All restaurants accumulate data: sales per dish, orders per platform, peak hours, average baskets. But few restaurateurs actually use this data to make decisions. Here are the 7 essential questions your dashboard should illuminate.
What is my actual CA per channel?
The total of your revenue is an obvious data point. The breakdown by channel is more informative:
- How much in-store?
- How much for takeaway (click & collect)?
- How much via Uber Eats? Deliveroo? Just Eat?
- How much via your own website or ordering app?
This breakdown shows where your dependence lies. If Uber Eats represents 60% of your revenue, your business is very exposed to platform risk. Diversification becomes a strategic priority.
How to obtain it: A well-configured POS differentiates channels. For multi-platform delivery, an aggregator like Pepprio consolidates all sources into a single dashboard.
What is my net margin by channel?
The gross revenue doesn't tell the whole story. Once platform commissions, packaging costs, and variable costs are subtracted, some channels are less profitable than one might think.
Indicative margins:
- Hall: gross margin 65-70%, no commission, net margin 65-70%
- Click & collect: gross margin 65-70%, commission 0-2%, net margin 63-68%
- Uber Eats / Deliveroo: gross margin 65-70%, commission 25-35%, net margin 30-45%
Knowing the net margin by channel helps you understand where to focus your efforts.
Which dishes are truly profitable?
Popularity of a dish is not synonymous with profitability. A best-selling dish with a low margin can either make you thrive… or sink you.
For each dish, calculate:
- Sales volume
- Selling price
- Raw material cost
- Gross margin in € and in %
- Gross margin per channel (with commissions)
The ideal: a dashboard that crosses volume × margin to identify the “stars” (high margin + high volume), the “milk cows” (high margin + low volume – to nurture), the “fleeting stars” (low margin + high volume – to rephrase) and the “to delete” (low on both).
What are my most productive hours?
Your fixed costs (rent, salaries, utilities) are constantly running. Your productivity per hour worked is a critical KPI.
To analyze:
- Revenue per hour and per day of the week
- Number of orders per hour
- Average ticket per time slot
- Productivity (Revenue / hour of staff present)
This key data point:
- Opening hours (should we maintain Sunday evening opening?)
- Staff scheduling (how many staff at 2pm vs. 7pm?)
- Targeted promotions (boost off-peak slots)
What is the profile of my recurring customers?
A customer who orders three times a month is worth much more than a customer who orders once and doesn't return. But you don't know that if you don't measure loyalty.
To identify:
- How many clients return within 30 days?
- What is their average order value?
- Which platforms have the highest repeat purchase rate?
- How much does a customer cost (acquisition + retention) versus how much do they generate over their lifetime?
On platforms, you don't have the customer's identity but anonymized hashes allowing for recurrence measurement. Your POS or aggregator can consolidate this data.
What is the impact of my marketing actions?
You launch a promotion. You change your photos. You add a new dish. How do you know if it works?
Without a baseline beforehand, it's impossible to measure. The good reflex:
Define the target metric (volume, average order value, conversion) Measure the baseline over 4 weeks Launch the action Measure during and after
Without this discipline, your marketing decisions rest on intuition—which often fails.
What are my operational risks?
Beyond the business, operational data reveals risks:
- Cancellation rate per platform (above 5% = penalties)
- Average rating per platform and its evolution
- Average preparation time (vs. announced)
- Error rate per dish (reorders)
- Average service time in the dining room
Tracking these indicators in near real-time allows you to take action before problems become visible in the CA.
How to Build Your Dashboard
Here's a breakdown of the key steps involved in creating an effective dashboard:
1. Define Your Objectives:
- What questions are you trying to answer? Start by identifying the specific insights you need to gain. Don't just collect data; focus on what you want to understand.
- Who is your audience? Tailor your dashboard to the needs and technical understanding of the people who will be using it.
2. Choose Your Data Sources:
- Identify relevant data: Determine where the data needed to answer your questions resides. This could include databases, spreadsheets, APIs, or other sources.
- Data quality: Ensure the data is accurate, reliable, and consistent. Clean and transform your data as needed.
3. Select Your Dashboard Tool:
- Popular options: Tableau, Power BI, Google Data Studio, Grafana, and many others.
- Consider your needs: Evaluate tools based on features, cost, ease of use, and integration with your data sources.
4. Design Your Layout:
- Prioritize key metrics: Place the most important information prominently.
