The Ultimate Guide to Restaurant Analytics 

They rightly say data is the new oil! Every day 402.74 million terabytes of data is generated. Your restaurant space sees data flowing from different sources like POS systems, social media, online food ordering platforms, staff schedulers, inventory systems, customer review platforms, and more. But the million-dollar question is – how do you make sense of all the data? Enter restaurant analytics!

What is restaurant data? 

You have food orders from an online delivery platform, or you receive online customer feedback. Result? You have mountains of data with you! But this is not it – your big data will consist of every piece of information collected at every touchpoint.

Your restaurant’s big data is the valuable information you use to drive actionable insights, produce accurate restaurant reporting, and make more informed business decisions.

Types of restaurant data

• Inventory data: The information you have in your inventory system or stock system is your inventory data. You get details about your food stock levels, ingredient usage, food costs, which vendor provides the ingredients, and more. Inventory data analysis helps reduce food waste and eliminate food shortage issues.
• POS data: This one stands for all your sales data. When you use a cloud-based pos system, your sales data will include your customers’ purchasing behavior, discounts, order type, best-selling food items, peak business hours, and the highest average transaction values. How will all of this information help you?
• Labor data: This will include all the information related to your employees’ schedules, salaries, bonuses, paid time off, and more. The data could be used to measure and assess employee efficiency and manage labor costs effectively.
• Customer data: This is the data point you collect about your customers. Then, you use restaurant analytics to measure customer satisfaction and improve customer service and business intelligence. Customer data includes information about your customer preferences, contact details, loyalty program rewards, and more. What does it help achieve? – Better understanding of your customers and a leading business model that optimizes customer experiences. Plus, you also enable efficient personalized marketing for maximized customer satisfaction.
• Kitchen data: It’s common in the restaurant industry to have kitchen display systems in the restaurant space. Now, these systems provide data like meal preparation time, delivery time from the kitchen to the customer table, equipment utilization, and more. What can you do with this data? You can level up your restaurant operations by tracking real-time data such as average preparation time per meal, delivery speed, and most popular food items on the menu.

Once you have a fair understanding of your big data – the next big question is how you convert all that data discussed above into useful information to grow revenue or expand business. Enter restaurant analytics.

Understand what your numbers mean with restaurant analytics

Simply put, restaurant analytics is an end-to-end process of collecting data from multiple locations, combining data, and then measuring all your data to extract insights and make data-driven decisions.

Restaurant owners shouldn’t confuse restaurant analytics with restaurant reporting. In the latter, you compare different data points of your restaurant business. Restaurant analytics, on the other hand, gives you a 360-degree view of all your systems and data associated with various business operations.

Benefits of restaurant data analytics:

1. Improve guest experience: As a restaurant owner, your priority is a pleasant customer experience, right? When you collect customer demographics to perform data analytics, you get insights into your customer’s tastes and preferences. Result – you build in-depth customer profiles. When you have these guest data, you can conduct data analytics to perform targeted marketing efforts and optimize customer experience. Let’s say it’s one of your customer’s birthday. Your operations team had this detail in their analytics platform along with their food preferences. You could use this information received from customer data analytics to surprise them on their birthday – like you serve their favorite dish for free.
2. Get repeat business: You want to keep your customers hooked to your restaurant and want them to visit your restaurant space more than once and convert them to regular guests. What will bring them back to you? Your menu and customer service! When you perform data analytics on information such as your most loved menu items, customer reviews, and feedback – you gain a detailed insight into what’s working for your restaurant business and what’s not. This helps optimize menus according to what customers like the best. Such advantageous business tweaks are only possible with data analytics.
3. Enhance staff efficiency: You have various staff members on your team like bartenders, chefs, servers, and more. Some might receive good customer reviews while some might not. Then there will be employees who take more time to serve customers while some staff members are known for their minimum waiting time. How do you ensure you reward good-performing team members and motivate those who might lag a bit behind? Simple. Restaurant analytics! It helps you identify opportunities that can help empower your employees and improve their overall efficiency.
4. Optimize financial flow: Restaurant owners always keep an eye out for opportunities or strategies that help grow their business. But one thing that you might often miss is considering your budget. Your growth strategies should align with your budget. Are you wondering how to ensure this? Again, data analytics is at your rescue. It will help you understand:
   1. What data sets are you receiving from multiple sources
   2. How they fit into your business strategy
   3. and if the strategy will drive the desired outcomes you want.
5. Reduce food waste: Being a part of the restaurant industry, you know how unpleasant it is to see food items getting wasted. How do you stop that? Answer: Inventory reporting and analytics. You perform data analytics to get an understanding of your inventory levels. You study historical data, sales trends, seasonal trends, predicted future sales, and more. And then, you revamp your inventory management plan to prevent food wastage.
6. Stay on top of the latest trends:  Last but not least, data analytics helps restaurant owners stay ahead of the competition. How? When you read through different growing data in the restaurant industry, you get an end-to-end perspective on what food items are experiencing popularity or what ingredients are going viral on social media. You start working on those trends and offer customers exactly what they search for.

