R-Keeper reports for restaurants with Power BI

R-Keeper collects everything a restaurant manager needs: every bill, every dish, every shift. The problem is that the till system’s reports answer the question “how much did we sell?”, but not “why does one site earn less than another?”

Below are the metrics that restaurant and café chains find most useful.

Revenue by site and by hour

Total revenue on its own tells you very little. The value comes when it is broken down:

by site – which restaurant is growing and which is standing still;
by day of the week – where the weak days are;
by hour – when customers actually come in.

The hourly view usually delivers the quickest practical benefit: shift rotas start being matched to actual footfall rather than to habit.

Average bill

This is the metric that explains changes in revenue. If revenue went up but the average bill fell, more guests came in but they ordered less – and that calls for completely different action from a drop in revenue.

The average bill is worth looking at alongside the number of bills: together, these two metrics show whether you are growing because of footfall or because of order size.

Food cost by site

The share of cost of sales is the number one metric in the restaurant business – and also the hardest to track without analytics.

That is exactly how one of our clients, who runs several cafés, noticed that food cost at one site was markedly higher than at the others, even though the menu was the same. Something like this is almost impossible to spot in separate till reports, but easy to see in a table with all the sites side by side.

Comparison across sites

For a chain, this is the most important view. When all the sites are shown in one table with the same metrics – revenue, average bill, food cost, staff efficiency – the differences become obvious straight away.

And the difference between similar sites is almost always a question of management, not of the market.

Which dishes bring in profit, and which only bring in revenue? What effect did a promotion have – did it attract new guests, or did it simply give a discount to people who would have come anyway?

These questions can be answered by adding loyalty programme and promotion data – we often build such bespoke reports in addition to the standard package.

Staff costs by hour

In a restaurant, the two biggest costs are food and people. Food cost is usually tracked; staff costs far less often, even though they are frequently easier to manage.

The most useful view is staff costs as a share of revenue by hour and by day of the week. It shows not that the rota is too heavy in general, but at which specific hours there are too many people on the floor and at which there are too few.

Combined with the hourly revenue view, adjusting the rota becomes a calculation rather than a hunch. In practice, this is one of the changes that pays for itself fastest, because it requires no investment at all.

Write-offs and inventory

The gap between theoretical and actual food cost almost always lies in write-offs: spoiled produce, oversized portions, mistakes in the kitchen.

A report showing write-offs by site and by product group often answers the question of why cost of sales is higher at one restaurant even though the menu and suppliers are the same. Comparison across sites works here just as it does with the other metrics – a difference between similar sites is a task, not a statistic.

What to track every week

For a restaurant chain, a weekly rhythm works better than a monthly one, because fluctuations are rapid. In practice, four metrics are enough:

revenue by site, compared with the same day of the week a week earlier;
average bill and number of bills together;
food cost by site;
staff costs as a share of revenue.

We have described a more general list of five metrics that suits any business separately.

Where to start

In practice, most chains find that a ready-built report package covering the key metrics is enough, with a few bespoke reports added later to suit the chain’s particular needs. More on the R-Keeper analytics page; prices are on the pricing page.

R-Keeper reports for restaurants: food cost, average bill and comparison across sites