve into restaurant reports, we must first understand the significance of data-driven decision-making, also known as DDDM. It involves mining and collecting the most relevant data, analyzing and summarizing them to generate actionable, real-time insights. This may sound difficult for you to do – and that’s what we are here for!
That’s right. Your restaurant reports are the fruit-laden trees ripe for the taking. Just like you would learn how to climb the tree, or use a long stick with a compact sickle at the end – a deep understanding of how to read these reports and interpret data is a prescribed prerequisite. The decisions you make thereafter will be backed by solid data. You may not win the World’s Best Restaurateur just yet, but you will witness a growth in customer footfalls, order size and value, profits and much more.
Where do you start? By wielding the powerful palette filled with the colors of the rainbow – the 7 most important restaurant reports. Understanding them will contribute towards enhancing your understanding of your customers’ desires and ensuring profitable growth for your business. Before you know it, you will start creating magnificent masterpieces and be known as the Raja Ravi Varma of restaurants.
The Restaurant Reports Rainbow
Like every rainbow color has an intrinsic meaning, each report contributes to an important aspect of the business. Let us get right to it:
Menu Analysis Reports
Menu analysis is one of the most important analytical reports that every restaurateur must be familiar with, like the back of their hand. This report covers every aspect of your menu, including:
- the dishes on your menu that your customers crave
- the food combinations that they would love to try
- the discounts and offers that make them feel delighted
The important metrics that you need to be well-versed with are: the cost and quantity of the top-selling menu items, the item-wise margins, and the non-selling items. By looking at these metrics, you will be able to:
- Understand the science of menu engineering and highlight your bestsellers
- Up-sell and cross-sell other menu items in the form of combos
- Unveil exciting discounts that would keep your customers coming back for more
The color violet symbolizes creativity. You can unleash your creativity by creating menus that are both attractive and profitable to your business as well.
Employee Performance Reports
As a successful restaurateur, it is important for you to manage your workforce, simultaneously aiming to improve their performance efficiently. Employee performance reports shed light on how each employee has contributed towards the business. The data covered in these reports include:
- Sales generated by each salesman / manager
- The job performance of stewards & waiters during business hours
- The number of working hours for each employee
The main metrics to be considered here are: sales generated per employee, the average wait time per table, the number of tables waited / managed, and the sales target achieved. Based on these metrics, you will be able to:
- Opt for the key performance indicators (KPIs) based on the roles and the users
- Outline realistic targets for sales, number of orders processed, average table wait time and other important metrics
- Optimize employee performance by identifying the efficient working hours
The color indigo symbolizes helping others. You can help your staff to understand their targets and perform better.
CRM & Loyalty Reports
As hackneyed as it sounds, the customer is king. Providing excellent customer service is the quintessential need today. Aside from attracting and retaining customers, creating the right loyalty programme will help you in the long run – resulting in an increase in customer footfall and the spread of positive word-of-mouth. CRM & loyalty reports consist of a trove of useful information, such as:
- Customer data, including their birthdays / anniversaries if they permit to capture the information
- Customer spending habits & preferences
- Loyalty points earned & redeemed
The main metrics to observe here are: the customer details, the average spend per customer, the frequency of their visits, and the loyalty points they have earned or redeemed. Upon understanding, you will be able to:
- Understand your most valuable customers and offer the right discounts
- Unify customers who have similar tastes / expenditure habits into groups
- Update your customers with new offerings, giveaways and much more
The color blue symbolizes trust. You can understand how to build trust with your customers and convert them into loyal brand advocates.
Inventory Reports
Inventory reports keep a close check on the health of your stock, especially ingredients & condiments which serve as the fundamental building blocks of your menu. These inventory reports are loaded with the following information:
- Opening and closing stock for each and every item of your inventory
- Inventory health status (fresh / expired / about to expire / damaged etc.)
- Details of stock updates made, and variances between stock imported and current stock
- Details of purchases including purchase invoices and quantity of stock purchased
The important metrics to be considered here are: the opening and closing stock, the stock updates and variances, and the purchase amount and quantity. Based on these metrics, you will be able to:
- Determine the date of reordering ingredients based on the stock quantity in your inventory
- Decide on your inventory budget by precisely calculating the costs
- Detect and minimize pilferage and wastage of your stock
- Design stock audits in a simple, hassle-free manner
The color green symbolizes health. You can monitor and take care of your business health by reducing costs and improving profitability.
