The previous course read the statement your accountant sends: sales as one number, costs as a handful of lines, a result at the bottom. That tells you whether the month worked. It cannot tell you why, because by the time a sale reaches the profit and loss it has been stripped of everything interesting about it — what dish it was, what hour it happened, whether it came from the dining room or a phone. All of that detail already exists, in a system you are already paying for, and this course is about reading it.
🧾 Every check records four things
When a check closes, your POS writes down more than the total. It records what was ordered, when it happened, how much it came to, and which channel it arrived through. Those four fields are the entire subject of this course, and every report worth opening is just one of them counted a different way.
| Field | The report | The question it answers |
| What | Item sales, or product mix | Which dishes sell, and which of those pay? |
| When | By hour and by day | Where in the week is the money? |
| How much | Check average and covers | Are people spending more or are there more people? |
| Where from | By channel or order type | Which way of selling actually pays? |
Most owners open exactly one of these — the daily total — and it is the one that carries the least information. The four together are enough to explain almost any movement in the previous course's statement, which is why these two books sit next to each other: the P&L tells you the result got thinner, and the item mix tells you it happened because the burger quietly displaced the pasta.
🎯 The sale is the subject here
It is worth being precise about what this course is and is not about, because two of its neighbours look similar and are not. The customer data course counts people: who they are, how often they come, which ones you are losing. This course counts sales: what left the kitchen, when, and through which door. The same Friday night looks completely different depending on which of the two you are asking about.
The practical line is simple: if the number is attached to an identifiable person, it belongs to the customer data course. If it is attached to a transaction, it belongs here. A restaurant needs both, and they answer different questions — "we are losing our Tuesday regulars" is one book, "Tuesday's average check fell because nobody orders dessert any more" is the other.
The other neighbour is the financial reporting course you have just finished. It owns money in aggregate: the lines of the statement, prime cost, break-even. This one goes underneath those totals to the dish, the hour and the channel. It uses the contribution of a dish without re-explaining how the dish's cost was worked out — that belongs to the cost control course, and this one assumes you already know roughly what your plates cost.
🧹 Getting a report you can trust
Before any of this is useful, the data underneath has to be roughly honest, and in a restaurant that depends on habits at the terminal rather than on software. A few things are worth checking once, because they silently corrupt every report you will build in the rest of this course.
- Everything gets rung in. Staff meals, comps and mistakes included, recorded as what they are. A dish that leaves the kitchen without appearing in the system is a hole in every number here.
- Items are their own buttons. If half the menu goes through a generic "food" key or an open-price button, there is no item report to read.
- Modifiers do not hide dishes. A dish sold as a variant of another one will not show up where you expect it.
- Channels are distinguishable. Dining room, takeaway, each platform and catering need to be separable, or topic 4 cannot be done at all.
- Voids and refunds are visible. They are part of the story, and a lot of voids at one hour or one terminal is worth knowing about for reasons beyond analytics.
None of this requires new equipment; it requires deciding that the terminal is a record and not just a way to fire tickets to the kitchen. If you fix nothing else in this course, fix the ones above, because everything downstream inherits them.
🧭 What this course covers
The shape of your week — which dayparts and days carry the money, which ones only carry activity, and what to do about a day that does not pay for itself (topic 2). Your menu mix, which is the heart of this course: crossing how much each dish sells against how much it leaves behind, and what to do with each kind (topic 3). Comparing channels honestly, because the same plate leaves you different amounts depending on how it goes out (topic 4). Whether a promotion actually made you money or just made you busy (topic 5). And a forecast simple enough that you will actually make one, for the two decisions it improves most: what to order and who to roster (topic 6).
Throughout, the same example restaurant from the previous course: fifty thousand pesos of sales in a month, two thousand covers, an average check of twenty-five. Keeping one example across both books is deliberate — you can see the same restaurant from the statement and from the till, and notice that they are describing the same thing.