Sunday night, laptop open, three tabs — the POS export, last week’s spreadsheet, and a calculator app — trying to work out if the week actually went well or just felt busy. Most operators are tracking too many numbers to look at properly and not enough of the right ones. You don’t need thirty metrics. You need six, and you need them without building a spreadsheet to find them.
Why more dashboards isn’t the answer
A report nobody reads is worse than no report at all — it just adds fifteen minutes of scrolling to a Sunday night that already has enough on it. The operators who actually use their numbers every week are the ones who’ve cut the list down to what actually changes a decision, not the ones with the most tabs open.
The six numbers
1. Direct vs marketplace order mix
What share of this week’s orders came through your own ordering channel versus Uber Eats, DoorDash or Menulog? This is the number that tells you whether you’re building a customer base you own or renting one from a marketplace that keeps the data and takes the cut. A delivery panel that shows every channel on one screen makes this a glance, not a reconciliation job.
2. Repeat vs new customers
Are the same people coming back, or are you refilling the room with first-timers every week? A CRM that tracks visit frequency per guest turns this from a feeling into an actual ratio — and it’s usually the first number that moves before revenue does, in either direction.
3. Average spend per order
Small movements here compound fast across hundreds of orders a week. If it’s drifting down, it’s usually a modifier or upsell prompt quietly not firing, not a pricing problem — worth checking against your digital menu before touching the price list.
4. Sales per labour hour
Not just “labour cost” as a lump sum — sales relative to hours actually worked, per shift. Shift tracking that shows sales, cash and hours per team member in real time turns this into a number you can check Monday morning, instead of guessing until the payroll run makes it obvious.
5. Loyalty and coupon redemption rate
A stamp card or coupon that isn’t being redeemed isn’t a loyalty program, it’s a poster. Digital loyalty typically runs at several times the redemption rate of paper cards — but only if you’re actually checking the number, not just assuming people are using it because you launched it.
6. Google review rate and rating trend
Not just the star average — how many new reviews landed this week, and whether the trend is up or down. A review system that prompts happy guests at the right moment and flags an unhappy one before they post publicly means this number moves because you’re managing it, not because you got lucky this month.
Read them together, not one at a time
None of these six mean much in isolation. A drop in repeat customers alongside a rise in marketplace order share usually points at the same problem — you’re losing the direct relationship, not just losing volume. A falling spend-per-order next to a flat loyalty redemption rate suggests the upsell prompts stopped working before the loyalty program did. The six numbers are a set for a reason: each one is a check on the others, and a single week where two of them move together is worth more attention than any one number moving alone.
Six numbers, checked every week, beats sixty checked never
None of these need a data analyst or a new spreadsheet template. Every one of them already exists somewhere in a system you’re using — the point is looking at the same six, every week, on the same day, so a bad trend shows up in week two instead of week twelve. That’s the entire difference between managing a venue and being surprised by one.