How to analyze restaurant data? Leverage a modern restaurant app

Analyzing your restaurant data becomes easy with a modern restaurant software or app. The KNOW app is relevant to discussions on restaurant data and analytics as it offers features that enable robust data management and analytics, tailored for restaurant operations. It provides tools for tracking and analyzing various operational aspects such as employee attendance, task completion rates, and compliance with internal standards. Some of the best features you should know:

• Get a complete picture of when your staff members are available to work. Plan their work schedules and track their attendance.
• Report, track, and resolve equipment faults, repair, incidents and IT issues in no time period.
• Track compliance of routines at different sites in one place.
• Create remedial actions for each audit item – track and resolve them.
• Automatically alert the right groups for each type of issue, and track progress with real-time updates.
• Generate daily reports from the web dashboard.

Key restaurant metrics you should track 

• Cost of Goods Sold: CoGS is the required amount to prepare food items on your menu. Keeping a tab on this metric will help take a deep dive into what food items are priced correctly, which are priced low, and if your food costs are higher than your revenue.
• Break-even point: This is your tipping point and helps you identify how much revenue you’d require to match the amount you’ve spent on your restaurant business. Let’s say you’ve been consistently earning less profit compared to the huge investments you’ve made. You don’t want this to continue. And that’s why you must track your break-even point and learn when you’ve covered all your restaurant expenses and started to earn profit.
• Overhead rate: Your overhead rate includes the fixed costs you incur for running your business in the restaurant industry. Fix costs can be expenses like restaurant rent, utilities, restaurant permit, license, and more. Analyzing your overhead rate will help price your food or beverages in the best manner and identify areas where you should cut your fixed costs.  
• Food cost percentage:  It represents the difference between how much cost is incurred to prepare a food item compared to how much you sell it for. Conducting food cost percentage reporting and analytics helps ensure you don’t pay more than what’s needed to prepare a food item. Your profitability stays stable.
• Labor cost percentage: It is the share of your revenue spent on employee wages, salaries, and benefits.  Keeping track of this data will help reduce high labor costs effectively.  
• Inventory turnover ratio: ITR is how many times you have sold out of your total inventory. Restaurant businesses can analyze this data to prevent overstocking and understand. You have just the right stock to keep your operations running smoothly.
• Repeat purchase rate: It helps you learn how many customers you have retained. Analyzing your repeat purchase rate helps you identify areas for improvement to maintain high customer retention and loyalty.
• Prime costs: It is the combined amount of your labor costs and CoGS. Keeping a tab on this metric helps reduce costs on your largest expenses and facilitates more profitability.

How to collect & work with restaurant data?

We have already discussed the different types of restaurant data earlier in the blog. Now we will look at the various sources of your data points – where you can collect your data from!

