Ordinami.itMost restaurant owners know their takings from the previous night and little else. Not out of laziness, but because useful numbers are buried among receipts, orders, and invoices, and no one has time to dig them up at the end of a shift. Yet, just four indicators, checked once a month, are enough to manage your restaurant based on facts rather than intuition.
The four numbers that matter
- Average ticket per cover, separated between lunch and dinner. It's the thermometer of how well you're selling, not just how much you're selling. If it drops, the problem lies in the menu or service, not the number of customers.
- Covers per service, day by day. It tells you when you need more staff and when the restaurant is slow: the basis for deciding on openings, closures, and promotions on weak days.
- Overall food cost: purchases of raw materials divided by period revenues. In European restaurants, it tends to stay between 25% and 35%: above that, there's a problem with prices, portions, or waste.
- Best-selling dishes ranking: the top ten most ordered and the bottom ten. It's the raw material for menu engineering: what to push, what to fix, and what to eliminate.
Where to find these numbers
Takings and covers are in the cash register; food cost comes from supplier invoices with an hour of patience per month. The tricky part is the dish ranking: with paper orders, it's virtually impossible to reconstruct, which is why almost no independent restaurant has it. This is where digital tools change the game: when orders go through a digital menu, each dish ordered is recorded automatically. With Ordinami's PRO plan, statistics are in the panel: what's ordered the most, when, and how it changes over time — details of the plans are on the pricing page.
How to use them without becoming an accountant
The right ritual is monthly and takes half an hour: the same four numbers, the same table, comparing with the previous month and the same month last year. You're looking for two things: trends (the dinner ticket has been dropping for three months) and anomalies (food cost has risen by four points: who increased it?). Then, one corrective action at a time, and the next month you check if it worked. Keep everything on one sheet, twelve columns for twelve months: at a glance, you'll see your restaurant's seasonality, which is the first thing numbers teach and the last thing memory honestly recalls.
The mistake to avoid
Don't measure everything: measure a little, but consistently. A dashboard with thirty indicators is abandoned in three weeks; four numbers on a sheet, checked every first Monday of the month, after a year are worth more than any consultancy — because they tell the story of your restaurant, not the sector average. And share the numbers with your team: a front-of-house that knows the monthly target works differently from one that's just guessing.