Mirus Reporter

Successful restaurateurs need to have extensive KPIs and they must be able to quantify everything.  Data scrutiny and analysis is an ongoing process. Restaurant CEO's need to have their restaurant information distributed and analyzed by different personnel that will empower their businesses to increase revenue and improve customer service.  However, operators can be misled by information received solely from their POS systems (sales, reservations) or BOH systems (inventory, food costing, labor scheduling).  They need to be able to get a look at the bigger picture.

Nowadays, the CFO in the restaurant industry performs multiple functions. In addition to finance, and regulating costs, the CFO is in charge of restaurant development and making tactical decisions ranging from marketing initiatives to growth plans. The modern day CFO has to have the ability to forecast market fluctuations, analyze restaurant benchmarks against peers, and have some knowledge of IT systems and IT investments, ensuring that there’s a return on these investments.

They must outline metrics so that restaurant data can be interpreted in real time to set business strategy and make intelligent decisions.

As your restaurant business continues to grow, you may decide it's time to implement tools and software to get better control and insight into how things are going across all locations (Exception based reporting isn't possible with Excel spreadsheets!).

Restaurant operators are always searching for new and fresh ideas that will attract more customers. The goal is clear: enhance customer experience, make sure the marketing objectives are met, and that the campaign produces profitable returns.

The wave of the future?

Within every industry, technology enables us to make positive changes to increase growth and productivity - Upping the ROI is certainly a great reason for making those changes. The restaurant industry is no exception.

Another Bite Out of Your Restaurant Profit Margin

It’s certainly not easy to own and operate a successful restaurant chain in today’s day and age. Take for example, a recent story about a small restaurant that placed a "minimum wage fee" on their customer receipts. The move was intended to shed a light on the raised minimum wages. While some customers understood and sympathized with the owner, others reacted harshly. Perhaps this was not the best way to handle minimum wage hikes.

Between high food costs and energy inflation, the unavoidable losses due to fraud, potential increases in state unemployment taxes, the ACA and now the imminent wage increases, restaurant operators are fraught with worry, more than ever, over keeping their doors open and their businesses profitable.

Recently, Mirus hosted an executive panel webinar presented by Burger King, Carl's Jr. and Red Robin Franchisees. They spoke eloquently about what spreadsheets were not showing them and what kind of BI solutions they currently use to drive revenue and examine data.

One thing became clear as they presented examples of how far they've come ever since they ditched the spreadsheets; they all manage their restaurant businesses by exception and achieve extremely successful results in both, finance and operations by doing so.

Point of Sale in the Restaurant Industry

Point of Sale (POS) Systems have transformed the restaurant industry.  Their accuracy has significantly cut down operating costs and mistakes due to human error and has increased the accuracy of customer orders.  No more taking orders on a piece of paper and walking the order back to the kitchen!

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
- Albert Einstein, Renowned Physicist

So Much Data to Manage
Restaurants generate a lot of information. Think about it. On a daily basis you’re collecting every item ordered on every guest check, every punch in/out of every employee, every receipt of materials, every entry in the log for deposits, etc. It’s a lot to process to gauge restaurant profitability!  So how do you manage all that information?  One way is to summarize the information across 5 restaurant reports: Daily Sales, Product Mix, Theoretical Food Cost, Labor Actual vs Schedule, Daily Cash.  But when you summarize data you run the risk of losing many specifics and the granularity of the data.

The Power of Information Leverage
In the restaurant business, we have tools for accelerating growth in Earnings Per Share (EPS). There are different kinds of leverage. Two of the most common being financial and operational.