Although there are many, we’ve picked out our Top 5 Tools for Financial Success in Your Restaurant:
1) Restaurant Budget vs Actual
A Budget vs Actual enables you to see week over week how you’re performing against your goals. Since the budget is your roadmap to success, you need to understand where you’re hitting the mark and where there are opportunities to improve within your 4 walls.
Without this tool, it’s difficult to make adjustments for unforeseen circumstances and maintain consistent profitability. Additionally, you’re more apt to run into a cash crunch situation due to a lack of knowledge on when to make larger purchases as well as miscalculating tax payments.
2) Declining Budget
A declining budget has proven to be one of the best ways to keep your purchasing in line with your sales.
Since revenues can vary on a week-to-week basis due to holidays, weather, local events, etc., so should your spending!
Being able to identify areas of over or under-spending daily and make adjustments to sales forecasts during the week will ultimately help with cost controls and cash flow.
For example — why would you spend the same amount on food on a projected 50K sales week as a 25K sales week?
3) Menu Engineering Tool
Having a solid Menu Engineering tool in place will allow you to identify the relationship between sales and profitability of each menu item.
Oftentimes, this is no easy task since most systems would require constant management to get the desired results.
Let’s face it, the price of commodities changes all of the time.
Having the ability to see the impact this has on your plate costs while also knowing the quantity sold over time are a huge tool to make proactive decisions to correct shrinking margins and improve overall food cost.
4) Report Card Tool
This tool enables restaurant owners/operators to interpret important POS information such as sales, labor, comps, and voids in ways so that performance can be evaluated each day.
Since we collect the raw data, we consolidate it into a centralized storage area where it is distributed using easy-to-understand reports and graphs.
Also, having the ability to identify trends and analyze the data in order to assist all operators inside and out of the store, directly influences decisions that ultimately impact profitability.
5) Query Reporting
Being able to track total spending over time is key for restaurant purchasing decisions.
Even more helpful is the visibility for price changes each time a product is ordered. This allows you to keep your vendors honest as well as highlight when there may be an area of opportunity to search for better pricing.
Having detailed usage reports can help determine if there is potential waste or theft within the four walls from week to week so issues can be addressed timely before more shrinkage occurs.
