Restaurant Analytics Software

Restaurant analytics software is a powerful tool designed to help restaurants collect, understand and use data from all areas of their operations to make smarter business decisions. 

It extracts information from POS systems, inventory, accounting, and customer interactions to provide a complete snapshot of the restaurant’s performance. 

The software tracks vital data such as food and labour costs, sales trends, inventory levels and customer flow, highlighting opportunities for improvement and growth. 

It simplifies complex data through detailed reports, visual dashboards and forecasts, making identifying and acting on critical insights easier. 

Moreover, it integrates with other management systems for a unified business view, which is especially beneficial for companies managing multiple sites. With features tailored to a restaurant’s specific size and needs, analytics software for restaurants is essential for boosting profitability, streamlining operations and improving customer satisfaction.

Companies in the food service industry use restaurant analytics to improve their business and operational efficiency. 

The software provides insight into several key areas. Operators can identify where they are wasting money or overspending and reduce those unnecessary costs. It also helps to refine inventory management and purchasing processes. That way, restaurant owners can ensure that their stores always have the right amount of stock at the right time. Additionally, they find new ways to increase sales and improve profitability by identifying customer trends and preferences. 

In short, using restaurant analytics allows restaurant chains and foodservice groups to make informed decisions that promote the continuous improvement of their operations.

Restaurant analytics software equips multi-unit operators with the data and insights to make informed decisions, enhancing efficiency and driving growth across the board.

Here’s how:

• Centralised visibility: You get a bird’s-eye view of all your locations in one place, making it easier to see how each one performs.
  
  
• Benchmarking: You can compare the performance across your restaurants to identify which ones are leading and why.
  
  
• Scaling best practices: Because all information is consolidated and centralised, you can more easily identify the winning strategies and apply them to your other food service locations and kitchens, boosting overall success. In the same way, you can see which outlet generates the most sales and which manager does the best job controlling costs. This might be the person whose career you want to advance within the company. 
  
  
• Simplified reporting: When data access is streamlined, reporting and decision-making become faster and more efficient. Your local restaurant teams can confidently make on-the-spot decisions, while the head office has all the information needed to make long-term, strategic decisions regarding operational efficiency, menu optimisation, inventory management, and suppliers. 
  
  
• Data for managers: Your regional and district managers have the insights they need to make smarter decisions on the ground. This dramatically reduces errors due to misinterpretation of data, lack of reliable information, and plain gut-feeling decision-making. 

The best restaurant analytics tools offer powerful reporting and visualisation capabilities that help you see the bigger picture and the tiny details of your business’s performance.

These insights help your teams on location and at HQ to make informed decisions so that the business can grow smarter and more efficiently.

We recommend taking these features into account when choosing a solution that best matches your business needs:  

• Reports on key metrics: The best tools can generate in-depth reports on your restaurant’s vital signs, such as how much it is selling, what’s hot and what’s not, and where you can cut costs.
  
  
• Trend analysis and forecasting: they help you spot patterns and predict future sales. This means your restaurants can better plan ahead.
  
  
• Drill-down capability: This enables closer investigation, zooming in on specific sales, purchasing, or other performance data. For example, when you want to know why one location spent considerably more on chicken one weekend, why food cost variance is higher than usual, or how much a particular location spends at a specific supplier.
  
  
• Integration with other systems: The best tools don’t work in isolation; they integrate with your other restaurant management systems and/or provide robust API endpoints. This means you can pull data from everywhere—your POS, inventory management, and staffing—to get a complete view of your operations.
  
  
• Data security: Your data’s safety is paramount, so check for robust security and privacy features.
  
  
• Scalability: In the restaurant industry, growth is inevitable. When you are good at what you do, you’ll make more sales, hire more people, have bigger COGS, and open new locations. The restaurant management tool you choose should be able to grow with your business. It should be easy to add new locations to the platform, and the surge in data should not increase complexity but remain actionable no matter the size of your restaurant’s operations.
   
• Customisable user permissions: The tech you choose will be used by many employees. When you run multiple restaurant locations, central kitchens, or a large-scale food service operation, that number could add up to dozens of people. What people can do and see in your analytics should be limited to what they really. That’s why you need robust user settings.
  
  
• Proven customer support and onboarding practices: Good support means you’re never left in the lurch if you run into issues or have questions.

Apicbase does all the above. Plus, it digitises and centralises back of house operations across all your restaurant locations.

Apicbase is a platform that offers total control. The software analyses thousands of data points from your sales, inventory management, procurement, food costs, food waste and unit performance. The information is presented in clear dashboards that show evolutions and highlight discrepancies. You can drill down into the data to identify causes and opportunities for optimisation. 

Tracked KPIs, amongst others, are :

• Unit performance 
• Menu profitability
• Food cost variance
• Food cost percentage
• Menu item profitability
• Revenue and sales trends
• Food and beverage costs (CoGS)
• Inventory levels and usage per store
• Supplier performance per store and company-wide

Apicbase generates insights about every aspect of your business, focusing on F&B management and back of house operations.

Some specific insights you might find interesting are:

• Most and least profitable menu items over time;
• Inventory evolutions per unit;
• Stock variance per item in a certain period;
• The variance between the items ordered and received;
• The causes of inventory variance;
• Whether a dish is priced correctly;
• Value of food waste during a specific period of time;
• Types of food wasted, sorted by total value; 
• Total inventory value on any given day per unit and company-wide;
• Deliveries per supplier, sorted by item value in time;
• Deliveries per supplier during a specific period;
• Most sold menu items;
• Food cost variance per store and company-wide;
• Profit margins per dish, category, menu and location;
• Gross profit margin (Revenue – CoGS).

When choosing an analytics system, consider the plans and pricing structure a potential tech partner offers and whether it fits within your restaurant’s budget. And evaluate its overall value in terms of potential cost savings, efficiency gains, and profitability improvements. 

When implemented correctly, restaurant analytics software offers a massive ROI. It is an investment in a restaurant business’s longevity. While budget considerations are essential, it’s equally important to consider tech’s value as well as its cost. Restaurant owners who can’t look past initial investments might find themselves behind the curve as the restaurant industry becomes increasingly automated, data-driven, and AI-driven.