If you feel like everything you took for granted running a restaurant has changed, you’re not alone. Between the unprecedented labor shortage and a massive shift in guest dining preferences in the wake of the pandemic, restaurateurs everywhere are looking for answers. How can you cut costs while simultaneously meeting surging customer demand?

The only way to answer that question is with better data.

Not just any data, though. You need restaurant data that is specific to your menu, your staff, and your guests—data that’s only available with best-in-class point-of-sale reporting. SpotOn gives you just that, with fully interactive, easy-to-use reports that come included with the SpotOn Restaurant point-of-sale system, easily saving you $300 – $400 per month compared to using a 3rd party reporting software suite.

Here are 7 of the most popular reports that SpotOn Restaurant clients are using today to make smarter business decisions, grow revenue, and cut costs.

1. Daily Sales Recap

This is the go-to report for restaurant operators to monitor the daily health of their restaurant. With a clear view of net sales broken down by category, with details on voids, discounts, batches, and reconciliation, the Daily Sales Recap makes it easy to monitor daily cash flow. Meanwhile, the top sellers graph shows you what menu items are selling the best so you know where to dig deeper when it’s time to adjust and refine your menu offerings.

2. Sales Snapshot

Get the numbers that matter most to understand sales performance at a glance. See sales, labor, discounts, voids, checks, guests, and averages all on one screen. Even better, you can look up any day in the past and see a comparison to the same day in the previous week to get the context behind the numbers. Yesterday felt really busy, but how did it compare to the same day last week? This report makes it easy to find out in moments.

3. Hourly Sales

The Hourly Sales report included with SpotOn Restaurant makes it easy to see your total sales by hour as well as how many guests and orders are coming through per hour. Run the report for a single day or over a longer date range to fully understand how trends are changing. Filter the data to understand specific sales by hour for your dine-in, carry-out, or online orders and optimize each channel. It’s a great way to figure out your peak hours at a glance and determine when it’s best to schedule your workforce. Particularly with the ongoing labor shortage, having this data is crucial to ensure you’re not staffing extra people during slow periods.

4. Product Mix

This report allows you to sort all your menu items by parent categories, by day and time, or by top sellers to quickly see what’s selling and what’s not. It’s also fully editable so you can focus on the data that’s most important to you. If you want to filter the data for your bar manager to only see beverages sold, you can easily do that from this report. Click on any item to get a detailed breakdown of which employees are selling it and which customers are buying it. Most importantly, see which items that product is most often paired with. Looking for a special offer to tempt in more customers during a quieter afternoon period? Look no further—this report gives you the data you need to pick a sure winner.

5. Product Mix by Employee

SpotOn Restaurant not only makes it easy for your staff members to do their job, but also gives you the reporting tools to monitor their performance. In addition to various employee and clock-in reports, SpotOn Restaurant has a Product Mix by Employee report that shows you sales performance by employee—with detailed information on the specific menu items each employee is selling. Understand which of your employees are making the most in sales, and who is discounting the most. See who your top-performers are with certain categories, such as upsell items, and boost sales by scheduling those staff members on Friday and Saturday evenings (or whatever your peak sales times are).

6. Product Mix with Subtotals

Similar to the standard Product Mix report, this report rolls up items into menu groups and then into categories, giving you an easy way to view reporting on subtotals of each category, such as “sandwiches,” “salads,” “sides,” “desserts,” and so on. Easily understand at a glance the most popular areas on your menu and which areas are most commonly discounted and sold at lower average prices.

7. Product Mix with Modifiers

If you run a pizza parlor, sandwich shop, or any other type of restaurant with numerous order customization and modification options, the Product Mix with Modifiers report will be your new best friend. This report further divides your product mix into each combination of modifiers that is requested at the time of purchase, giving you the insights you need to determine guest behavior and modify your standardized menu accordingly. Maybe a lot of people are removing an item from one of your pizzas, or requesting additional condiments. With this report, you’ll be able to easily spot those trends, so you can adjust your menu to create a more appetizing and profitable menu.