Restaurant Revenue Management 3: Monitoring Outcomes & Communicating Results
You've established a baseline, understand your demand drivers, and have a strategic action plan in place to manage your revenue - now it is time to track the results of your efforts and share them!
In this section, we will walk you through creating a Restaurant Revenue Management dashboard to monitor the results or your changes and how to export reporting to share with other team members.
Monitoring Outcomes - Restaurant Revenue Management Dashboard
The first step is creating a dashboard specific to your efforts. An Avero dashboard will automatically update daily and can be viewed at-a-glance without running a single report. If you want to dive into more detail, you can access your reports and drill into more detail.
Report availability varies by subscription; here are the reports we recommend including for a basic Restaurant Revenue Management dashboard. Don't forget to target reports specific you your strategic action plan!
If you aren't familiar with dashboards, see our complete guide: Creating & Managing Dashboards
- Bird's-eye-view - Pin a summary report to see total sales for WTD (Week-to-date) or MTD (Month-to-date)-Include Average Check as one of your metrics!
- Group Sales Summary (available in all subscriptions with multiple locations)
- Group Sales Overview Report (breaks sales out with Global Category and Promotions included)
- Time or Area specific reports - Did you identify times of day, meal periods, or areas of your venue in which to take action? Watch their progress with one of these reports
- Item Sales Report (available in all subscriptions) - Use the filters in the Report Generator to limit this report to specific meal periods or revenue centers. You can pin multiple Item Sales Reports focused on different areas or times to the same dashboard to see them compared side by side.
- If pricing changes or Menu Engineering are part of your strategic action plan, this report is a must!
- Sales by Meal Period or Hourly Sales Report
- Item Sales Report (available in all subscriptions) - Use the filters in the Report Generator to limit this report to specific meal periods or revenue centers. You can pin multiple Item Sales Reports focused on different areas or times to the same dashboard to see them compared side by side.
- Changes over time
- Use Trend Reporting to see how your metrics are trending. Set this to any Day-of-week and the Dashboard will update it each day to yesterday's day of week, without you lifting a finger! We recommend 5-7 weeks for a Day-of-week trend, see the last 5 Mondays side by side to see the impact of your changes quantified. This feature is available in most reports.
- Team Performance
- Service Summary / Service Category - if your strategic action included upskilling or retraining team members, or sales contests, include these reports to see the impact
- Occupancy & Table Performance
- Table Performance Report - use this focused on a single area of the restaurant (like the Dining Room) for highly detailed table performance metrics. If your plan included adjusting your table mix, seating plan, staffing, or service sections, this is an excellent addition to your dashboard. Don't forget to exclude any outliers or irrelevant tables!
Keep the Team Engaged
Consider setting some of your dashboard reports to email to other members of your team on a regular basis. A monthly, weekly, or daily reminder of their area of focus can keeps them engaged over the duration of your plan.
See our complete guide: Automating Email Reports
Communicating Results
Once you've determined results of your plan, or trending changes related to your plan, you'll want to share those results. Share with your team to commend them on their efforts and to your peers and superiors to demonstrate the effectiveness of your efforts.
Here are some Best Practices for communicating your results:
- Share what didn't work too! Self-promotion and congratulations to the hard work of a team are great, but learning what didn't work is just as important to refine future efforts! Be forward-looking about how this will change your next action plan.
- Use visuals - Avero presents reports in a visualization/graph and in a table format. The table is great for getting all the details, exporting for additional manipulation, or emailing daily. The visualization is a great way to show the results to others who aren't as close to your efforts. A visual impact can help your results resonate!
- Refer to your baseline - let others know where you started and your new baseline. This is a measurement of the impact of your plan, or ROI (return on investment) of your efforts!
- Show trends - use Avero Trend Reporting to show incremental changes over time.