Items and categories
What this is for
Two reports that together tell you whether your menu is the right menu.
- Item report — sales and performance per dish.
- Category report — the same, grouped, so you can see which parts of the menu carry the business.
The item report
Per item: Quantity Sold, Selling Price, Total Revenue, plus Top Selling Items and Total Quantity Sold across the period.
Reading it
Sort by quantity and by revenue separately. They tell you different things:
- High quantity, low revenue — a cheap item doing volume. Often a loss leader, sometimes just cheap.
- Low quantity, high revenue — an expensive dish selling rarely. Fine if the margin is there.
- High on both — your stars. Protect them: never let these run out, and never quietly change them.
- Low on both — candidates for removal.
The bottom of the list
This is where the money is, and it's the part people don't look at.
Every dish at the bottom of your item report costs you something even when nobody orders it: ingredients held, freezer space, prep time, a line on the menu that pushes something better down the page, and one more thing for a new chef to learn.
A menu item that sells fewer than a handful a week is usually costing more than it earns.
Before cutting one, check three things:
- Is it a signature? Some dishes sell little and define you. Keep those.
- Does it share ingredients with something popular? Then its true cost is low.
- Is it a dietary option? The only vegan main might sell rarely and still decide where a table of six eats.
If none of those apply, cut it. A shorter menu is faster to cook, cheaper to hold and easier to sell.
The category report
Sales by category, so you can see the shape of the business rather than the detail.
Read it as share of revenue. A drinks category at 15% of revenue in a restaurant that sells wine is a problem — drinks usually carry the best margin, and a low share means nobody is offering them.
Categories also expose menu-structure problems. A category with a single item in it, or one that never appears, is usually a category doing no work — see Item categories.
Combining with cost
Sales tell you popularity. They don't tell you profit.
With Stock & Recipes, the Profit & Loss report gives margin per dish, and the combination is the useful one:
| High margin | Low margin | |
|---|---|---|
| Popular | Protect and promote | Re-price, re-cost, or re-portion |
| Unpopular | Promote — move it up the menu | Cut it |
Most menus have several things in the bottom-right box that nobody has ever looked at.
Without recipes, you can still do this roughly with what you know your ingredients cost. It's less precise and still worth an hour.
Acting on it
- Move things, don't just cut them. Item order follows Menu › Menu Organizer, and position changes sales more than most owners expect.
- Re-check after any change. Give it a month, then look again.
- Watch for a dish that's fallen. A steady seller that drops is usually a recipe change, a supplier change, or a price rise — all worth catching early.
- Check your top item is always available. Running out of your best seller is the most expensive ordinary mistake in a restaurant.
Good to know
- Both reports are per branch, and follow your operating shifts.
- Variations are counted against their item, so a dish sold in three sizes shows as one line.
- Items removed from an order after the kitchen ticket went don't count as sales — they appear in cancellations.
- Both export — see Exporting reports.