“You can’t improve what you can’t measure”, is one of the guiding principles of business. And it’s certainly true that having immediate access to high quality, detailed restaurant POS reports is crucial to your success.

The CBS Northstar POS system can produce dozens of such reports at the touch of a button, but we’ve highlighted here just five of the most important. 

The 5 Most Useful Restaurant POS Reports

1. Sales Reports

Perhaps the most important report of all, a comprehensive sales report should provide a high-level view of key metrics such as total sales and number of guests, speed of table turns and payment methods used.

But your POS system should also allow you easily to call up more detailed data, which might include sales of individual menu items, sales by server, tips and the specific credit cards being used.

For comparison purposes, all this information can be analyzed by day, week, month or year, and will be an invaluable aid to your financial planning and budgeting.

For maximum productivity, however, you also need to make use of some of the other reports Northstar can produce.

 2. Product and Menu Performance Reports

The success of a restaurant depends above all on the quality and popularity of its food, so you need a report that will let you know exactly how well each of your menu items are selling, and which tend to do better at different times.

You can order Northstar POS Product and Menu Performance reports to produce detailed comparative figures for lunch and evening sessions, weekdays and weekends, and also to detect any seasonal trends.

You will then be able to assess immediately which of your dishes are contributing to your profitability, and which could usefully be dropped. And your reports will also let you know at a glance which upsells and extras are adding value to your menu. 

3. Staff (Labor) Reports

Staff are one of the most significant costs for any restaurant, so maximizing employee productivity is essential to the profitability of your business.

The Northstar restaurant POS can produce detailed analyses of the performance of all your team members, such as the number of sales, upsells and table turns delivered by each server, as well as the number of orders fulfilled by each member of your kitchen and bar teams.

The staff report will also help you monitor such issues as employees’ attendance, time-keeping, absenteeism and sickness, and tips earned.

So the performance of each team member, and their contribution or otherwise to the profitability of the business, will be revealed through incontrovertible hard data rather than subjective impression.  

4. Sales Exception Reports

The Sales Exception report is a valuable complement to the staff report, and enables you to see at once how many voided receipts, discounts and refunds your staff members are generating.

In this way a Northstar POS Sales Exception report can help you identify any additional staff training that might be required, or if there is a more fundamental problem with some of your menu offerings.

The report can also help you spot staff members who may be giving discounts to family, friends or regular customers, perhaps in return for larger than usual tips.  

5. Customer Reports

On a more positive note, Northstar POS customer reports can help tremendously with relationship management and marketing.

You’ll be able easily to identify your most frequent visitors and biggest spenders and to cultivate a relationship with them; for example by offering special deals or promotions and conducting opinion surveys.

Finding out what your best customers like and don’t like about your restaurant can be a great help in fine-tuning your operation and planning targeted email marketing campaigns.

And detailed customer reports will also help you get the maximum value from any loyalty or reward programs that you run.

Find Out More  

These five types of reports are easily customizable to allow you to generate the specific data points most useful for your business. But as valuable as they are, they represent just a fraction of the reporting power now available through NorthStar POS systems.

You can see these capabilities in action by requesting a live demo here, or find out more by calling us on 800-551-7674.