Why You Should Track Daily Sales in Your Restaurant

With the online POS systems like Toast taking over the restaurant space, many restaurant owners wonder why they need to track their restaurant's daily sales when it happens automatically. Let’s talk about why you should still track daily sales in your restaurant.

You're busy. The last thing you want to do is close your restaurant and take an extra 10 minutes to look up your daily sales in your POS system when you know the POS system already has it all tracked. Well, let’s talk about why you need to track your daily restaurant sales outside of your POS system manually.

1. You want to know what your over/short is. You want cash controls to make sure the money made it to the bank, or if you’re over or short. This helps you identify mistakes being made in your business so you can train your managers, keep honest people honest and ensure it all makes it to the bank.
2. Track your gross sales by category: food, bottle beer, draft beer, wine, liquor and merchandise. This helps you calculate your weekly prime cost budget variance report. This way when you do your food cost and you need to grow sales, when you do the pour cost for bottle beer, draft beer, wine and liquor, you have them all summarized and ready to go. Instead of going in and out of the POS system to run special reports, you just pull up your daily sales tracker, and you’re there. You can also track your labor cost because you need total gross sales to divide into your labor totals. You will have accurate reporting for your budget variance report, which allows you to proactively change your bottom line.
3. Track your accounts payable, such as your sales tax collected, your gift cards sold, your tips collected, and any deposits for events. These are items that aren’t in sales; it’s money you collect and hold onto for future use, like sales tax. You're getting money today, but it's not a sale of food, bottle beer, draft beer, wine, or liquor. If you're collecting tips and paying on your staff’s paychecks, that is money that is not yours, but it is going to show up in your bank account. To protect yourself, you need to track it.
4. Subtract your comps from your gross sales plus your accounts payable. Again, because this tells you how much money you collected. What should you have at the end of the night based on cash collected, Mastercard, Visa, Discover, Amex, any house accounts paid out and so on, is that going to equal what you’re expecting? This gives you cash controls.
5. Track how the money came in. You want to look at the cash deposit in your bank account and see that the money made it to the bank. Tracking like this keeps honest people honest, meaning your managers can't steal, or if they do, they're going to be caught. You need to know that your Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Discover how it came in and did it come in on the next credit card statement. You’ll be able to see your over/short and keep honest people honest. It seems kind of redundant, but it's step by step by step.
6. You want your managers to know their numbers. One of the negatives about using software is that when things happen automatically, people don’t pay attention as closely. But when they touch every number, type them into the spreadsheet, they now understand what their sales were day after day after day. This makes it easier for them to control their labor, to control their cost of goods sold, to make sure they're cutting properly, running the restaurant properly. They get to know their numbers.

My coaching program members use a spreadsheet that I provide them called the DSR tracker - daily sales restaurant tracker, which is simply a Google Sheet that does all the things I talked about. You can create your own if you're not already using one. Whatever method you choose, these six reasons I listed will help you run your restaurant in a more proactive way and protect your employees from themselves at the same time. 

If you would like to learn how you can add 13% to your bottom line and get 2 days off per week from your restaurant – guaranteed – click to watch a video training I put together for restaurant owners: https://dsp.coach/transformation. If you're ready right now to make some serious changes in your restaurant, you can also book a 60-minute call with me where we talk about your challenges and figure out exactly what is holding you back from having a restaurant that doesn’t depend on you being in it to be successful. 

Be sure to visit my YouTube channel for more helpful restaurant management video tips.