What’s your restaurant’s forecast now?  

Adjusting and updating your forecast to make sure it’s accurate and reflects the current environment is essential. An inaccurate forecast can cause issues down the road such as under and over staffing, over-ordering and over-prepping. During these more turbulent times, it is prudent to continuously adjust your forecast to reflect dips in customer confidence leading to fewer covers or an increase in cancelled bookings and no shows due to guests contracting Covid.  

If your adjusted forecast looks like it won’t match your budget, then it’s time to review the sales mix. An effective sales mix analysis will help you highlight where your team need to focus their energy, whether it’s through updated daily specials, a high impact marketing campaign or upselling. Once you’ve updated the sales mix to reflect the impact of your new restaurant forecast then that’s going to have an impact on purchasing.  

Taking action  

So, your forecast is miles away from your restaurant’s budget and you need to take action. First things first, look at what stock you are holding and consider:  

• Are your current offers making use of your held stock? 
• Holding daily shift meetings to let your floor teams know what they should be upselling and why.
• Highlighting dishes that have high profitability to your teams so they know what to upsell.  

What do your web PLUs look like?  

The next step is to make sure you’re taking advantage of all revenue opportunities available to you. Can your customer base get your food delivered with ease? Do you have the right partners? Is ordering food for delivery an easy process for the customer? Home delivery has become a crucial revenue stream for hospitality businesses, especially since delivery services increased in popularity during lockdowns and when consumers are less likely to venture out due to high Covid risk.  

According to research from CGA, delivery sales in November 2021 were 192% higher than in 2019, far outstripping the 25% growth in takeaways. In addition, having a presence on delivery partners’ apps increases your community visibility – remember that a customer who chooses you for delivery, and enjoys their experience, may also choose to visit you in person when they are looking for an out-of-home venue.  

Communication is key  

The most important part of making all of this work and getting your restaurant’s forecast back on the right track is making sure everyone is on the same page. The GM and Head Chef need to adopt a united front ensuring all bases are covered and any immediate, necessary adaptations are accounted for. Daily meetings to cover this ground, consider the impact of any changes to the forecast and discuss labour requirements will mean that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet, and there are fewer surprises come the end of the month!  

Tools of the trade

If revenue is down and the P&L is off-budget, reacting, adapting and managing that gap becomes critically important. Utilising the right technology to analyse data trends and help manage your purchasing more efficiently can make life a lot easier.  

Here are three things you can do with purchase to pay software from Access Hospitality to help manage your budget effectively.

1. Flash reporting

Within the flash reporting function, you can review the full spend taken from a full ledger of purchases made through the system calculated against the forecasted revenue over a period to date, period overview or week by week. This can be customised to include relevant data across all costs and spend to give a true GP%. And these can be further programmed to manage user orders, so that if the user is attempting to place an order outside of their target GP% an approval request will be automatically generated regardless of their basket order self-approval amount unless target GP% is achieved, enabling users to manage the budget effectively.

2. Product price acceptance

All products from suppliers can have a full price approval set up through alerts within the system or email alerts to enable your team to accept price changes for products on supplier price files. No price changes will impact user ordering without it being approved allowing for live pricing within the system. Including impact % reports to highlight the impact of any price change in comparison to the volume of product previously ordered over a configurable date range. This gives you full visibility over real-time changes that could affect your budget.

3. Spend analysis reporting

Enabling procurement teams to understand specifically what products the end-users are placing orders for. If there are similar orders of products, for example, milk, butter, cheese, etc. then the administrators can see how much they have spent on the products and make adjustments accordingly, such as reducing the product ordering lists to only display the best price products, helping users make the most effective purchasing options.

In this article, we’ve looked at the importance of flexibility and adaptability in the ongoing survival of hospitality businesses. We’ve discussed how realigning budgets and adopting forecasting strategies can help you plan better, minimise losses and capitalise on revenue opportunities. From adjusting sales mixes to leveraging delivery services and utilising advanced purchase-to-pay software, we’ve provided actionable ways you can thrive this financial year.  

What’s your restaurant’s forecast now? 

Adjusting and updating your forecast to reflect the current environment is crucial. Ensuring accuracy will help you prevent issues like over-staffing or over-ordering.  

Did you know Access Procure Wizard has modules to help you with menu engineering and sales forecasting?  

Talk to our team to find out how our purchase to pay software can help you analyse your data and secure your businesses success.