Restaurant Finance 101: Top Numbers to Watch for Your Delivery Business

Today's post comes from our partner Otter. Otter helps restaurants by providing an all-in-one digital solution for delivery management. Our integration allows restaurants to consolidate orders from Incentivio and other delivery platforms in one place. With exclusive offers for Incentivio customers, Otter can help you say goodbye to multiple tablets, manual entry, and order issues.

Top Numbers to Watch for Your Delivery Business

Understanding your restaurant’s delivery operations is the first step to growing your business. Otter’s all-in-one dashboard helps you take control of your delivery data across platforms — reducing order issues, increasing sales, and decreasing delivery headaches.

Before we jump in, let’s review the Secret Recipe to make your restaurant more profitable with this short video.

Now that we’ve reviewed Nathan’s top restaurant finance tips let’s dive into the data points your restaurant should pay attention to improve performance, operations, and promotions.

How do I manage a food delivery business?

Otter Insights can quickly help your restaurant make data-driven decisions. Here are the numbers to watch to help perfect your delivery business.

Understand business performance with these numbers:

The Business Performance tab within Insights provides an overview of your restaurant performance regarding sale volume and orders, designed to help you make thoughtful decisions about how to maximize your revenue.

• At the top, you will find aggregate cards for Gross Sales, Order Volume, Average Order Value, and Average Sales Per Store. You can sort these by time periods to compare over time as well.
• You can also quickly and easily check your Store Ranking, Channel Performance, and Fulfillment Performance.

Why is this helpful? Imagine you work with Uber Eats, Doordash, and Grubhub. Business Performance allows you to compare delivery partner sales to know which platforms work best for your restaurant and which could use some attention.

Optimize operations with these numbers:

The Operational Excellence tab within Insights details how your restaurant is running its operations and how to optimize efficiency. Simply put, we tell you where you’re making, losing, and missing money.

How can I improve my online orders?

The main answer is to reduce order issues and errors. Creating a seamless ordering experience for your customers is also crucial to lowering bad reviews online.

You can reduce order issues and save money from error charges with data points like:

• Understand the why behind order issue rate and error charges with a toggleable bar chart for Top reasons and Rate over time.
• Order issues rate
• Lost revenue
• Avoidable cancellation rate
• Availability

Why is this helpful? Missed orders, canceled orders, and negatively adjusted orders happen. Our Operational Excellence dashboard provides you with a clear view of your customer issues across locations and platforms. Verify commissions and payouts to delivery partners and get money back where you can.

How can I know which promotions are performing the best?

‍Make sure your marketing spend doesn’t go to waste with these numbers:

Marketing is intended to make you more money, but if you’re not sure how to evaluate the data, how will you know what’s a success and what’s not?

We give you visibility on the real impact of your delivery app promotions - both good and bad. Learn what type of promotions are driving sales with data points including:

• Promotions net take-home
• Promotions ROI
• Promoted vs. non-promoted order volume.

Why is this helpful? Imagine you’re running 3 types of promotions on your delivery apps: free delivery, free item, and a discount. Promotions Insights will show you which is bringing more orders, sales, and ROI, so you don’t keep running promotions that aren’t adding value to your restaurant.

How do I reduce turnover rate?

Calculate turnover rate with this calculator:

Since the restaurant labor shortage is predicted to continue into 2022, it’s crucial to calculate your restaurant’s turnover rate. Make sure to record the percentage and calculate it again in a few months to compare.

What can you do if you have a high turnover rate? Here are some questions to ask yourself to see if there are any areas you can improve:

• How do your managers treat your employees? Have they been adequately trained?
• What benefits are you able to offer your team?
• Have you looked at the top tech to help support your staff?
• Do you conduct exit interviews to learn why staff leaves?
• Have you refined your hiring strategy?
• Are your delivery tablets consolidated into one to make operations run smoother? You know we can help with that!

We hope this article helped show you how data can help improve your restaurant’s delivery business. We know the idea of “finance” and “managing numbers” can be intimidating, but our solutions are designed to make this part of your business easy! We hope this helped you navigate your delivery experience!