How to Forecast Sales with Restaurant Business Intelligence

Have you ever been surprised by a sudden boom or drop in your business? You might’ve found yourself rushing to change plans or launching new promos to attract customers again. However, while performance fluctuations are expected in the restaurant industry, it doesn’t mean you can’t prepare for them.

Restaurant business intelligence is a powerful tool for anticipating changes in your business. One thing it can help you do is forecast sales, which allows you to plan for future staffing & inventory changes, customer satisfaction, profitability, and more.

Here’s how to use restaurant business intelligence to forecast sales.

1. Review Historical Data

Restaurant business intelligence tools preserve past sales data, allowing you to review trends and patterns from a previous period to help you forecast future sales. All you need to do is pull up your POS system’s sales reports from any time and date range, and you’ll be able to identify your peak season or hours and, of course, the period when business is slowest.

2. Analyze Your Menu

Tracking real-time restaurant analytics lets you identify your most popular items and forecast their performance in a future period. You can also look up each item’s sales to determine which generates the most and least revenue. In turn, you can update your menu to keep only popular and profitable items, allowing you to maximize sales in the future.

3. Gather All Sales Data

You can also predict sales by gathering relevant data such as average sales per cheque, number of customers served, and sales per order channels like in-store, online, and call center. You can also filter out sales data by online ordering channels since customers from online platforms tend to behave differently from in-house customers. By gathering all relevant sales data, you determine which of your marketing campaigns have worked, allowing you to plan new strategies aligned with your effective campaigns in the past.

4. Determine Staff Performance

Advanced restaurant analytics also generates data on your staff’s performance. It can show the sales every member of the waitstaff has generated during a period. As such, you can also determine how many orders a staff has taken daily, which can help you analyze staff productivity by the hour.

For example, if your dinner service staff makes the most sales, it indicates that your restaurant peaks between 6 PM and 9 PM. In that case, you can assume that you’ll get a lot of foot traffic at the same hours the next day, so you can hire extra help if needed. Proper staffing is critical to ensuring smooth restaurant operations, maximizing sales, and enhancing the customer experience.

5. Evaluate the Sales Demand Forecast

A LIVE Business Intelligence Dashboard features a Sales Demand Forecast, a line chart showing potential sales for a future period based on historical data. This chart will help you determine how much inventory you need for an upcoming period so you can prepare for an increase or decrease in business.

Advanced restaurant analytics helps forecast sales by providing insights into key performance indicators (KPIs) that impact your revenue. It keeps historical data to let you look back at your past performance, allowing you to determine what you have done right and which strategies could have been improved. 

With business intelligence, you can always be ready for changes and turn things around when a slow season is about to come.