To have a crystal clear notion of upcoming restaurant sales is crucial for efficient business. Sales forecasting is addressing this very issue with some interesting approaches.
It is true that a restaurant owner knows his business better than anyone. But it is also true that there are some wastes, not matter how good you are into business planning which is also time consuming. This is what sales forecasting is doing for restaurants – it manages the tiny balance between the necessary stock products sufficient to meet the customers demand while keeping wastage levels to a minimum.
The Solution
Since the problem is defined we need a proper solution. Sales forecasting tool tailor made for restaurant needs is exactly this, not matter its vendor even though A4E`s A4Restaurants is a great option. With such solution restaurant managers will be able to extract 4 main benefits:
- Minimize the planning time
- Reduce wastage
- Overstock prevention
- Improving overall efficiency
There are few more benefits as preventing from locking cash in overstock or filling the storage with too many items while limiting space for others, as well as serving fresh products.
What to look for in a sales forecasting tool
There is some technical trickery into sales forecasting tools available on the market right now. When restaurant manager is starting to shop around for such solution, he has to have things in mind.
- Statistical forecasting is not an option. Statistics is a great science but it is not the most credible for foreseeing in the future. If restaurant sales are growing through the week, the statistical approach is projecting that the Monday`s sales will be higher than Sundays, even though they should be lower. This makes statistics approach viable just on weekly basis, which is not the best case scenario.
- Products correlation is a must. It is true that some orders have common items like beer and French fries for instance. If the weather is going to be hot, the beer demand will be increased so as French fries.
- Weather based forecasting. The actual weather conditions have their impact on any restaurant sales, less or more. To extract the maximum of this, restaurant manager needs weather sensitive sales forecast tool.
- Holiday detection is important. Not matter the type of the holiday, it also has a strong impact on customers demand. Look for a tool able to differentiate the holidays from the normal working days or weekends.
Any restaurant manager willing to improve its business efficiency should have to consider sales forecasting as a shortcut to this achievement. Testing some free trials will deepen his knowledge, a glimpse in some sample sales forecasting reports will make him more prepared for what he/she should expect.
Need help with this? Do not hesitate to contact us at https://www.a4everyone.com via the contact form in the footer of our website.
