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Restaurant sales forecasting is all about getting a reasonably accurate picture of your profit loss situation. Many restaurants have set up weekly milestones to reflect on these reports. Others do it on a monthly or end-of-financial-quarter basis.
Whatever your timeline for generating a restaurant sales forecast report is, the best way to do that is through a set of predefined strategies.
Conduct Accurate Restaurant Sales Forecast In 2 Easy Ways
We won’t go into the manual paper-trail mode. That’s easy, but it is too time-consuming.
Since restaurant owners now use automated methods to fall back on metrics, sales forecasting isn’t such a big deal anymore. You just need to have the right numbers for it.
Calculate Your Restaurant’s Daily Capacity
If you have a POS terminal, you can export the sales numbers alongside the depleted vs. available inventory state in report format.
If your restaurant has 10 tables, each caters to 4 diners, we are looking at the following projection.
- You can safely assume that on a full day, the kitchen and the servers will be serving two-course dinners to 4 tables each, making it 80 courses.
- Sales forecast formula = Total number of tables x Seat allotment x average ticket size x total number of table turns
- 10 x 4 x 20 x 2
- Sales forecast = $1600
You don’t have to use a POS system for the above sales forecast. The data is available to you since it’s based on the number of average customers walking in each day.
Sales Forecasting through Restaurant Sales Data
For this, you can either use the data from the POS terminal or the sales analytics data in your restaurant order management system.
In our opinion, the latter is much better because you can filter results by month, hour, day, or any particular timeline. The automated system is intelligent enough to predict numbers according to the timeline preference.
Either way, it is an exciting activity to garner results that can scale your business soon.