5 Must-Have Restaurant Reports to Keep Your Business on Track

Owning a restaurant is much more than managing staff and creating delicious food for your customers. It also requires strategy and consistent self-evaluation. Restaurant reporting is the best way to ensure that your business remains healthy despite the ever-changing restaurant industry landscape. Restaurant reports highlight details on how your business performs. They also take complex data like payroll and inventory and break it up into digestible snapshots that you can use to make informed decisions about your restaurant. 

As you dive into the data, you may find that it may be hard to know which reports feature must-have information and which ones you can ignore. Below, we give you some tips on what to look for when conducting restaurant reports.

Why is Reporting Necessary to Run a Successful Business?

Constantly tracking data and creating reports may seem daunting, but they benefit your restaurant. Reporting insights can help you identify issues and areas for improvement within your business and ensure you’re on track to meet your goals. 

Thankfully, reporting doesn’t have to be as hard as it sounds. You may imagine a nightmare of compiling data and manually plugging it into spreadsheets, but this is a thing of the past. Instead, a comprehensive restaurant management tool like Deliverect Restaurant can crunch those vital numbers quickly, enabling you to learn your business better. You can gain insights and act on them through crucial analytics and reporting. It seamlessly integrates with your current POS system, automates orders, and reduces human error. 

But what if you want something personalized to your unique business? Most tools offer in-depth and customizable data to create reports that fit your restaurant’s specific needs. That means you can pick which data are most important to your restaurant's success and even decide how frequently you want to measure them—weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

With that in mind, to which reports should you pay the closest attention?

Must-Have Reports for a Successful Restaurant

1. Inventory Reports

Second to labor costs, food expenses are among a restaurant's most significant expenses. As such, monitoring your inventory is vital. You should regularly conduct this must-have restaurant report to help prevent your food (and your money) from going to waste. 

With the insight provided by an inventory report, you can get an up-to-date analysis of which items you use most and how often you need to restock them. This knowledge allows you to make informed, cost-effective decisions like buying in bulk, switching to a cheaper substitute, or even striking up a partnership or deal with a certain vendor you deal with often.

2. Menu Reports

You may want to create a menu that accommodates every kind of diner or perfectly captures the spirit of a particular cuisine, but that alone won’t guarantee your restaurant’s success. When restaurant owners and managers draft a menu, they often don’t consider the financial burdens of a signature dish. Unfortunately, a high price tag doesn’t always equate to a high ROI, so sometimes, opting for that Chilean sea bass can do more harm than good. 

When you need to know how your menu is performing and which dishes your diners prefer most, conducting a menu item report can give you much-needed tough love. 

Menu reporting can help you create menus that satisfy your customers and your restaurant’s financial health. This vital restaurant report details the popularity and profitability of each item you serve. Its analysis also shows you the current selling price and cost of ingredients, outlining which items cost you money versus helping you make a profit. With these reports, you can stop dumping money into menu items your customers won’t order and focus on perfecting your most profitable dishes.

3. Sales Reports

If you don’t have food sales, then there is no restaurant! This report is a must-have because it lets you know how healthy your business is. The answer may reside in your sales report if something in your current operations needs to be tweaked or reimagined. 

It may seem like a sales report and a menu report are the same thing. How they differ boils down to what they cover. A menu report approaches things from a food and customer experience perspective, i.e., which dishes are most popular and how they impact your business financially. whereas a sales report looks behind the scenes, evaluating your operations and the efficiency of your business model.

Sales reports can help you analyze trends in sales volume over time, track table turnaround times, and even monitor the discounts your servers apply to a patron’s meal. When you use the power of these reports, you’ll find that identifying and resolving sales-related pain points becomes suddenly much clearer. If well done, a sales report can also give insight into the most popular days your customers visit and at what time of day. 

4. Payroll Reports

Your staff members are your business's most valuable asset. They’re the heart and soul of the operation, making or breaking the customers’ experience. However, they’re also your most expensive asset.
When employees consistently clock in too early or don’t stick to their schedule, they can disrupt the service flow and cost you unbudgeted funds. To keep an eye on these trends, it helps to have all the necessary data laid out in front of you. You can track crucial employee metrics like attendance, labor costs, paystubs, scheduled hours, and more by conducting a restaurant report on your payroll. 

Monitoring and comparing these metrics can help you comprehensively look at your finances and determine whether you have scheduling issues you need to address. After all, the ultimate goal of any business is to boost revenue, which won’t happen if your profit vanishes into inefficient scheduling and processes.

5. Online Order Reports

Due in part to the pandemic, online order reports have recently grown increasingly instrumental to a restaurant’s success. More than ever, eateries now offer online ordering and delivery, which can be tracked with the right restaurant management software.

Online order reports give insight into how your customers use your site and user experience. For example, if customers consistently get to the ordering page and abandon their carts, your tax, pricing, or turnaround time could be something to investigate. 

Additionally, online reports can give you valuable insight into which platforms your customers frequent, influencing your social media marketing strategies and helping you learn who your customers are. It will also inform which times of day the orders come in, allowing you to schedule enough staff to keep up with demands.

Deliverect Restaurant

Knowing which restaurant reports to use is crucial to grow your business and boost revenue. We highly recommend investing in restaurant management software like Deliverect Restaurant to get the most out of your reporting. We are an omnichannel platform that seamlessly connects with your current POS system, reduces human error, streamlines your FOH and BOH processes, and helps you provide an excellent customer experience.

Interested in learning more about our software and how it can boost your revenue?  Contact us today.