1. Point of Sale (POS) Systems

POS systems provide you with POS data. They help you gain a detailed overview of your sales data, staff data, guest data, and inventory information. Examples include the payment method your customers use, how frequently they place orders, and more. Restaurant operations managers could use POS data to drive data-driven decisions and boost business intelligence.

2. Customer Feedback Tools

Your customer feedback tools can offer data about your customer’s satisfaction levels with your food and beverage items, their tastes, and preferences. The tools collect this data from direct online customer surveys and reviews, in-store feedback forms, and social media listening. In social media listening, you keep a tab on your customer’s interactions on social media platforms – what posts they like or comment on, how they perceive your brand.

3. Inventory Management Systems

With inventory management systems, you have full control over your restaurant stock levels. These systems or tools help you with real-time inventory monitoring – a complete view of when you are running short of ingredients or when you have stocked more than you sell. You could integrate your inventory management system with your POS system to analyze how much revenue is generated against what food items, what ingredients are no longer required, what items you need in bulk for peak hours, etc,.

4. Staff Management Tools

Staff management tools include employee scheduling software and performance tracking and feedback capabilities. They help you analyze data at peak and slow hours and adjust your staff shifts. The tools enable you to analyze and calculate your labor costs per hour, week, or month and compare the total amount with your revenue generated. You also get to identify which employees have been performing consistently good and which staff members you need to motivate to achieve the desired outcomes. Your overall employee satisfaction enhances and you’re also able to optimize labor costs.

Get Started with KNOW – Your Digital Restaurant Operations Assistant

We hope our article helped you understand the key nuances of restaurant data and why and how data analytics is important for your business. Analyzing guest data or your sales information will help uncover many hidden trends that you should know for implementing business decisions that facilitate growth. Predictive analytics is on the rise in the restaurant space. You get to forecast future business outcomes based on the historical data you have and level up your customer service and satisfaction.

Why should you consider KNOW?

With KNOW’s rich dashboards, you gain valuable insights into your restaurant operations and quickly identify actionable improvement areas. Capture and track equipment failures, breakages, incidents, and IT issues in one place.

We are trusted by 1,000,000+ users and leading restaurants across the globe including Swiggy, Domino’s, SaladStop, and more. With KNOW, you can experience a 70% increase in productivity and a 72% increase in employee engagement. Bid goodbye to text messages, manual paperwork, and messy spreadsheets. KNOW helps manage all your restaurant operations with ease and confidence.

KNOW is your one-stop tool for scheduling, food safety, maintenance, training, and employee engagement. You get instant visibility on compliance and audit status. Here’s a list of some of the best benefits that you get with KNOW:

• Effortless work scheduling & attendance: Keep a tab on staff availability. Plan their work schedules and track their attendance.
• Fault maintenance & incident resolution: Report, track, and resolve equipment faults, repairs, incidents, and IT issues quickly.
• Seamless audits and compliance: Digitize pest control, fire safety, equipment checks, and facility quality.
• Hassle-free onboarding and employee training: Program custom learning journeys for your new hires with bite-sized content. Provide access to your restaurant’s knowledge base anytime, anywhere.
• Food Safety & Hygiene: Prepare and manage your HACCP checks and hygiene audits, and track food and equipment temperatures.
• Streamlined SOP management: Digitize kitchen and front-of-house checklists, temperature checks, sales data collection, and other daily tasks.

Connect today to learn more!

FAQs

1. What is restaurant data analytics? Restaurant analytics is an end-to-end process of collecting data from multiple locations, combining data, and then measuring all your data to extract insights and make data-driven decisions.
2. How to use data in a restaurant? Your restaurant’s big data is the valuable information you use to drive actionable insights, produce accurate restaurant reporting, and make more informed business decisions.
3. What are the data collection methods in restaurants? Restaurant owners and managers can collect data from POS systems, customer feedback tools, staff management systems, and inventory management tools.
4. How to get customer data in a restaurant?You can collect customer data through online forms and surveys, in-store feedback, social media platforms, conversations over phone, and more.