Quick-service restaurant (QSR) owners and managers recognize the importance of understanding the data and metrics that propel a thriving enterprise. While determining the value of “total profits” and “cost of employment” may be straightforward, identifying the irregularities that are decreasing your profitability can be challenging. It can be time-consuming and exhausting to sift through point-of-sale (POS) data from multiple locations to understand the driving force behind inventory and financial loss. Maximizing your restaurant’s exception reports is key to mitigating loss.
What are QSR Exception Reports?
In a QSR, exception reports are data-driven reports that highlight outliers, deviations, or anomalies from a set of established rules, standards, or expectations. The purpose of exception reports is to bring attention to any unusual transactions that may require further review, investigation, or action.
For example, an exception report might be used to identify:
- Transactions exceeding a certain dollar amount
- Transactions that occur outside of normal business hours
- Transactions that don’t match the typical pattern of activity
Establish a daily routine to review these exception reports and gain visibility into potential losses:
- End of day transactions
- Voids and returns
- Discount/gift card redemption
- Reward program transactions
- Sales by item for inventory management
Envysion, a loss prevention software, is already integrated with several POS systems, such as Toast, Par – Brink POS and Clover, allowing us to seamlessly marry your POS software with your video cameras to generate these comprehensive exception reports.
How to Maximize Restaurant Exception Reports
The combination of exception reporting and video security systems offers a streamlined approach to manage your restaurant’s everyday transactions. Merging your POS system with a video security system facilitates the integration of transaction data with video footage, allowing you to view receipts and video simultaneously in a side-by-side display. This integration of video cameras, POS data, and reporting software results in a powerful solution that provides customizable metrics and verifiable results, including audio and video recordings. By simplifying the monitoring and analysis of your restaurant’s activity, this integration makes your life easier.
Exception Reports Can Decrease Internal Theft and Loss
Exception-based reporting offers QSR owners and managers a valuable resource in solving the missing piece of their financial puzzle: identifying where exactly their profits are going. This reporting tool connects video footage with every POS transaction, providing actionable insights into any inconsistencies that may require further investigation. Exception-based reporting provides the means to access transaction data in your quick-service restaurant and focuses on specific trends that could be happening. Reporting tools are configurable, allowing you to generate reports for your entire business, individual locations, or specific employees.
QSRs experience losses from multiple sources. Therefore, it is crucial to have strategic tools that can automatically audit each transaction by considering inventory and cost to identify potential losses. As an owner or manager, your bottom line is simple: you want to know where your money is going. Use reports to gain insights into daily transactions, voids, returns, discount or gift card redemptions, reward programs, and even sales by specific inventory items.
Boost Restaurant Profits with Standardized Reports
While several POS systems come equipped with their own set of reporting templates, Envysion also provides a suite of standardized reports. These standardized reports provide basic profit and loss summaries, discount redemptions, voids, refunds, reward program reports, and transaction data from any specific day across your entire QSR enterprise. The user-friendly and easy-to-read dashboard allows you to view the results on your desktop or mobile device. Stay informed and receive incident notifications via daily or weekly report emails directly to your inbox.
As an illustration, a restaurant general manager notices lower-than-usual sales in fountain sodas. The general manager creates a void and refund report. Within seconds, the manager views transaction receipts, along with the corresponding video footage side-by-side. By filtering these transactions by the approving manager on duty, the general manager discovers that cashiers were giving away multiple fountain drinks during the weeknights by voiding the drink before the customer paid. The GM determines that one specific manager was approving the voids. The general manager seamlessly shares the findings with the human resources department for further investigation.
Track Specific QSR Loss with Customizable Reports
Customizable reports allow QSR owners and managers to dive deeper into specific reporting, exploring all available metrics to track elusive outliers effectively. These reports are a powerful tool for QSR owners or managers to identify and analyze specific loss drivers, even when managing multiple locations.
With customizable reports, you can:
- Drill down on specific theft incidents
- See what items were given away for free or over a certain value
- Investigate by location, employee, and approving manager per transaction
- View video and receipt data alongside transactions
- Save and label reports for easy access
- Receive daily or weekly alerts via email
- Create unlimited reports and share them with other leaders in the organization
For instance, a QSR has a promotion where any purchase over $10 receives a free fountain drink. With customizable reports, the manager creates a report to show all of the transactions where a free fountain drink is given to a customer. By applying this filter, the manager can spot any anomalies, such as an employee giving away a complimentary fountain drink without a customer spending $10 and vice versa. With POS transaction data and video footage paired in the report, the manager easily monitors employee compliance with the promotion requirements. With customizable reports, gain valuable insights into frequent types of loss occurring at your restaurant and unique transaction occurrences that you may not have been aware of – giving you the advantage to easily increase profits.
In a three-month pilot program conducted by Envysion and a quick-service restaurant, “Leveraging Envysion’s industry expertise, the group was able to build actionable reports. The team understood how to access the reports and analytics and committed to a 5-to-10-minute review via their mobile device at the start of each day. In addition, daily email alerts highlighted both known and unknown operational issues which kept them engaged and maintained their focus.” This trial period resulted in a $1,230 growth in recorded transactions and a significant increase in ROI. (QSR Magazine)
Conclusion
For quick-service restaurant owners and managers, understanding the data and metrics that drive business success is crucial. Given that loss can occur in several ways, a monitoring and tracking tool for every transaction is vital in uncovering such instances. Simplify your job by using a reporting system that is powered by your QSR’s data and security cameras.
With Envysion’s reporting tools, identify areas of growth and profit increase by detecting loss and identifying outliers that are difficult to track. With a user-friendly dashboard, viewing POS transaction data alongside video footage is more efficient when you see the whole story. This software can help you identify trends and patterns that would have otherwise gone unnoticed, allowing you to make informed decisions to increase your restaurant’s overall success.
Uncover the hidden outliers that are negatively impacting your bottom line and uncover profits. Get in touch with us today.