A modern POS can produce fifty reports. Most owners open one – total sales – and close the app. The seven below are the ones that consistently lead to a decision. Each has a rhythm: look at it daily, weekly or monthly, and no more often than that.
Daily (five minutes, on your phone)
1. Sales and cash close
Total sales by order type (dine-in, takeaway, delivery) and by payment method, against the same day last week. Then the cash register close: expected cash vs counted cash per cashier. Yesterday's shortage is still explainable today; last month's is not.
2. Voids, cancellations and discounts
Every KOT item cancelled after sending, every bill voided, every discount – with the user and the reason. Most days the list is short and boring. The day it is not, you have found either a training problem or a leak. Look for the same name appearing repeatedly.
Weekly (twenty minutes)
3. Item sales and profitability
Quantity sold and margin per item after recipe cost. Sort by quantity and by margin. The four quadrants tell you what to do: high volume/high margin – protect and promote; high volume/low margin – reprice or re-engineer the recipe; low volume/high margin – move it up the menu, train staff to suggest it; low volume/low margin – remove it.
4. Food cost % and variance
Cost of goods ÷ food sales for the week, plus theoretical vs actual usage for your top twenty ingredients. A rising food cost with stable variance means prices or portions; a rising variance means waste or theft. Different problems, different fixes.
5. Channel mix
Share of orders and revenue by channel: dine-in, counter takeaway, own online ordering, QR table orders, each delivery app. Track the net revenue after commissions, not gross. If aggregators are growing as a share while margin falls, it is time to push direct ordering.
Monthly (one hour, with your manager)
6. Staff performance
Sales per waiter per shift, average bill, add-on attachment rate, table turn time; for cashiers, shortages and voids. Use it for rosters and incentives, not for public rankings.
7. Hourly and day-of-week sales
Sales by hour and day over the month. This drives staffing (who works Friday 7–10 pm), prep schedules, happy-hour timing and whether the 11 pm hour is worth the electricity.
Reports you can mostly ignore
Lifetime totals, vanity dashboards, anything without a comparison period. A number without a baseline is decoration.
Setting it up so it actually happens
- Pick the comparison period once (same day last week, same month last year) and stick to it.
- Have the daily two reports sent to your phone automatically at close.
- Put the weekly and monthly ones on a calendar with your manager.
- Keep a one-line log of decisions taken from reports. After three months you will see which reports earned their time.
How MealNix does it
MealNix provides sales, payment, cash register, void and discount, item-wise, category, staff, hourly, channel and tax reports by date range and by branch, with export to PDF and Excel on paid plans and an owner app for live numbers.
FAQ
Which restaurant report is most important?
Daily sales with cash close and the void/discount log. Together they tell you what you sold and whether anything went missing, and they take five minutes.
How do I calculate food cost percentage from POS reports?
Food cost % = cost of goods sold ÷ food sales for the same period. A POS with recipe-based inventory calculates cost of goods from sales and recipes; otherwise use opening stock + purchases − closing stock.
What is a good table turnover time?
It depends on format: 30–45 minutes for QSR and cafés, 60–90 minutes for casual dining, longer for fine dining. Track your own trend by day and hour rather than chasing a benchmark.
Can I get restaurant reports on my phone?
Yes. Cloud POS systems such as MealNix show live sales and reports in an owner app or browser, and can send daily summaries automatically.
