Discover the top restaurant reports you need to track for success.
The restaurant industry today is vastly different - and far more tech-driven - than it was just five years ago. With increasing competition and rising guest expectations, restaurant managers and owners are constantly seeking ways to streamline operations, boost productivity, and clearly measure the impact of their efforts.
Restaurant reporting is divided into two parts: key restaurant metrics (including general, productivity, and restaurant-specific KPIs) and comprehensive restaurant reports. Together, these provide invaluable insights into guest behavior, sales trends, operational efficiencies, and more.
In this article, we’ll be looking at the 7 essential restaurant reports every restaurant needs - and, most importantly, how you can easily access and leverage them to drive your restaurant's success.
Restaurant reporting: Why it matters
Reviewing restaurant reports provides a data-driven overview of the business's performance, enabling informed decisions, which can significantly impact profitability and operational efficiency.
Here are a few reasons why restaurant reporting is important.
Financial health
Reports, including sales reports, profit-and-loss statements, and cost of goods sold (COGS), can provide a clear picture of your restaurant's financial health.
They help identify trends in revenue, expenses, and profitability, allowing managers to make adjustments to pricing, inventory, or labor costs.
Inventory management
Some reports, like inventory reports, allow you to track stock levels, top items used, and waste. All this data can help you reduce food waste and optimize purchasing.
This helps control costs and ensure that the restaurant has the necessary supplies on hand.
Further reading: 7 Best Inventory Software for Restaurants
Labor management
Labor reports are another important reporting tool. They help you track employee hours, payroll, training, and productivity in your restaurant.
These restaurant-related reports also help you optimize staffing levels based on your needs, like when preparing for peak season or peak days, and control labor costs.
Menu optimization
Menu-related reports offer analyses to track popular dishes or beverages. They’re designed to help you improve profitability by identifying your most-sold dishes and those that should be revised or removed.
Customer insights
One of the main benefits of restaurant reporting is getting insights into customer behavior. The contents of customer behavior restaurant reports may vary but they often cover preferences, top items sold, ordering patterns, among others.
Customer insights can also include feedback through post dine-in guest surveys.
These reports help managers, owners, and operators improve guest experiences and tailor offerings to meet customer needs.
Operational efficiency
Another important type of restaurant reports are those related to efficiency and operational management. These reports can identify areas of inefficiency in a dining concept’s operations, such as slow service, high waste, or excessive costs.
Top 7 restaurant reports to review for excelling performance
Now that we’ve covered the importance of reports for F&B concepts, let’s look at the top restaurant reports you should be reviewing regularly.
Daily sales report
By far the most important restaurant report is the daily sales report. It gives you an overview of your daily performance and covers various sales metrics in your restaurant.
The daily sales report shows you:
Total sales: A straightforward indicator that quickly shows whether you’ve had a strong or weak sales day.
Sales by category: A restaurant's daily sales report breaks down sales data into specific item types, offering deeper insights into guest preferences and purchasing patterns. Here's how this breakdown can help:
Menu items: Identifies top-selling and underperforming dishes and beverages.
Payment methods: Reveals guests’ preferred payment options (cash, cards, digital wallets).
Discounts: Tracks the effectiveness of promotions and offers.
Average and total spend: Helps analyze spending patterns for pricing and upselling strategies.
Here’s an example of restaurant daily sales report (via Servme)
Another benefit of the daily restaurant sales report is the ease of making comparisons to identify trends and patterns. For instance, you can:
Compare performance between days, such as Monday versus Tuesday.
Analyze week-over-week changes, such as Monday, March 3rd compared to Monday, March 10th.
Evaluate year-over-year performance, for example, Monday, March 3rd, 2025, versus the same day the previous year.
Top-selling items
Another important restaurant report to regularly review is the top-selling items report. As its name suggests, it shows you your most in-demand dishes, beverages, desserts,…etc.
If you’re running a seasonal menu, make sure to compare weeks or months to see how your seasonal items are performing over time.
You can get this report through your restaurant management system, inventory management software, or your restaurant POS. The top-selling items report is often considered an important POS report.
Top clients report
This is one of the most important restaurant reports that you can get through Servme’s restaurant reservation management system.
The top clients report in Servme is specifically designed to help you understand and nurture your most valuable guests. It offers a clear and detailed view of your guests' spending patterns and behavior.
If you’re using Servme, you can view up to 500 top clients or guests.
The report provides the following insights and more:
Guest ranking: Clearly ranks your guests based on their total spend within a selected date range, helping you quickly identify your top spenders.
Total spend: Tracks the overall amount each guest has spent at your restaurant, highlighting your most profitable relationships.
Average spend per visit: Shows how much each guest typically spends on every visit, guiding you to target upselling and cross-selling opportunities effectively.
