These could also prove to be more informative
Thursday 19 July 2018
You likely as not review your KPI’s on a regular basis. Checking your gross profit/food costs, labour costs and net profit. These give you an excellent idea of how your business is performing. There are alternative figures you can look at though, some that may give you a better insight in to how the business is doing especially when you operate more than one site.
I recently completed a job for a client who was concerned by variances in performance between his two sites. Like him I reviewed the usual KPI suspects and though I could see the variances was no clearer of what the problem was than the client.
There is more than one way to look at your figures so, and using these often throws up results that normal KPI analysis fails to reveal. You don’t need a sophisticated EPOS system to obtain the data, though these will gather it instantly and present it in a uniform manner.
Example: a restaurant served 1,200 customers during the week and the gross income from bar sales was £2,280 the average spend per guest was therefore £1.90, gross food income was £11,040 giving an average spend of £9.20 per guest. Food costs were £2,945 or £2.45 per guest. Labour costs per week are £3,456 or £2.88 per guest.
On the surface, all looks well and good. But what if you other restaurants were achieving beverage sales of £2.10 on the same drinks list? This might indicate that there is a training need, service problem or even a theft problem (unrecorded sales) *see “sales per employee”.
If food costs in other sites are an average of £2.55 per cover it may be that the first site is more efficient in its production and waste management. Practices that would benefit the business if adopted across all sites.
Though the labour costs are at around 30% of turnover and £2.88 per guest if you compare and other sites are achieving £2.65 per guest then there could be a problem with staff scheduling.
An alternative to sales per guest is sales per employee. Though giving similar data using this to cross reference your previous data does give you a better idea of how good your team is and whether they need additional training.
If we take the beverage sales per guest of £1.90 in the original example and compare it to the £2.10 as identified in the other sites it is clear there is a problem the amount of spend being encouraged from guests in the first site. This could be training, or different customer mix. However, if analysing the average sales per employee at a given time there is large differences it brings suspicion on the activities of the team members concerned. They may be under ringing sales and pocketing the money.
Analysing your sales in this manner also makes it clearer if there is a problem with scheduling. Comparing sales per employee as well as per customer hour to hour will show where the rotas could be reviewed, staff encouraged to drive impulse purchases or special offers introduced to encourage up-spending.
Other register and EPOS activity worth monitoring:
Voids
No sales
Discount or complimentary sales activity
These will help you establish patterns of behaviour and weed out any unwanted practices or rotten eggs, should there be any.
Too many voids indicate there may be training needs, discounts or complimentary sales that there could be quality and/or service issues.
Don’t be stayed in how you review your business performance take a look at these reports as they may tell you a whole lot more than your GP or NP results do.
If you would like further advice or help then please send me an email, give me a call or message me on LinkedIn.