12 Essential Restaurant POS Reports to Improve Your Business

Are you on the hunt for a new restaurant POS? Or perhaps your current POS doesn’t provide you with the necessary analytics to grow your business.

Here are the 12 must-have restaurant POS reports to look for when purchasing a POS. These will give you all the data you need to earn more and spend less, no matter the situation.

Before we look at the most important restaurant POS reports you need to keep an eye on, let’s see why these are so vital for the longevity and success of your business:

1. Optimize your menu: By identifying your best and worst-selling menu items, you can ensure you only keep the dishes that people love and that bring in a steady profit.

2. Identify trends: Tracking your sales over specific periods of time enables you to identify:

• Trends
• Seasonal patterns
• Peak and slow times

That way, you can make the necessary adjustments to your menu, promotions, or staff schedules.

3. Simplify payroll: Having your employee’s financial data at your fingertips not only helps you track individual performance but also makes payroll a breeze.

4. Optimize inventory: An in-depth look at the menu items and ingredients that sell out the fastest and those that end up being thrown away can help you order the right inventory and reduce food waste.

5. Schedule your staff better: With a restaurant POS system, it’s easy to identify slow and busy days and times of the day, so you can:

• Better schedule your staff
• Avoid over or understaffing

You might also like: Restaurant analytics for online ordering

This report contains crucial restaurant menu analytics such as sales count, net sales, gross sales, or item discounts for each of your menu items.

This information can help you accelerate sales and make informed business decisions on which items to keep and which to discard to get a bigger return on investment.

This POS report template contains a summary of the sales count, net sales, gross sales, and item discounts of your major group categories. A major group example would be FOOD or DRINKS.

It gives you a bird’s-eye view of each menu category as a whole. For example, if you introduce a new menu category called MEAL KITS, you will quickly see if the venture pays off or not.

As opposed to the major groups, which are menu categories, family groups are the subcategories. For example, under the category FOOD, you will have subcategories such as APPETIZERS or SALADS.

This restaurant sales report gives you a summary of your subcategories’:

• Sales count
• Gross sales
• Sales total
• Item discount.

It also provides a closer look at individual types of food, and which are the most popular.

One of the most important restaurant POS reports, especially if you own more than one location, the property financial report allows you to see how effective your restaurant is at generating revenue.

This is a much-needed restaurant daily report containing:

• Net sales
• Order types
• Offered discounts
• Cash payments
• and more

It also provides relevant operational statistics which can show your restaurant’s level of efficiency, such as:

• Average check amount
• Average turn time

Another POS report example that you need to keep a close eye on is your employee’s financial data, including:

• Checks opened
• The number and amount of service charges
• Menu items ordered
• Discounts
• Tenders applied

All of this information reflects your employees’ activity, which you can use to track individual performance and balance the server’s bank.

Interested in a summary of the total tip activity of each of your employees? This is the report for you.

It features a list of tippable sales in the shape of gross receipts, service charges, charge tips, tips paid, percent of tips to sales, and direct and indirect tip declaration.

This restaurant POS data report shows you all the open checks belonging to an individual employee at the time when you run the report.

It gives you a quick way to check whether all checks are closed and settle any unpaid open checks before you balance your daily sales.

Use this report to prevent inaccurate daily sales data by not carrying over open checks from one day to the next.

Similar to the previous report, this one shows you all the checks that were closed by an individual employee, including those that were reopened and then closed again.

This report comes with a series of special symbols that will tell you whether a check has been added, transferred, split, or re-opened. You can use this data as an employee audit trail or access the report if you’ve lost the hard copy check.

This restaurant POS report shows you all the checks scheduled for “Autofire” at the time when you run the report. The checks are sorted by scheduled date and time.

You can run this report for a selected employee or all the employees at once. Each check will have an identifiable number and include the date and time when it was opened and the date and time when it’s scheduled to be fired. You can also see the subtotal, service charges, tax, and total due for each check.

The check journal report gives you a breakdown of all sales transactions on any given check. You can run the report for a selected period, time span, or check number.

This report is particularly useful if you’re searching for fraud, enabling you to maintain financial security at your restaurant.

It also eliminates the need to keep physical copies of your checks since you know you’ll always have the information digitally available, right at your fingertips.

This type of sales report provides a breakdown of all sales transactions of any specific employee, displayed in a check detail area.

You can run this report for selected employees, time spans, or periods.

Finally, the last type of report we’re going to spotlight today is the tax summary report. This summarizes tax collections for your location by active tax rate.

If you have rates where the tax rate type was set to 0, those rates are set as inactive and won’t show up when you run this report.

Are you ready to improve your restaurant operations? Get access to all of the reports above by signing up for the GloriaFood POS.

To run any of these reports, you simply have to:

• Tap the report you want to run on the POS Reports page.
• Choose filters if you want to limit the results by employee, date, workstation, cash drawer, and so on.

For example, let’s say you want to run an Employee Financial Report. Follow these steps:

1. Select the employee name or all employees;
2. Select the time period for which you want to run the report. If you choose “Custom,” you will have to select a desired date for the interval (2’);
3. Choose an individual workstation or all workstation for which you want to run the report;
4. Choose the individual cash drawer or all cash drawers for which you want to run the report.

Then, simply tap “Run Report” and “Print” if you want to print it. That’s it!

Before deciding on the best restaurant POS for your business needs, it’s vital you take into account its data analytics capabilities. Does it offer the types of restaurant POS reports you need to grow your business long-term?

With robust restaurant POS data, you will be able to optimize your menu, staff, and day-to-day operations, which is what will ultimately dictate the success of your business.