- Visual hierarchy: Use size, color, and placement to guide the viewer's eye.
- Keep it clean and uncluttered: Avoid overwhelming the user with too much information. Whitespace is your friend!
- Logical flow: Arrange elements in a way that tells a story.
5. Choose the Right Visualizations:
- Bar charts: Comparing categories.
- Line charts: Showing trends over time.
- Pie charts: Representing proportions (use sparingly).
- Scatter plots: Identifying correlations.
- Maps: Visualizing geographic data.
6. Add Interactivity (Optional but Recommended):
- Filters: Allow users to narrow down the data.
- Drill-downs: Enable users to explore data in more detail.
- Tooltips: Provide additional information on hover.
7. Test and Iterate:
- Get feedback: Ask users for their opinions on the dashboard's clarity and usefulness.
- Refine your design: Make adjustments based on feedback and your own observations. Dashboards are never truly "finished."
The Minimum Viable Product approach
If you start, limit yourself to 5-7 key indicators:
- Daily revenue per channel
- Number of orders per channel
- Average basket per channel
- Average rating per platform
- Cancellation rate per platform
- Top 5 best-selling items
- Monthly cumulative revenue vs. previous month
Updated daily (ideally automatically), this dashboard already gives you an excellent level of control.
The evolution
As you master the basics, expand on:
- Margins per dish and per channel
- Customer retention cohorts
- Price or description A/B tests
- Forecasts based on historical data
The tool ecosystem
To produce this dashboard, several data sources:
- POS : sales, items, transactions
- Platforms : orders, reviews, notes, cancellation rates
- Aggregator (like Pepprio) : multi-platform consolidation, unified metrics
- Accounting : raw materials, variable costs
A aggregator handles the bulk of the consolidation work for the delivery aspect. It’s the tool that prevents you from juggling between 4 dashboards from different platforms.
Traps to Avoid
Here are some common pitfalls to watch out for when starting a new project:
- Lack of a clear vision: Without a well-defined goal, it's easy to lose focus and direction.
- Scope creep: Allowing the project's requirements to expand uncontrollably can lead to delays and budget overruns.
- Poor communication: Ineffective communication between team members and stakeholders can cause misunderstandings and conflicts.
- Insufficient planning: Failing to adequately plan the project's timeline, resources, and risks can result in chaos.
- Ignoring feedback: Dismissing valuable feedback from users or stakeholders can lead to a product that doesn't meet their needs.
It's important to be aware of these potential problems and take steps to mitigate them.
Too many indicators.
A dashboard with 50 KPIs is not being used. Limit yourself to actionable indicators.
Data that is not comparable over time If you change your POS or add a platform, be aware of breaks in the data series.
No action plan. An indicator without a threshold alert or planned action is useless. Define: "if X exceeds Y, I will do Z."
Voici la conclusion :
Il est important de noter que la recherche sur les effets de la méditation de pleine conscience sur la santé mentale est encore en cours. Cependant, les études actuelles suggèrent que la pratique régulière peut avoir des effets bénéfiques significatifs. Ces effets incluent une réduction du stress, de l'anxiété et de la dépression, ainsi qu'une amélioration de la concentration et de la régulation émotionnelle.
Il est crucial de souligner que la méditation de pleine conscience n'est pas une panacée. Elle ne remplace pas un traitement médical approprié pour les troubles mentaux. Elle peut cependant être utilisée comme un outil complémentaire, en conjonction avec d'autres approches thérapeutiques, telles que la thérapie cognitivo-comportementale ou la pharmacothérapie.
Enfin, il est important de rappeler que la méditation de pleine conscience est une pratique personnelle. Il n'existe pas d'approche unique qui convienne à tout le monde. Il est donc essentiel d'expérimenter différentes techniques et de trouver celles qui sont les plus adaptées à ses besoins et à ses préférences.
- Conseils pour débuter :
- Commencer par des séances courtes (5-10 minutes).
- Trouver un endroit calme et confortable.
- Se concentrer sur la respiration.
- Ne pas se juger et accepter les pensées et les émotions qui surviennent.
Your data contains the answers to almost all of your restaurant’s strategic questions. The challenge isn’t collecting them – you already have them – but organizing and leveraging them in a way that illuminates your decisions.
Pepprio provides a consolidated analytics dashboard for the delivery side, which complements your POS data to give you a unified and actionable view of your business.