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Beginner: Audit Open Item Use

Updated

Data Quality: Audit Open Items

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Recipe: 20 Minutes + Any Subscription

Let us walk your through it step by step: Audit Open Item Use

Log into Avero in another tab, then click the link to launch a step-by-step guide to auditing your use of Open Items. 

In this walk-through, we will teach you data-quality best practices for optimizing your analytic ability by reviewing your use of Open Items. By auditing the use of these untrackable items, you'll identify opportunities to protect profits by revising your policies and procedures to support continued data analysis with Avero!

What are Open Items?

In your POS, you have buttons staff will use to input orders for certain menu items. This button will add the menu item to the guest check, print a ticket to the bar or kitchen requesting the item be prepared, etc.

You may also have an Open Food or Open Beverage button for special requests that allow a server to type in a title and price for the request manually. This may be a necessary option for the occasional special off-menu request, but these buttons cannot be tracked and analyzed the way menu items can be, so you'll want to limit their use.

Why limit use?

Open Items do not pass all conditions to Avero and are at the mercy of servers to type in any title and price, so these items can't be tracked or analyzed in the same way. This could put you at risk for lost revenue or profits, so it is best to have a Menu Item programmed for all regular requests and menu specials, and limit the use of open items to only when truly needed.

Run an Item Sales Report

See our complete guide to this report: Item Sales Report

To audit the use of Open Items, you'll use the Item Sales Report and run it individually per outlet to audit. 

To run your report, choose an outlet for the report and make the following selections in the Avero Report Generator:

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  • Choose at least 90 days for the best information on the average performance
  • Revenue Center, Meal Period, and Order Type set to Total/All Selected
  • Under Categories, choose Global and select All Globals
  • For Metrics, make sure to select both Item Qty (number of items sold), and Gross Sales

Find all of your 'Open Items' in the report. Most outlets have an open item for each category such as Open Food, Open Wine, Open Liquor, etc. 

You are interested in the Item Quantity and the Gross Sales for each Open Item.

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Next, you will compare the total Open Items sold and Open Items revenue to the total in the report:

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If you are comfortable with excel, you can export the report to excel and enter formulas to calculate the frequency of use of these items:

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To calculate the frequency of use:

  • Divide the Total number of Open Items sold by the Total number of all items sold. Categories do not matter because all Open Items are alike in that they can't be analyzed. So if I have 52 Open Food, 111 Open Wine, 8 Open Liquor I would have a total of 171 Open Items and divide that by the total number of items sold for the time period.
  • Divide the Total Gross Sales for all Open Items by the Total Gross Sales for all items. 
  • Both calculations will return a decimal, a 'Pass' is fewer than .03 (or 3%) and a 'Fail' 

Goal

Open items less than 3% of Gross Sales and Item Sales by Quantity