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How Harnessing Your Restaurant’s Sales Data Can Boost Performance

Joanna White | October 27, 2023 |

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How Harnessing Your Restaurant’s Sales Data Can Boost Performance

Harnessing restaurant sales data is the key to making informed decisions and optimizing operations. 

Using data-driven insights allows you to improve your average transaction value, track sales vs. budget, and optimize performance in multi-site restaurant businesses.

With the right data, you can make strategic decisions that will drive consistency, efficiency, and ultimately, success in the restaurant industry.

Making Informed Decisions with Average Transaction Value

Average Transaction Value (ATV) is the average amount of money spent per customer during a single transaction. Monitoring ATV is crucial in measuring restaurant performance; it provides insights into customer spending habits and helps identify opportunities for growth.

Why Average Transaction Value is a Crucial KPI to Monitor

Monitoring Average Transaction Value (ATV) allows restaurants to understand their current customers and use this to boost performance. Knowing where the average price point is allows businesses to tailor their menu pricing accordingly; it can be used to test whether increased prices are accepted. 

Tracking the ATV by each individual employee can also help boost labor productivity and increase sales per labor hour. Restaurants can identify which employees are consistently generating higher sales and put them in at the busiest times to maximize sales, while lower-performing employees can be provided with additional training. This can help improve overall service and increase customer satisfaction. 

Tracking ATV can also identify trends in seasonality or days of the week. By comparing the ATV across different time periods, you can identify trends and patterns. This information can help you optimize staffing levels and adjust your marketing strategies to maximize sales during peak periods and generate more sales during troughs.

How to use Average Transaction Value to Boost Performance

Improving average transaction value comes hand-in-hand with improving restaurant performance. The easiest way to do this is through upselling. 

Upselling is a hard skill to perfect and monitoring the ATV by employee allows you to identify which employees are best at upselling. Setting targets for your staff and giving them a goal to work towards can also motivate them to upsell more and increase ATV.

Depending on the type of restaurant, using kiosks to allow customers to self-serve can help improve ATV. Customers generally order more using digital platforms as the reduced personal contact makes them feel less judged. It can be a good place to add optional bundles too. 

Tracking Sales vs. Budget for Performance Evaluation

Sales vs. budget refers to the comparison between actual sales and the projected budget for a restaurant. This metric is essential for evaluating performance because it allows restaurant owners to assess whether they are meeting their financial goals, or whether they need to make adjustments to improve profitability. 

How to Analyze Sales vs. Budget Efficiently

To efficiently analyze sales vs budget, there are several key metrics that you should consider. 

Tracking the profit and loss (P&L) is most important as this will give you an overall picture of how well your restaurant is performing financially. 

The budget is based on projected sales, it is the amount that should be taken in to maintain profit margins with the given costs. Cost of goods sold and labor costs are also crucial metrics to be monitored, to ensure that budgeted sales can cover them.

It is challenging to aggregate this data from multiple sources. However, using a tool like Tenzo means all your data is in one place and budgeting can be based on all aspects of business.

Benefits of Tracking Sales vs. Budget

Tracking sales vs. budget is crucial for restaurants to stay on top of their tight margins. By monitoring this metric, restaurateurs can ensure that their labor and inventory costs align with their sales. This allows them to make necessary adjustments and avoid overspending on resources that are not generating enough revenue.

Tracking sales vs. budget on a daily basis allows for the identification of weak spots in the business. By comparing actual sales to budgeted sales, restaurateurs can pinpoint areas where they are falling short and take proactive measures to improve performance. This could involve adjusting pricing strategies, reevaluating marketing efforts, or implementing operational changes to increase efficiency. 

It’s important that daily budgets aren’t static. They should vary; taking into account seasonality and fluctuations in demand — distributing the budget dynamically by taking historical data into account. 

Overall, tracking sales vs. budget provides valuable insights into the financial health of a restaurant. It allows restaurateurs to make data-driven decisions and optimize their operations to maximize profitability.

"Tenzo gives me eyes, it gives a great overview and all the information we need to make good decisions." — Nehme Darwiche, Co-founder and MD of Beiruti

Optimizing Performance in Multi-site Businesses

Optimizing performance in multi-site businesses can be challenging. With multiple locations to manage, it can be difficult to track and compare sales data across all sites. However, by harnessing restaurant sales data, you can gain valuable insights that can help boost performance.

Leveraging Data for Consistency and Efficiency

Understanding and using sales data is most important for multi-site locations. Scaling is an important aspect of all businesses, but for larger businesses, it can be hard for senior stakeholders to make the best decisions for the business without all the information; and equally for all the information to trickle down to the teams on the ground.

Identifying high, or low, performing locations is one of the most helpful tools. This allows restaurateurs to make data-driven decisions to boost the performance of the lower-performing businesses, based on learnings from the highest-performing. 

If one restaurant is outperforming the others significantly, looking into what they're doing differently can be the key to success. If their employees are using a certain sales strategy, or upselling a certain product, it can be translated across all locations. 

Connecting customer sales data across all locations can be incredibly useful in understanding an optimum target customer. This helps when designing marketing campaigns and also when optimizing the menu. If there are menu items consistently underperforming then they should be removed and replaced with those similar to the best-selling dishes. 

Automated reporting allows all stakeholders to work from the same source of truth, reducing human error and improving communication within the business. This is vital for large businesses where data can be siloed in lots of different platforms.

Challenges of Comparing Sales Data In Multi-Site Restaurants

Comparing sales data in multi-site restaurants can be challenging due to varying customer bases. Each location may have a different demographic and preferences, meaning that what works for one restaurant might not work for another. Changes in restaurant menus and sales strategies may have to be tailored to individual locations. 

Communication can be an issue with large multi-site businesses. If each location is using a different system or method to track sales data, it can be difficult to consolidate and compare the information. This can lead to discrepancies and inaccuracies in the data, making it harder for the head office to make informed decisions and optimize performance.

Tenzo allows businesses to aggregate their data from all locations and use it to drive data-led decisions. Optimizing performance from the head office with business-wide insights, whilst empowering front-line workers to engage with their data and make improvements. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, harnessing restaurant sales data can greatly benefit your business. By analyzing sales data you can make informed decisions, boost performance, and increase efficiency. 

Sales data is most useful when reported in real-time. This allows businesses to make immediate improvements to their operations, as well as correcting any issues quickly. 

This data-driven approach allows you to identify areas of improvement, make adjustments, and ultimately drive success in your restaurant operations.