Multi-Unit Restaurants - Why Upgrade Your Reporting Platform?

Increasing Your Awareness

Restaurant companies carefully seek out the smartest ways to manage their everyday operations. Each system they employ (POS, Labor Scheduling, Inventory, Food Cost, Guest Loyalty, Payroll, GL) probably does a decent job of capturing and recording all transactional information and provides some sort of static reporting.

However, these systems are unable to “talk to each other”. In order to try to get greater clarity, many operators must resort to merging all the data from all of these systems into excel spreadsheets. This method is not only often unreliable but extremely time consuming and tedious.

We’ve talked to a lot of restaurant executives who are frustrated because they aren't always able to get the necessary answers in a timely manner (if at all). Creating a report that ties in all their restaurant data is cumbersome or nearly impossible. Do these reporting limitations sound familiar? If the answer is yes, it may be time to upgrade your existing restaurant reporting practices.

Finding the Solution That is Right for You

As you navigate the learning curve and look for answers, you may have a lot of questions along the way. Upgrading your reporting system can help you improve efficiency, reduce delays or uncertainty and improve communication between departments. Dissecting data in an efficient manner is crucial to helping pinpoint potential problems within your business as well as evaluating its performance.

An advanced reporting and analytic solution should offer:

Filtering
Sorting
Drill Down Analysis
Trend Analysis

You should be able to set your own Key Performance Indicators, be able to find the exceptions, analyze employee performance, track over-time, detect fraudulent activity, and measure the success of marketing initiatives. It is critical to have a system in place that can provide real time access to metrics and overall restaurant performance.

What to Look For

If you’re ready to make a change, there are several important considerations that may help when searching for a new solution.

How easily does the reporting system allow you to collect and merge data from all the transactional systems you have in place?
How effortlessly can you adjust your system to fit your evolving business needs?
Will it help you measure your business’s potential for improvement and the need to stay competitive?
Is it user-friendly or does it require special programming skills to operate?
Do you get unlimited reports for your dollar or will you have to pay a la carte each time you need to have a report created to answer a particular question?
How easily can you sift through the irregularities and receive alerts so you can put out fires before they start?
How quickly can you expect to see a return on your investment?

Over time, restaurant companies come to understand that while each system they selected to operate their businesses performs its individual task well, the reports they offer are standardized and limited to just the data they generate, leaving operators with many of their most pressing questions unanswered.

The competition in the restaurant business is more intense than ever. As a restaurant business grows so does the need to rate and increase its performance. To answer intricate business questions, you'll need to integrate data from other systems used in your restaurants. Selecting the right above store reporting system to meet your current and future business needs is vital.