Stock Report

You can easily see the gross profit you should have made on your itemised sales report, but the stock report will show you what you are really making after any losses are taken into account.

The aim is for your actual gross profit to be close to your potential, but where differences arise the stock report will help you to identify the issues causing them.

Correct product set up is critical to a food stock tracking function. Our hospitality EPOS system uses product templates allocated to each category, so any new products created automatically include the correct stock settings.

Staff Costs Report

After your stock, your staff are likely to be your biggest cost, so keeping a close eye on your wage bill can make an enormous difference to your bottom line. The key figure on your staff costs report is your wage as a percentage of sales, but other useful figures are total hours and sales per staff hour.

Underlying the staff costs report will be detailed rota and sales information, which you should be able to drill down into to see specific days or times where you might be over or understaffed.

Many EPOS systems will integrate with a separate staff scheduling system, which will show this information, though having it all in one system means all the data is in place for one of the most useful hospitality EPOS reports…

P&L Report

A P&L (profit & loss) report is one of the most useful reports you can have on an EPOS as it can provide the clearest indication of how your business is performing.

This report won't be available on all systems, as the EPOS needs to hold relevant data on all areas of the business. Where it is available it can give you an immediate estimate of your profit for a specific day, week, or month, so you know exactly how your business is performing.

Email Reports

Email reports may include much of the same data covered by the reports already mentioned, but in terms of usefulness they stand out as a category on their own.

For anyone limited by time (and in this industry, who isn't?) receiving key metrics via email each day, week or month can be a great way to give you a view on how your business is performing. The quicker it can do this the better, so information such as total sales, and how these compare to last week or last year, are great metrics to include.