This article is aimed at restaurant entrepreneurs (franchises, chains, independents...) who believe that digital tools can help them better understand customer behavior, analyze sales and develop new sales channels. If you haven't yet taken the plunge, here are the advantages of implementing a sales analysis tool in your restaurant.
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Restaurant sales analysis: what are we talking about?
Restaurant sales analysis involves a detailed examination of sales data in order to understand the restaurant's commercial performance. This analysis helps identify sales trends, strengths and weaknesses. This provides valuable information for the restaurateur, whose aim is to make informed decisions on management and sales strategy.
Generally speaking, restaurant sales are analyzed using an intelligent tool such asIO Analytics. This tool presents you with clear and precise reports (thanks to indicators and graphs) on your business. Here are the main elements that appear when analyzing restaurant sales:
- Overall sales: This is the total amount of sales generated over a given period. It measures the restaurant's overall performance.
- Sales by product category: It's useful to segment sales by product category, such as appetizers, main courses, desserts, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, etc. This helps you understand which products are the most popular and contribute the most to your restaurant's revenue. This allows you to understand which products are the most popular and which contribute the most to the restaurant's revenue.
- Sales by time of day: Analyzing sales by time of day (morning, noon, evening) can reveal specific consumer trends at each time of day. This can help optimize the offer, staff availability and marketing strategies for each period.
- Sales by day of the week: It's often useful to compare sales on different days of the week. This can reveal seasonal variations or trends specific to certain days, enabling operations to be adjusted accordingly.
- Sales by distribution channel: If the restaurant offers additional services such as online ordering, click and collect or delivery, it's important to analyze sales specific to these channels. This allows you to measure their contribution to overall revenues, and to understand customer preference for each channel.
- Customer data analysis: Sales analysis can also include customer information, such as demographic segmentation, consumption habits, frequency of visits, etc. This enables us to better understand our customers and adapt our marketing and loyalty strategies accordingly.
- Comparison with targets and previous periods: It's important to compare current sales with pre-established targets and performance in previous periods. This enables you to assess growth, improvement or any deviations from expectations.
It's worth noting that a restaurant's sales performance is influenced by many factors that need to be taken into account during the analysis: the restaurant's location, direct competition, new consumer trends, seasonality and so on.Â
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The 5 benefits of a sales analysis tool
1. Understanding sales performance
A sales analysis tool gives restaurateurs an overview of their restaurant's performance. It provides real-time data on sales, profits, costs and profit margins. This helps identify the most profitable products, peak hours, off-peak periods, etc.
2. Informed decision-making‍
Thanks to the information and trends provided by the sales analysis tool, the restaurateur can make more informed strategic decisions. This includes choosing menus, launching promotions, adjusting prices, etc.
3. Menu optimization
By analyzing sales of each dish, the tool can help identify the most popular and underperforming dishes. This allows the menu to be updated accordingly to maximize revenue.
4. Inventory and supply management‍
Sales analysis enables us to forecast demand for certain ingredients or products, facilitating inventory management and avoiding waste.
5. Fraud and error detection‍
The sales analysis tool can also be useful for detecting fraud or internal financial errors by identifying discrepancies between recorded sales and actual transactions.
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How can digital technology help restaurateurs better analyze sales?
Digital technology opens up a host of opportunities for the foodservice industry. Whether in the kitchen or in the dining room, technological innovations are all performance levers that canenrich and boost sales: they are precious sources of differentiation for your restaurants. And more generally, investing in digital also means enhancing thebrand image of your establishment or franchise.
Digital technology is not just for the initiated. On the contrary, it's the concern of all business leaders looking for the keys to differentiating themselves or anticipating the markets of the future.Â
Sell more, sell better by publishing your menu and offers in contactless mode. Opt for online booking, an invaluable time-saver.
Better inventory management thanks to regular monitoring of footfall enables you to adapt kitchen volumes, for greater efficiency on a day-to-day basis. A sales analysis tool can be used to calculate the profitability of a restaurant or sales outlet.
👉 Read the testimonial from Jing Ren of Focaccia Club, who has put his trust in the Innovorder ecosystem to pilot his outlet: "In just a few clicks, my network manager pilots all my restaurants, checks product performance and profitability. We have a global vision thanks to the various reports." Â
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How to boost restaurant sales with IO analytics?
IO analytics provides insight into sales trends, peak hours, most popular products, customer preferences and more. All this information can help restaurateurs adjust their menus, optimize sourcing and better manage overall operations.
By investing in a data analysis tool, you'll gain detailed information to help you optimize your facility's profitability.Â
1. Make better decisions
Find all the data related to your business in clear, relevant graphs and identify new growth opportunities. IO Analytics presents graphs on sales turnover, number of products sold, breakdown of sales by product, details of sales by product and by restaurant, etc.Â
All this data will help you make more informed decisions, improve operational efficiency, optimize the customer experience and increase profitability.
"Thanks to Innovorder, my entire business is encrypted. I constantly rely on data to make my decisions." Stéphanie Merceron, BCHEF franchisee in Cholet
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2. Save time tracking your business
Follow your budget at a glance, even from your smartphone, and compare the evolution of your results. Thanks to our graphs and dashboards, you can view your key business figures in real time, without wasting any time!
For example, with just a few clicks, you can see that XX product brings in XX sales in XX sales channel.
Another example, IO Analytics lets you check the sales of each of your points of sale (thanks to multi-point of sale tracking) in just a few seconds, using a single tool.Â
Focus on the Heat Map
"Innovorder's Heat Map helps me to manage the payroll as closely as possible to the restaurant's activity, by tracking the sales generated hour by hour." Guillaume Coiffe, Smash Smash franchisee in Bordeaux
👉 To find out more: How Smash Smash became a management ace thanks to Innovorder
3. Know your customers' habits
What day do your customers book the most? What are their favorite dishes? What's their average age? Gather data on your customers' profiles and consumption habits to get to know them better and win their loyalty.
IO Analytics helps you track your visitor numbers, and adapt your offer to the number of visitors, for example, by setting up special offers according to time slots or peak/off-peak days.Â
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Would you like to implement a sales analysis tool to help you make the best decisions for your business? Contact an Innovorder expert!
