The seven reports worth reading, and the ones that only look useful

Revenue is the number every dashboard leads with and the one you already know. Here are seven reports that change what you do.

Daily

1. The shift close

Expected cash, counted cash, variance, and discounts and voids by staff member. Two minutes, every evening. Seeshift close.

2. Sales by hour

Not the daily total — the shape of the day. It answers the only staffing question that matters: when do you need people, and when are you paying for them to stand still?

Look at it by day of week. Thursday's shape is not Sunday's, and rostering the same pattern across both is how shops are simultaneously overstaffed and understaffed in the same week.

Weekly

3. Gross margin by product and category

Revenue tells you what sold. Margin tells you what earned. They are frequently different products, and the gap is where the useful decisions are.

This requires cost prices on every product. If your margin report is empty, that is the gap to close before anything else here is meaningful.

Look for: high revenue with low margin (a plough-horse — seemenu engineering), and low revenue with high margin (something to promote).

4. Staff performance

Transactions per hour, average basket value, attach rate, discounts given, voids, refunds.

Used well, this is a coaching tool. Attach rate in particular — the proportion of sales that include an added item — is the number most responsive to a conversation.

Used badly, it is a stick, and staff will optimise for the number rather than the customer. Frame it as coaching and the effect is durable.

5. Shrink and variance

Stock variance by category, refunds by staff, voids by time of day. Seeshrinkage.

Monthly

6. Dead stock and stock ageing

Items not sold in 60 or 90 days. Every one is money sitting on a shelf that has a rent value, and the longer it sits the less it will eventually fetch.

The action is binary: discount it and recover cash, or stop reordering it. What is not an action is leaving it there for another quarter.

7. Channel contribution

Revenue and contribution by channel — in-store, takeaway, each delivery platform. Revenue alone is misleading here, because commission and packaging change the economics completely. Seedelivery commission maths.

The reports that only look useful

Total revenue on a big dashboard. You know this number. It changes nothing.

Year-on-year percentage with no context. Up 12% — against what? A month with a different number of weekends, or a Ramadan, is not comparable.

Top ten selling products by units. Nearly always the cheapest items. Rank by margin contribution instead.

Live sales tickers. Engaging and never once changed a decision.

Forecasts built on three months of data. A forecast needs history and seasonality. With a quarter of data it is extrapolation dressed as insight.

The rhythm that works

• Daily, two minutes: shift close and the day's shape
• Weekly, fifteen minutes: margin, staff, shrink
• Monthly, an hour: dead stock, channels, pricing review

Ninety minutes a month. Shops that keep this rhythm find problems while they are small; shops that look at reports when something is already wrong find them at full size.

What to demand from a system

• Cost prices, therefore margin
• Filters by branch, channel, staff member and date range
• Comparison to the same period last year, and to a custom period
• Export to a spreadsheet, because real analysis happens in a spreadsheet
• Scheduled email of the reports you read, so reading them is not a decision you have to make each day

See thereports feature.