5 reasons to monitor your QSR analytics every day

Running a restaurant can be like training for a marathon. In order to beat your best time, you have to run a little every day, and you have to set smaller goals before working up to your big goal. Without those small goals — those days upon days of shorter runs — you'll never achieve the long-term results.

In the QSR world, those daily runs, those smaller goals are your daily operations. Measuring things like your sales, check average, labor costs, food costs, POS metrics, and other key numbers on a daily basis can be extremely helpful to winning the sprints that lead to long-term wins.

Here are five reasons to monitor your QSR analytics every day.

1. Build a transparent work environment for your team

Running a daily analytics report card can help your team communicate effectively. Making this available to everyone on your team opens up recognition opportunities and can create calls-to-action to help your team address gaps in operations. When your team is more aware of what’s going on, they’ll be more willing to go the extra mile to improve their numbers.

Try using these questions as you work through your daily analytics report card:

1. What are the current gaps in our performance metrics?
2. What steps can we take today to address those gaps?
3. How will we know that our actions worked?
4. How do we compare against others in our organization (From a district, area, or company perspective)?

2. Keep your team focused on results

Monitoring and managing the business at every level each day keeps the teams focused on their results versus their goals. This puts them in a situation where it’s easier to close gaps and gain favorable results while they still have a chance. Without daily checks, it might become too late to make changes to fix the problem quickly, since by then it may have become an insurmountable challenge.

3. It’s easier to track emphasis points and special promotions

Each week or month you’ll have different things you need your team to focus on. These may be new corporate initiatives or even products that are being promoted right now. By tracking your analytics on a daily basis, you’ll be able to keep the team apprised of how well they’ve been doing. It also gives you additional time to teach and encourage them.

You could show individual employees how well they’re doing compared with their co-workers. Nobody likes being at the bottom, so this technique could be effective at encouraging low-performing employees to do more.

4. Daily monitoring leads to more intelligence

Monitoring numbers daily is a great way to identify trends and improve forecasts. From an analytic perspective, daily sales should be predictable under normal circumstances (without weather-related or holiday-related issues). For example: Monday – 9%, Tuesday – 10%, Wednesday – 14%, Thursday – 16%, Friday – 22%, Saturday – 18%, Sunday – 11% = 100%.

Although the percentages will vary by restaurant, monitoring the daily numbers will reveal trends, and the daily percentages should become predictable, which becomes a great way to help managers understand both their business and their forecasting.

5. Bonus points!

Your managers will be able to read their metrics and understand how they relate to their bonus objectives. If they know where they stand daily, they'll be better positioned to make adjustments while there's still time to make an impact — and earn a better bonus.

Winning the race takes a lot of training

Running a QSR is a marathon, but when you train on a daily basis with sprints it becomes far easier to keep pace with the competition. Doing this will not only help you as a leader, but it will help your team to perform even better. Plus, your competitors probably aren’t taking the time to run these daily analytic reports. Taking these simple steps will put you miles ahead of the competition and will help you win the race.