Key business decisions such as making changes to the menu, distribution of marketing budgets across outlets, or formulating promotion plans can’t be made on a whim or a gut feeling. To ensure the success of your restaurant, it is critical to make informed business decisions. 

Before you get worried, making informed decisions is no rocket science. Yes, raw data can be intimidating but when presented as analytics they form invaluable insights. Unlike reports that simply relay the data to you, these analytics push you to make sense of the data when put together, they make you question the how, what and why of your restaurant’s performance.

In case you’re wondering where to find these analytics, you don’t have to go too far in its search. They’re available on your Thrive Business Dashboard itself. And in this blog we’re going to dig deeper into how you can rely on these analytics to make the right decisions that take you one step closer to your restaurant’s success. 

Let’s begin with your Sales Performance Overview; apart from reviewing the existing and past numbers, it gives you the ability to forecast and project what your upcoming days, weeks or months may look like.
Get a clear understanding in terms of the number of orders, the average order value, the net sales, the count of customers that generated the same and the channel they came in from.
Do the summer months bring in extra sales? Will you need more inventory or staff  to meet the increase in demand? Are the winter months slower? Do you need to plan promotions to boost sales?
These are just some of the inferences you can draw from your overview numbers.

Next, let’s look at your Item-wise Performance; it gives you a summary of the count of units of each menu item sold, the revenue it generated and it’s contribution to your total sales.
Why is this relevant, you ask? It helps you decide whether you can add more items similar to your bestsellers. Or, can you run an offer to push the ones moving slowly? Is your item selling better than before, thanks to inclusion of add-on and variation options? 

Moving on, let’s have a look at your restaurant’s Order Density; just as the name suggests it gives you an overview of the best performing hours of the day, days of the week, weeks of the month and months of the year.
Thus giving you critical insight into planning your promotions and scheduling them. For example, if you notice a drop in orders between 3pm to 6pm on weekdays, how about creating a Happy Hours offer that’s available to redeem only between those times? 

Enough about sales, is your restaurant operationally sound? Find out via your Operational KPIs. Get a clear view of the count of accepted and cancelled orders and their rates. Figure how much time it takes on an average for your team to acknowledge an order, prepare and deliver the same.
Do you need to dedicate a resource to addressing online orders? Do you require your own staff to enable deliveries during high traffic times? 

That’s not it, dig deeper into Order Cancellation Reasons and improve on them.
Is your kitchen full too often? Do you need to expand to meet the demand? Are your items out of stock more frequently than assumed? Do you need to revisit your inventory levels? Are customers ordering from outside the delivery range? Can you expand your radius? 

While there are more analytics to review around Feedback, NPS, Loyalty and Marketing Campaign performance. Let’s wrap this article up with the ones that make or break your business, your Customers. 

What is the Contribution of New & Returning Customers to your business? Get a comparison view between the count, transactions and revenue generated by your new and existing customers.
Do you need to boost your customer acquisition? Push marketing budgets behind activities such as ads? Or, do you need to introduce a Loyalty Program and incentivize customers to stay engaged with your brand?
Further within existing customers, understand their segmentation - how many are new, regular, at risk, lapsed or lost? Can you activate Automated Engagement and retain them? 

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In conclusion, the Thrive Business Dashboard is in fact a textbook of your restaurant’s performance analytics data, one that is written simply for you to understand easily and take action on accordingly.
Do your homework, and you are guaranteed to excel.