Restaurant Analytics: Drive Growth with Data-Driven Decisions

Hospitality businesses constantly collect impressive amounts of data. If you want to achieve growth, using this information is essential. It contains the insights you need to better understand your customers and opportunities to increase revenue.

If you're unsure how to make the best use of restaurant data and analytics, you're in the right place. In our comprehensive guide, we'll take you through the best methods to make the most out of data you’re likely already collecting.

What are restaurant analytics?

Restaurant analytics involve examining your data to glean the most important insights for your business. Chances are your venue already collects data around booking trends, spending patterns and so much more.

With comprehensive restaurant analytics, you can use this data to its fullest potential. If done right, this leads to strong restaurant growth as you find the right areas to cut costs and increase sales.

It's no surprise that according to ResDiary's 2024 Hospitality Tech Trends Report, 85% of venue operators describe analytics technology as important to their business.

Book a demo to take a look around ResDiary's full analytics suite that gives you a full view of all your booking data. 

How to collect restaurant data and analytics

Here are a few simple ways you can begin collecting data in your restaurant:

• Table management systems: A table management system like ResDiary can collect extensive data about your customers and business. From contact details to use in marketing campaigns to booking trends, ResDiary can be an analyst's best friend. ResDiary even comes with a full analytics suite to get the best insights from your data.
• Point of sale (POS) systems: POS systems are especially useful for collecting high-quality sales data. Integrating this software into your table management system makes analysing information like spend per head and average time per booking even easier.
• Other integrations: Various other pieces of software can be handily used for data collection in a restaurant. For instance, Wireless Social collects customers’ email addresses when they sign up for guest Wi-Fi. You can then use this data to expand the reach of your marketing campaigns.

How to use restaurant data and analytics

Once you know how to properly analyse your restaurant's data, you'll be brimming with ideas to improve and grow your business. Here are 10 of the best ways to put restaurant data and analytics to work in your venue.

10 ways to make the most of data and analytics in your restaurant

1. Optimise your menu

With sales data at your disposal, you can find ways to get better results from your restaurant's menu. Use a restaurant analytics solution to discover your top sellers and which products are lagging behind. This data can often be easily accessed through your POS system.

Give your most popular dishes pride of place on your menu to see if they can perform even better. Dishes that aren't selling well may simply be causing bottlenecks in your kitchen. These dishes might need to be removed from your menu.

Creating a stronger menu allows your back of house to function more smoothly, leading to efficient service and greater customer satisfaction. When you have created a razor-sharp menu, your customers will appreciate being able to choose high-quality dishes from the top to the bottom.

2. Increase profit margins

When digging into data about your dishes, you can also gain insights about their profit margins. Analysing metrics like cost of goods sold can give you insights about your profit margin for different dishes.

Dishes with higher profit margins are extremely important to promote. The place of dishes with lower profit margins should be reconsidered.

Restaurant reporting can also identify other opportunities to increase profit margins. If you suspect that your breakfast or lunch services might not be paying off, looking at booking and sales data might confirm this suspicion.

You can then consider what needs to be done to improve the performance of these services, or even make the difficult decision to cull them entirely. This presents an opportunity to refocus on areas with greater potential for profitability.

3. Predict the future with sales forecasting

Predicting future sales has many benefits for restaurants. Based on previous data, you can project how much revenue you can generate for certain periods, like specific holidays.

This can be instrumental in making important financial decisions for your business. If you can accurately project how much money you will make in the near future, you can be properly informed for making major decisions like opening a new venue.

To really predict the future of your venue, integrate your POS and table management systems. ResDiary integrates with POS solutions like PowerEPOS from Triniteq and Oracle Hospitality, offering two-way data flow.

This makes it easy to combine your booking data with sales data for a holistic view of your business.

4. Personalise your service

Personalisation is an important part of creating memorable dining experiences that keep customers coming back. It ensures that your diners feel they have a relationship with your restaurant. In fact, 71% of customers expect personalised interactions from businesses.

One of the best ways to collect and use this data is customer relationship management. ResDiary integrates with several CRM solutions. This enables two-way sharing of data, offering great opportunities for customer personalisation.

For example, Acteol brings together customer data points to create a deeper understanding of your diners in a single, easy-to-understand dashboard. This means your team can deliver highly personalised service each time a customer visits your venue.