Guest tags: Includes valuable tags such as "Returning Guest," "New Guest," and specific guest preferences or allergies (like "Shellfish," "Peanuts"). This allows your team to tailor interactions and ensure guest satisfaction by accommodating individual needs.
No-show tracking: Provides visibility into guests’ reliability, assisting in managing reservations, reducing no-shows, and improving booking strategies.
New vs returning report
This report looks at your guests, new guests versus your returning guests.
Returning customers, or loyal customers, offer a larger opportunity to increase restaurant sales. Research indicates that a 5% increase in customer loyalty can boost profitability by 25% to 95% over time.
Like other reports mentioned here, the new customers versus returning customers report can be viewed on a weekly or monthly basis.
This report helps you view the impact of your marketing campaigns and help you measure guest loyalty and satisfaction.
Are new guests turning into returning guests? Or do they come once, never to return?
If guests aren’t coming back, consider using automated guest surveys to understand what guests like and dislike about your venue, menu, experience…etc.
Feedback report
Another report you can generate through Servme is the feedback report. It shows you all the guest feedback provided through guest surveys.
By viewing this report, you can see guests’ common issues, their favorite things about your restaurant…etc.
Guest surveys can cover various aspects like ambiance, food, speed of service, among others.
One benefit of the feedback report is it allows you to keep track of shortcomings in your venues. This is especially important if you manage multiple restaurant locations.
Often guests will find discrepancies in the level of service or quality between venues. The feedback report helps you, as a restaurant manager or operator, maintain a high level of service and offerings across all your venues.
Like other reports in this list, you can compare guest survey reports on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis.
Payment report
The payment report is a Servme-specific restaurant report. It provides a comprehensive view of all payment transactions processed by your restaurant, ensuring transparency and easy reconciliation.
This payment report streamlines financial oversight, helping you manage reservations, deposits, pre-authorizations, and completed transactions effectively.
Servme’s restaurant payment report covers several detailed fields, including:
Card information: Displays the last 4 digits of the guest's card, ensuring secure and easy identification of payments.
Transaction ID: Provides a unique identifier for each transaction, facilitating reference and follow-up for financial reconciliation.
Reservation date and time: This part of the payment report shows the date and time of the reservation associated with the payment. It helps you to quickly and easily correlate bookings and payments.
Guest name: Identifies guests by names, enhancing customer relationship management (CRM) and allowing for personalized follow-ups or customer service inquiries.
Package information: Highlights specific packages or offers purchased, useful for analyzing sales performance of promotional packages or special menus.
Currency: Specifies the currency in which the payment was made. This is relevant for multi-location brands or international or multi-currency venues.
Transaction amount and approved amount: Provides clear details on the amounts requested versus approved, ensuring accuracy in payment processing and management.
Transaction status: Indicates the outcome of each payment transaction (e.g., successful, declined), ensuring real-time financial accuracy and aiding timely follow-ups if necessary.
Regularly reviewing your Payment Report ensures accurate financial tracking, smoother operations, reduced payment discrepancies, and improved cash flow management for your restaurant
Manager’s report
We saved the best for last. The Manager’s Report is a unique report offered through Servme.
Highly customizable and comprehensive, the Manager Report consolidates operational and guest insights. It is customizable and comprehensive. The report consolidates operational and guest insights.
It helps managers monitor daily operations, optimize and improve guest experiences, and assess marketing effectiveness.
The Servme Manager’s Report allows operators, managers, to select specific fields for comparison. It’s ideal for dining concepts managing multiple outlets.
You can review daily, weekly, and monthly sales, along with guest feedback, top clients, and much more.
Generate restaurant reports with Servme
Managing your restaurant on a daily basis isn’t easy. From constantly trying to increase restaurant sales to providing your guest with a consistent but memorable guest experience, among other operations.
That’s why reviewing restaurant reports can help, not only manage these operations, but also understand which operations need more focus, support, or even training.
Servme’s reservation management system supports dining concepts in managing various operations, from getting and increasing online reservations, to managing shifts and cover flow, to collecting reservation deposits and reducing no-shows and cancellations, among many other operations and tasks.
In addition, Servme offers F&B operators a robust restaurant CRM with detailed guest profiles with information like preferences, dietary restrictions, special orders and requirements—just to name a few.
One important feature in Servme is the auto-tags feature, which hosts and operators can use to segment guests.
Restaurant managers can create their own auto-tags and use them across Servme’s marketing platform, which includes email, SMS, and WhatsApp, across reservation management, and even reports.
Discover how Servme can help your restaurant, from reservations to building relationships with guests to marketing to reporting. Learn more here.
Nada Sobhi
Guest CRM
