3 Numbers Every Restaurant Should Be Forecasting (and Probably Isn’t)
Most restaurants forecast one thing, loosely: total sales for the month, for the budget. Useful for the bank. Useless for Tuesday. There are three forecasts that actually drive your shifts, and most operators aren’t running any of them at the level they need.
1. Covers and sales, by day and daypart
Not a monthly number. Not even a daily one. Lunch and dinner are different businesses, with different staffing, different prep, and different demand, and a weekday lunch looks nothing like a Saturday one. Forecast at the daypart level and you can staff the line for the rush instead of the lull, and prep for what each part of the day actually needs. This is the foundation the other two stand on.
2. Labor hours required
Once you can forecast demand by daypart, you can forecast the labor it takes to serve it, by position and by hour. That’s the difference between “we always put four servers on Friday” and “here’s what this Friday needs, hour by hour.” Forecasting labor to demand is usually where the biggest, fastest savings hide, because over- and under-staffing are both happening in your schedule right now.
3. Item-level usage for ordering
Your par sheet is a forecast in disguise, a guess at how much of each item you’ll sell before the next delivery. Forecast usage item by item and you order to projected need instead of a stale par. That’s what kills walk-in waste and weekend 86s at the same time.
Why three, not one
These three feed each other. Demand drives labor. Demand drives ordering. Get the demand forecast right at the daypart level and accurate labor and ordering follow. Run them all on guesswork, the way most restaurants do, and the errors pile up through every shift. The good news is that all three come from data already sitting in your POS.
Want to see how sharp these three could get on your own numbers? That’s exactly what we’ll show you.
Want to see it on your own restaurant? We’ll do it free. Pick one of your locations and we’ll run a no-obligation predictive analysis on your actual data, showing where your forecasts are missing and what sharper revenue, labor, and ordering forecasting is worth to that store. No cost, no commitment, pro bono. Book your free location analysis →
