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Why use analytics in your restaurant and 3 responses
Terms like “analysis”, “metrics” and “reports” in the restaurant industry generally do not elicit a feeling of excitement for restaurateurs.
Immersed in sales, menu and manpower reports can be intimidating, even with the right tools, not to mention extremely difficult if you don’t have them.
The staff of large restaurants already includes in their skills, knowledge in restaurant analytics, and decipher how they affect the business.
To continually improve, restorers must be able to answer questions such as:
- How can I adjust my menu to sell more?
- What time of day is best for my sales?
- Which of my restaurant locations is the most profitable?
Let’s see why these statistics are so imperative for operations and how a skillful use of the restaurant analytics tool can result in an improvement in your business.
What is restaurant analytics?
78% of restaurant owners check their business metrics every day, but what does this really mean?
First, we must distinguish restaurant reports from restaurant analytics.
Restaurant reports involve looking at your data for a short, specific period. The reports can be used to compare sales and earnings between this week and last week, or yesterday and today.
Restaurant reviews are a little deeper and they force you to ask questions like “Why?”, “what?” And “What does this mean?” Restaurant analysis often combines multiple data sets to answer deeper questions about your restaurant’s performance. If you want to know why a certain day of the week or what time of day, in general, generates profits, you would consult the analytics of your restaurant.
From here, you can get ideas on how to improve your overall restaurant operations.
In short: reports provide you with information; analysis gives you ideas. The reports raise questions; the analysis tries to answer them.
Some answers are as follows:
1. Which sales category is the most popular
Watching your inventory deplete isn’t always the most effective way to determine which food item is most popular. It’s not always a one-on-one showdown, as theft, waste, and spillage can affect these numbers.
With restaurant analytics, you can take a look at which sales categories are most popular, from pizzas to drinks to combo lunch specials, what are the profit margins and what is the gross income.
This information can help you create catering menus, readjust different prices, and connect with your customers by providing them with the food they prefer the most.
2. What is the best day to sell?
It is an ancient question for restaurateurs: Should we open on Mondays? Friday seems to be our busiest day, but It really is that?
Restaurant analytics can give you visibility on the occupancy of each day, but also on how each day of the week compares on average with the others.
In other words, you can see the occupancy on Wednesdays to calculate the number of menus to prepare and adjust the staff hours.
Example: Let’s say your Tuesday sales are falling. You decide to introduce “Pizza Tuesday” with half-price pizzas to get more tables occupied, and you want to see how this affects your income after two months.
A feature of restaurant analytics is the ability to view special requests on the POS system over time.
Owners can see how often the options are preferred by customers, for example, if hamburgers are served, they could know if they prefer more “to the point” or “more done” so that the kitchen standard adapts more to taste of customers.
Clearly, these changes affect the bottom line, so use the data to make menu and pricing decisions.