As an individual and as a restaurant owner, you cannot make any progress without measuring your performance and setting short term and long term goals for yourself. 

You can read your numbers and analytics for as long as you want and you can identify your key performance indicators (KPI). 

You can also and you should check your reports for data driven insights about your business but what’s the point of all this if you aren’t measuring your numbers to a set goal?

With the right restaurant analytics system, it’s very easy to determine the flaws of your business, which category is driving the most sales and which one is keeping you from increasing your revenues. 

What are some short term and long term goals that you should set for your restaurant?

Explore new revenue streams

It’s obvious that your main revenue resource is your restaurant sales, but aren’t there more ways to earn more revenues?

Loyalty programs are a great way to increase your revenues if implemented properly. 

The loyalty programs are your way to hook your customers and keep them loyal. They used them to visit your restaurant and spend more money. 

In addition, you can create gift cards that your customers offer to other people to bring you new customers. 

Increase monthly net sales

Your monthly net sales are the most important indicators for your business. They simply show you how well you are managing your business.

With a reliable accounting system integrated with the POS software, you can check your profit and loss statement checking your areas of improvement. 

You can set a goal to increase your net sales by 5 or 7% but before deciding on the exact number, you should check your historical data for the previous year to set an achievable target.

Increase daily net sales 

You might look at the bigger picture and you might decide to start small by increasing your daily net restaurant sales.

Giving a boost for your daily sales eventually serves the bigger goal to increase your monthly net sales.

Ladies night or happy hour or a weekend event or promotions are all ways to drive up your sales day by day. 

You can have a special platter everyday on specials bundled with a drink or dessert. 

You should always play around with your promotions to identify the best one for your customers. 

Improve menu items

One of the most important tools in a software is the menu engineering that enables you to categorize your different menu items depending on their popularity and profitability. 

Once you categorize your items, it’s time for you to make the most of these items to increase their popularity and profitability, the thing that directly affects your income.

That’s why you should aim to improve your menu items whether by replacing them with others that are more profitable or reduce the cost of the platters. 

You might promote items that are profitable but not really popular to increase your profits.

Improve employee productivity 

An important goal that should aim for is improving your staff productivity and performance.

With an employee management system, you are in control of their schedule and their performance assessment.

From this point, you can aim to improve their performance through training that goes along an attractive pay scheme.

Beside their productivity, you need to keep an eye on theft that is accountable for a big inventory loss in restaurants.

Again and again, when you automate your operations it becomes easier for you to control unwarranted transactions and fishy operations.

Increase average check 

The amount of checks impacts directly your overall sales. You can get this numbers by dividing your total sales by the total number of transactions per day or per week let’s say.

Increasing your customers check amount is directly related to your employees that have contact with customers. 

Providing training to your employees to upsell is the key for increasing check amount. 

In addition, your employees should be aware of all the items and their categories so they can suggest the most profitable items to your customers. 

As a restaurant owner, your actions and decisions should be guided by data and analytics enabling you to set profitable goals to grow your business.