and managers can make the most of the staff that is working on a particular day, night or week. Inversely, a report may show a labor percent (%) or labor cost per sales number, meaning it is a ratio of cost of labor to sales. “(You may want to ask) why is that ratio so high, when we weren’t doing any sales,” says Ventre. “We were we preparing for a busy night and there weren’t the reservations (we anticipated).” This type of figure is indicative of how your labor expense is trending, and as Toast Bistro has noted in its content programs, food and labor are definitely the highest costs in a restaurant and most worthy of management scrutiny CRM (Customer relationship management)

related to your winners for better pricing with suppliers. “Every day, easily identify the items that are directly contributing to restaurant sales—and consider dropping those that aren’t,” notes a report from Toast POS. Labor reporting Touch Bistro’s Snapshot Report summarizes sales and labor costs in real time. A manager would be able to review labor to sales ratios and decide to send a staff member home if sales aren’t what they were originally projected,or if the ratios are at a predetermined threshold. A strong measure of productivity for a restaurant is sales per labor hour. The higher the number, the more a restaurant is leveraging its (wo)man hours to produce sales. By using such a productivity report, restaurant owners

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Many companies use CRM apps, software and services to track customers and the frequency of their visits. For a large Fortune 500 company, the CRM is indispensable for sales teams to understand who the biggest prospects are, the value of what a particular prospect’s business might represent and how many times a prospect or existing customers have been contacted to inform them PHOTO COURESTY ROB RYE about new products and services (which may lead to additional sales.) Many POS systems have the ability to be activated for CRM, depending on the capabilities and how they interact with card processing systems, cloud services and third-party loyalty and online ordering systems. The reports that can be extracted to discover insights on particular customer visits, preferences and dollar amount of business is a treasure trove for restaurants to build their businesses intelligently, targeting one customer at time. In our ongoing Restaurant Tech Discovery series, both in this magazine and on Eatery Pulse TV, we expect to cover more topics related to CRM and loyalty marketing systems. Stay tuned for additional insights and analysis in our holiday issue, coming out in October.