Finance & Accounting Reports
Finance & accounting reports capture the revenues and expenditures of your restaurant business in a detailed manner. These reports also help you to maintain accurate transaction records and be prepared for the tax season. These reports are stocked with data such as:
- Accounts receivable and payable
- Banking details for suppliers
- Financial statements
- Cash flow statements
- Ledgers and account books
The metrics which are significant here are: the details of assets and liabilities, the revenues generated, the expenses incurred, details of cash-in-hand, payments due to/from suppliers, and tax details from sales. You will be able to:
- Maintain a detailed record of each and every transaction
- Make ready for tax season with up-to-date financial statements
- Monitor your expenditures, fixed costs and variable costs
- Minimize multitudes of data points into a simple snapshot
The color yellow symbolizes hope. You can analyze your earnings and expenditure in the most effective manner, instilling hope to do better each day.
Ingredient Cost & Wastage Reports
Restaurants are businesses with smaller margins, and thus, every penny counts. Cutting down costs efficiently is essential to achieve an increase in profitability. Ingredients, as mentioned before, form the backbone of a restaurant’s menu – and money spent on procuring ingredients forms a major chunk of expenditure.
Ingredient cost and wastage reports are important to understand the amount spent on procuring them and the loss incurred due to wastage of ingredients. These reports contain crucial information such as:
- Cost price of ingredients
- Ingredient freshness, which is a measure of the ingredient’s shelf life
- Ingredient expiry date
- Wastage quantity
- Wastage type
The important metrics to consider here are: the ingredient cost price, the purchase date and expiry date, the wastage type & quantity, and the loss amount incurred due to wastage. With a deep understanding of these measures, you will be able to:
- Determine the exact quantity of ingredients that you require based on the cost and requirement for your recipes
- Diagnose ingredient wastage by zeroing in on the right reason (expired items / damaged items / stale items etc.)
- Determine the sale price of your menu items based on the ingredient cost
- Diminish purchase costs by identifying the optimal purchase quantity
The color orange symbolizes success. You can attain success by reducing the wastage costs through meticulous monitoring and perfect planning.
Sales Reports
Sales reports are the crown jewel of restaurant reports. Analyzing the sales of a restaurant can help in a holistic understanding of the business. The details covered in these reports are information rich, such as:
- Sales quantity and amount
- Tax amount
- Service charges / Packing charges
- Profit margin
- Sales by menu category, customer, order type and payment type
- Hour-wise sales
The prominent metrics to observe here are: sales by hour, sales by customer, profit margins, sales by order type, and sales by payment type. By understanding these metrics, you will be able to:
- Detect whether you generate more sales through dine-in or through online food orders
- Deduce the bestsellers in your menu and create a separate section for them in your menu
- Define your ideal business hours and peak business hours based on the sales by hour metric
- Discover customer habits and the different payment types that the customers prefer and adopt the same
The color red symbolizes confidence. You can build confidence towards making the right decisions and achieve exponential growth in your business.
Gofrugal Restaurant POS – The Proficient Palette
Now that you have visualized the vibrant colors, let us talk about the palette that beholds them – the restaurant POS or restaurant management system. Every restaurant management system offers you elaborate modules for your everyday operations, but just giving you the right exercise regime and efficient medications is not enough for you to understand your health. You need numbers, facts and figures – empirical evidence to identify insights, and Gofrugal is your go-to friend for this proposition.
With exhaustive reports on every operation you undertake, Gofrugal provides you with a simple and seamless experience towards achieving business growth. It empowers you to make the most of data with the least training required. Here’s how you can paint a successful 4D masterpiece with Gofrugal as your palette:
- Discern the menu items which are topping your sales charts – as well as those that did not make the cut. You can recommend your bestsellers, and save significant costs by not preparing the dishes that didn’t do well.
- Design and carry out hassle-free audits of your business, and identify your challenges easily and effectively. Strengthen your staff by identifying the roadblocks and optimizing their performance.
- Discover your customers, their favorite dishes, their most preferred time for dining or ordering your delicious food online, and much more through detailed customer & sales reports.
- Diminish your purchase and storage costs using the inventory and ingredient costing reports. Identify the right quantity and date to reorder your stock, and save yourselves from the spoilage shock.
Achieving success through data-driven decision-making is not as challenging as it sounds, as the right restaurant management system makes your life easier by generating detailed, information-rich reports. Gofrugal offers you the best module for reporting and analytics which helps you in every step of the way.
What are you waiting for? Get yourself the magical palette called Gofrugal, and watch your business excel with flying colors.
