Naji Haddad, VP for EMEA at Deliverect, emphasises that effective restaurant reporting is crucial for business success. Detailed reports on inventory, menu, sales, payroll, and online orders offer critical insights, streamlining operations, optimising spending, and enhancing decision-making for increased profitability.

Effective restaurant reporting is crucial for maintaining a thriving business in the dynamic restaurant industry. Restaurant reports provide detailed insights into your business performance, from managing staff and food service to strategic evaluation and informed decision-making.

Running a restaurant requires constant vigilance and adaptation. Through insightful reporting, you can pinpoint areas for improvement and ensure you’re on track to achieve your goals. Fortunately, modern restaurant management tools streamline this process, eliminating the manual effort of data compilation and spreadsheet management. Tools like Deliverect integrate seamlessly with your POS system, automating orders and minimising errors. They enable you to better understand your business through critical analytics and reporting, while reducing human error.

But what if you want something personalised to your unique business? Most tools offer in-depth and customisable 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?

1. Inventory Reports
Inventory costs constitute a significant portion of a restaurant’s budget, next to labour costs. Regularly monitoring inventory helps prevent wastage and optimise spending.

With the insight provided by an inventory report, you can get an up-to-date analysis on 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 often deal with.

2. Menu Reports
Crafting a menu that appeals to every kind of diner or perfectly captures the spirit of a particular cuisine   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.

This Menu reporting can help you create menus that satisfy your customers’ and your restaurant’s financial health. It also 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 which help 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 Analysis Reports
Understanding your sales patterns is fundamental to managing a successful restaurant. Sales reports are essential because they let you know how healthy your business is. If something in your current operations needs to be tweaked or reimagined, the answer may lie in your sales report.

It may seem like a sales report and a menu report are the same, but how they differ depends on 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.

These reports can help you to track revenue trends over time, highlight peak hours, and evaluate the impact of promotions or discounts. 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 and Employee Management 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.

Payroll reports help monitor and track crucial employee metrics, such as attendance, labour costs, paystubs, scheduled hours, and more.

Monitoring and comparing these metrics can help you comprehensively review 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 ordering and Delivery  Reports
In today’s digital age, online ordering and delivery have become indispensable for restaurants. Online order reports have recently grown increasingly instrumental to a restaurant’s success.

Online order reports provide insights into customer behaviour, such as order abandonment rates and preferred ordering times. This will give you valuable insight into which platforms your customers frequent, influence your social media marketing strategies, and help you learn who your customers are.