Restaurants

“With the standard reports that came with our POS system, we couldn’t figure out when our ‘specials’ were no longer pulling in more business. Sales figures of individual items or departments seemed too random for us to get a feel for the trends. The Variance Explorer showed us clearly that 2 of our once-popular ‘specials’ were dropping in sales at an alarming rate. We were able to replace them with new specials that reversed the downtrend.” – Noel S.

Your Challenge

If you are managing a restaurant or group of restaurants, you already know how difficult it is to stay successful in your business. Changes in your customers’ tastes, in your competition, and in your neighborhood are happening all the time. Nothing stays the same for long.

You can adapt and thrive in this challenging environment by varying your menu, offering specials, changing advertising and promotions, among others. But how do you know how well or how badly your efforts are helping your sales and profits?

You need to keep on top of business indicators such as:

• Count and value of checks and patrons
• Discounts and bonuses given
• Cost of ingredients and gross profits
• Tip average and percentage of check

You want to monitor such performance at various levels of detail, such as:

• By day of week and time of day
• By department and menu item
• By waiter/waitress
• By ingredient type
• By location

Limitations of POS Reports

Your POS system probably has a large number of built-in reports. It might even have a report writer that can provide you with raw data. But by now you know that all you get is a sea of numbers and meaningless charts. You drown in data, but get no actionable information. A critical weakness of these reports is that they don’t account for seasonal and cyclical patterns. Simple trending doesn’t work when the data is as erratic as your sales.

Charts of raw POS time-series data like the one above give unclear or misleading impressions about trends.

Variance Explorer ^TM - Your Solution

Variance Explorer offers “smoothened” charts that average out the seasonal and irregular fluctuations in sales, to provide a clear picture of underlying trends.

Variance Explorer ^TM offers an “out-of-the-box” solution for the POS systems of restaurants. The solution has already pre-defined a large number of charts and drill-down trees that you use to generate spreadsheet reports on all those indicators.

We provide these critical features needed to get actionable information from your POS by just pointing and clicking with your mouse:

• Repository: Automatically extracts and stores transaction data over multiple years.
• Underlying trends: Automatically removes seasonal and cyclical factors to expose underlying trends in your POS data.
• Drill-down trees: Just point and click to see sub-totals or grand totals at any level of detail.
• Headlights: Visual before-and-after analysis of the impact of any internal or external event.
• Spotlights: Automated searching for the parts of your business undergoing the most positive or negative changes in performance.
• Highlights: Point out the net impact on your business if trends and changes continue.
• Reviews: Recording of your actions and targets, and comparison with actual results over time.

Each of those features, by itself, makes the solution helpful. Together, they provide the essential information you need to succeed in a very volatile industry.

How to get Variance Explorer ^TM

Call us at 201-962-7781 to have one of our certified resellers install the software and integrate it with your existing POS database.

Within hours, Variance Explorer ^TM will analyze years’ worth of your POS data and show you charts that highlight where your problems and opportunities are. You get instant ROI from that first session. And continuous benefits from then on, as the solution monitors your progress and alerts you of changes to your sales trends that may be caused by your actions, by new competition, by changing tastes, etc.

Variance Explorer ^TM is like having your own personal consultant helping you successfully manage your business in a very tough and unforgiving industry.