Here at Access Hospitality, we often talk to customers who are still using admin-heavy processes and Excel spreadsheets to report on sales data. In this article, we will take a closer look at EPoS reporting, what data you can collect, and how to use it in your hospitality business.
What is EPoS data?
EPoS data is the data that is recorded through the electronic point of sale (EPoS) system with every transaction such as. The value of the order, the payment method, the staff member who recorded the sale, as well as the date and time of the transaction.
Depending on the reporting capabilities of your EPoS provider, the recorded transaction data can be fed into real-time reports that monitor sales trends and product performance, prepopulate accounts, and monitor stock levels.
By capturing this data, hospitality businesses can identify trends, monitor performance over time and use this information to inform their marketing strategy or menu analysis initiatives.
So, how can you harness the data collected through your EPoS system to make improvements in your hospitality business?
Using EPoS analysis to optimise business performance
Are you currently utilising your sales data to help inform ordering, forecast staffing needs and maximise profits? The potentially untapped source in your EPoS data can give you a clear understanding of how your business is performing and where improvements can be made.
Accessing those insights in real-time not only saves you hours of manual reporting but helps you to make quick, data-backed decisions that lead to predictable sales and profit forecasting, optimised product performance and streamlined accounting.
Let's explore how you can leverage your EPoS resports and data to achieve these goals.
Accurate forecasting
Many hospitality businesses struggle to create accurate forecasts because their data is in numerous different places, or they aren’t benchmarking based on past performance. Analysing your EPoS sales data in one central system can help you become extremely accurate in your projections.
Starting with an overview of your total sales across the weeks, months, and year, your sales dashboard allows you to track sales data by period - either across your business or at site level. For those hospitality businesses who operate multiple sites, investing in a multi-site hospitality EPoS is a good idea as you can manage all the data across your sites in one platform.
Your hospitality EPoS data can also help you identify and track important KPIs for your business, such as average spend per transaction. By recording and monitoring this data, you can observe the success of upsell and promotion campaigns by measuring the impact on the average spend amount.
Some EPoS systems offer additional advanced features like integrated weather reporting. These systems pull weather data directly into the platform, allowing you to compare current conditions with past weather patterns and their corresponding sales data so you can analyse how weather patterns affect your business.
A huge benefit of accurate sales forecasting for restaurants is that you can optimise other business processes to reduce unnecessary costs. Your staff schedule is one area that can be positively impacted - with an accurate sales forecast, you can predict when you need more staff and reduce the incidence of understaffing, which can lead to poor customer service. Your accurate forecasting can also positively impact your purchasing, helping you determine when you need more or less stock and what items you need the most, leading to reduced food waste in your venue.
To summarise how EPoS data can help you with sales and profit forecasting:
- Tracking sales data over time
- Comparing sales data year-on-year
- Optimising staff scheduling
- Monitoring and informing stock purchasing
- Comparing patterns with weather forecasting feature
Measure product performance
Seasonality, changing consumer trends, and even supply issues can all make measuring product performance challenging. But understanding which of your products are high-performing stars and which aren’t generating the profit you need is a key part of building revenue. Your EPoS sales data can help you to reduce waste, spot up-and-coming trends and adapt your menu to keep your customers happy.
Start by drilling down into your sales reports. Identify your top sellers for the week, then track those trends over time. Notice how certain items perform better seasonally (think hot chocolate in winter, beer in summer). This data powers smarter purchasing, ensuring you always have the right stock on hand.
Your EPoS also reveals how customer tastes evolve. Trends like the rise of craft gin or a new favourite dish can emerge – and your sales data is the first to alert you. Want to know your most profitable dishes? These are the menu items that are both popular and have low production costs. Your EPoS data helps you with menu engineering, allowing you to pinpoint these cash cows so you can create high-value offerings that customers love.
Your product sales data can also help you measure and track the impact of promotions and upselling initiatives by tracking the performance and popularity of promoted products over time.
How EPoS data can help you with product performance:
- Identify your top-performing products
- Spot seasonal trends
- Track consumer trends
- Identify your most profitable products
- Track promotional activity performance
Free up man hours with automated accounting
Tracking, monitoring, and reporting on accounting data is very time-consuming. With EPoS data, you can ditch the manual data entry and automate accounting tasks, saving you valuable time each day.
Most EPoS systems streamline accounting by automatically populating reports with your daily sales data, ensuring accuracy and security, and you can often customise your reporting for even greater control. Additionally, many EPoS solutions offer seamless export formats, eliminating the need for manual data entry into separate accounting packages.
As well as sales and transactions, you can also generate reports to help gain actionable insights across the business, with reporting on banking, discounts, promotions, sales mix ratios, petty cash, and invoices.
Lastly, if your EPoS system is cloud-based, it offers the advantage of real-time reporting for up-to-the-minute insights into your business. This means you always have real-time visibility across your hospitality business at your fingertips.
In summary, here's how EPoS reports can help you with accounting:
- Auto-populate sales data to save time manually entering data
- Securely lock business sheets at the end of the day
- Export in an accounts-friendly format
- Gain actionable insights about cash flow across the business
- Real-time reporting (in cloud-based EPoS systems)
Read more about switching to a cloud-based hospitality EPoS system.
How our hospitality EPoS can help
Our intuitive and easy-to-use cloud-based hospitality EPoS system is perfect for busy restaurants, bars and pubs where every transaction and stock movement is available for analysis within seconds of them taking place.
The most robust and reliable stock solution on the market, our EPoS report dashboards are configured to suit your operational requirements, giving you real-time sales, staff, and stock data 24/7.
Our hospitality EPoS system can:
- Monitor transactions and stock movements in real-time for greater accuracy.
- Manage cash, stock, and resources effectively.
- Generate business sheets that help you control all aspects of sales and cash management.
- Instant reporting and KPIs highlight issues for proactive decisions and resolutions.
To find out more about our hospitality EPoS, download our brochure.
Ready to harness your sales data and learn more about your business performance?
If you’re interested in learning more about how our cloud-based solution can help you harness your sales data, download our free, comprehensive guide today.
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