Your POS already knows most of what's wrong with your restaurant. It knows which dayparts are slipping, which items sell and which don't, who's comping what, and how many hours got edited after the fact. Most owners just never open the reports, or they open all of them once, get overwhelmed and go back to looking at the daily sales total.
I've spent a lot of time in the back end of Toast. You don't need every report it offers. You need the same five or six, read on the same day every week, with someone responsible for acting on them.
A quick note: Prime Cost Group isn't affiliated with Toast. This is just how I use it as an operator. Report names and menus change over time, so I'll describe what to look for rather than exactly where to click.
Weekly reports
These are the ones I'd read every week, ideally Monday morning, before the manager meeting.
Sales summary by daypart and revenue center
Total sales tells you whether it was a good week. It doesn't tell you where. Break sales out by daypart (breakfast, lunch, afternoon, dinner, late night) and by revenue center or dining option (dine-in, bar, to-go, online, delivery, catering).
What I'm looking for:
- Is the mix changing? If to-go is growing and dine-in is shrinking, that affects staffing, packaging cost and delivery commissions.
- Which dayparts are soft? A slow daypart is usually where labor is too high for the sales.
- Look at check average and guest counts. Sales can be flat because traffic dropped while checks went up, or the other way around. Those are different problems.
This report is also the raw material for your sales forecast, which is what your schedule should be built from. More on that in how to lower labor cost without killing service.
Labor summary
Pull labor for the week and look at:
- Scheduled hours vs. actual hours
- Overtime hours, and who's carrying them
- Labor as a percentage of sales, by day and ideally by daypart
- Hours by job or position
Remember that the POS usually only sees hourly labor. Salaried managers, payroll taxes and benefits have to be added to get your true labor cost. I'd keep a simple weekly sheet that adds those on top, so you're looking at real total labor and not a flattering version of it.
Voids, discounts and comps
Look at these by employee, by reason and by manager who approved them.
Comps, voids and discounts are a normal part of running a restaurant. A burnt steak gets remade, a regular gets a dessert. The common rule of thumb is to keep them under about 2% of sales.
Patterns show up fast once you look:
- One server with far more voids than everyone else
- Voids after a check is closed or printed
- Discounts with no reason, or the same generic reason every time
- One manager approving most of the comps
- Spikes on specific shifts or days
Most of the time the answer is training or sloppy habits. Sometimes it isn't. Either way, you want to know.
Monthly reports
Product mix
The product mix report shows what sells, what doesn't and what moves together. It's where menu engineering starts.
Put it next to your recipe costs and you can sort items into four groups:
- Popular and profitable. Protect these. Keep the spec tight.
- Popular, low margin. Your biggest food cost risk. Look at pricing, portioning or the recipe.
- Profitable, slow. Better menu placement or a server push might help.
- Neither. Candidates to cut, which also simplifies prep and inventory.
Look at contribution margin in dollars, not just food cost percentage. A higher-cost item that makes more dollars per plate can be a better seller than a low-cost one. For more on that, see restaurant food cost percentage.
Time-entry edits and missed clock-outs
This one is quiet, and it adds up. Pull every manual time-entry edit for the month: who made it, whose punch it was, and why.
- Every edit should have a reason.
- A lot of edits for the same employee, or by the same manager, deserves a conversation.
- Missed clock-outs that get "fixed" to the scheduled end time can hide real hours, or add hours that weren't worked.
- Early clock-ins without approval are worth a rule.
Menu and modifier hygiene
A messy POS menu gives you messy data. If the menu in the system doesn't match the menu on the wall, every report built on it is off.
What I'd clean up:
- Match the POS to the printed menu and the recipe cards. Same names, same prices, same items.
- Remove dead items. Old specials and discontinued items clutter reports and confuse new staff.
- Price your modifiers. Add-ons like extra protein, extra cheese or a substitute side that ring in free are a direct food cost leak.
- Avoid open-price items. Every "open food" button is an item you can't track in your product mix or cost properly. Build real buttons.
- Structure items consistently. Put items in clear groups and categories so reports roll up the way you think about the menu.
- Price online and delivery menus on purpose. If third-party menus mirror dine-in prices, commissions may wipe out the margin on those orders. Check what you're actually netting.
Permissions
POS permissions are a control most restaurants set up once and never revisit.
- Limit discounts, comps and voids by role. Servers shouldn't be able to comp an entry on their own. Require a manager.
- Limit who can edit time entries. The fewer people, the better, and every edit should be logged with a reason.
- Limit who can change menu prices.
- Remove access for people who've left. Old logins for former managers are a real risk.
- Give every person their own login. Shared codes make every report useless for accountability.
Review permissions whenever a manager leaves or changes roles, and at least a couple of times a year regardless.
Make it a routine
Reports only help if someone reads them on a schedule and acts on them. Here's a simple rhythm:
- Daily: the owner or GM gets a short sales and labor summary. Most POS systems can email one. Two minutes.
- Weekly: sales by daypart, labor, and comps, voids and discounts, reviewed in the manager meeting.
- Monthly: product mix against recipe cost, time-entry edits, and a permissions check.
Pair those with a weekly prime cost number and you'll catch most problems within days instead of at month-end. Plug your numbers into the Prime Cost Health Check to see where you stand today.
If your POS is set up in a way that makes this hard (bad menu structure, open items everywhere, permissions nobody's looked at), that's what Toast POS Optimization is for. It's a project quoted after a free consult. If the reports are fine but nobody's acting on them, that's more of a fractional COO problem.