5. Level up your marketing

You can also put personalised data to use in your marketing efforts. Acteol helps you drive multi-channel marketing campaigns that make the most of this personalised data.

It's also critically important to look into how your marketing campaigns are performing. With ResDiary promotions, you can dive into information about which of your events and menus are driving revenue and which are faltering.

You can also analyse where your bookings are coming from with booking channels. Maybe your Google widget is a huge hit, or your Meta widget needs some extra attention.

By clearly showing which channels are driving performance, ResDiary makes it easy to analyse your marketing campaigns and make the improvements you need to grow.

6. Reduce food waste

Food waste presents financial and environmental concerns for restaurant businesses, making it a top priority to address.

If you're using data analytics to better understand your inventory management, you'll quickly find ways to reduce food costs in your venue. Collecting this data can be as simple as a logbook of wasted food, either due to expired inventory or food left on customers' plates. (In UK restaurants, 39% of meals end up with a substantial portion in the bin.)

Find out how the majority of your food waste is being caused. If inventory is going off, step up your inventory management and provide training for practices like First In, First Out. If too much food is ending up in the bin off customers' plates, look into reducing your portion sizes.

Often, POS systems can integrate with inventory management systems. This means that your inventory can be automatically updated when particular items are purchased, streamlining data collection.

7. Create better rosters and rotas

One of the quickest wins restaurant booking data offers is the chance to create better rotas. All restaurant owners and operators know what it's like to roster the wrong number of staff members.

Either your team is standing around with nothing to do, resulting in unnecessary labour costs and reduced growth. Or your service becomes utterly frantic because you haven't rostered enough staff members.

Restaurant analytics and data help to prevent this from happening. With a table management system, you can quickly see how many reservations have been made during a given service. If tables need to be turned over very quickly, you'll know to roster extra staff members.

ResDiary's analytics suite is the perfect place to take your understanding of booking data to the next level. You can move beyond rostering the right number of people for a single shift.

Instead, you'll start projecting how busy your venue will be well in advance. You can also use ResDiary segments to prepare for peak times. With segments, you can change your diary in ways like opening up new seating areas. When the peak period has passed, you can revert your diary to its original form.

8. Improve your floor plan

A floor plan is an important tool for your restaurant - which is why ResDiary's table management system includes features for setting up and managing your own floor plan. It's a way to make sure you are maximising space in your venue. If you have the room for an additional table but never put one in, you will miss out on a serious amount of revenue over time.

Data analysis might reveal that a particular table has a lower turnover rate due to its location. This may cause you to reorient your floor plan to ensure it isn’t accidentally neglected by staff members.

With a reservation management system like ResDiary, you can create floor plan views of your booking diary. This gives you a useful bird's eye perspective on your restaurant while also updating you on the status of different tables. This allows for smoother service and stronger revenue.

Check out our guide to designing the perfect floor plan - with 20 ideas you can download too!

9. Streamline your operations

Restaurant data and analytics can provide remarkable insight into optimising operational performance. When you collect and delve into areas such as order wait times and table turnover times, you'll be able to locate bottlenecks within your venue.

It may stand out that every time a particular dish is ordered, wait times spike. You'll need to carefully consider if it's worth keeping this dish on the menu. 

You might also discover that seating large parties causes wait times to increase around your entire restaurant. In this case, you’ll need to carefully reevaluate how you deal with bigger tables.

An efficient service is important for achieving high table turnover and keeping customers satisfied. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to optimise your operations through restaurant analytics.

10. Track employee performance

Another way to ensure your restaurant is running smoothly and promoting growth is to track the performance of specific employees. Some restaurant analytics solutions will allow you to link data like table turnover and upsell success to particular team members.

This enables you to get a stronger understanding of your top-performing team members, and which members of staff need extra support. You might find several team members need support in a single area. In this case, organising training sessions may be in order.

In the restaurant industry, your team is a hugely important resource. Using all the data at your disposal to help them perform even better can make all the difference in achieving growth.

Leverage restaurant analytics with ResDiary

ResDiary is an excellent tool for working with restaurant data and analytics. We collect plenty of booking data for you to optimise your services and track your venue's performance.

We take a comprehensive but intuitive approach to restaurant data analytics. It's easy for restaurant owners to understand data and quickly grasp the top insights.

You can also take advantage of two-way data flow thanks to over 60 integrations with leading providers of hospitality software.

Book a demo today and get start growing your business with ResDiary.