Your restaurant’s POS creates data every minute of every hour of every day. Consistently, it feeds your reports on orders, payments, check requests, tips, take away deliveries, wait times and even online reviews.
But what story do these reports tell? Or, better yet, how can you transform these individual pieces of data into valuable insights to grow your profitability? Two words: restaurant analytics.
Restaurant analytics can make sense of all the data your restaurant generates and empower you to make better business decisions. In this blog post, we’re going to explain precisely why and how to use restaurant analytics to improve efficiency, drive growth, and ultimately boost revenue.
What are restaurant analytics?
Restaurant analytics involve gathering, measuring and combining multiple sets of data to reveal clear, actionable insights. Put simply, they do what no single expert could do and inspect immense piles of data to answer the big whys in business.
Unlike restaurant reporting, which simply compares data sets, restaurant analytics dive deeper into what the numbers mean. They tell the full story of your restaurant like you’ve never heard it before.
Restaurant analytics are even more useful to owners of multiple restaurants or even restaurant chain managers. Instead of having to look in multiple different places to understand what is going on, you’ll have a single source of truth that will not only save you time, but will also win you money.
Ultimately, restaurant analytics deliver insights that help you understand what drives your restaurant’s profitability and what pulls it down. Building on these findings, you can tweak operations, adjust inventories, train employees, fine-tune menus, and rethink customer interactions to enjoy more success. And, in these troublesome times, restaurant analytics can make an immediate difference by helping you refine your take away and home delivery offers.
Why should you use restaurant analytics?
Businesses that use analytics can boost their profits by 8% to 10%. Still, only 12% of companies leverage the power of data.
It’s a shame, really. Especially since the quantity and quality of data restaurants generate are increasing as technology advances. In fact, with the right cloud-based POS system, you can track every transaction and data related to your restaurant, without lifting a finger.
The boost in profitability is just one of the many advantages of restaurant analytics. Studies have also shown that businesses that use analytics increased their productivity by 17% and improved their products or services by 12%.
And it’s easy to understand why. Restaurant analytics take every bit of data available and place it into a single, coherent storyline. Things such as how much food is wasted, preferred payment methods, favourite dishes, waiting times, reservations, ordering trends, customer reviews, take away, home delivery and countless other statistics are combined, analysed, and translated into tangible and actionable insights.
The best part, though, is that restaurant analytics can reveal your blind spots. By combining different sets of data, analytics can bring to light issues you couldn’t have otherwise pin-pointed. Plus, with the help of restaurant analytics, you can spot emerging trends and build on them.
And, if you own a restaurant chain or multiple restaurants, analytics can offer you the unified overview you need to succeed. By compiling all the separate data into a single storyline, you’ll be able to grasp the bigger picture and understand how and where to redirect your efforts.