Inventory and labour costClient work
Inventory drift and labour cost, from the till system to the operator
A restaurant runs on two levers that its systems already record every day. This pipeline and its reporting make both visible while there’s still time to act on them.
Sample data, white-labelled.
A venue stands or falls on two numbers: what it bought against what it sold, and what it paid in labour as a share of those sales. Both are recorded every day by systems the venue already pays for.
They sit inside a system built for taking orders and paying staff. Getting a usable picture out means someone exporting, someone assembling and someone interpreting. The number arrives about a month later and describes a month that can no longer be changed.
When it arrives, nobody can tell whether it is complete. A report built on four days of a seven-day week looks identical to one built on all seven.
Most of the work sits under the reporting, in a pipeline that has to be right every day with nobody watching.
Scheduled ingestion
Inventory and labour data is read out of the venue’s management system on a schedule and stored where it can be queried. A question that used to mean re-reading a screen becomes a query.
Drift, computed per period
Expected and actual usage are compared for each period. A pattern shows up in the week it happens, while it is still small enough to correct.
Labour against the sales it produced
Labour hours and cost are set against the revenue of the same period, broken down the way the operator plans shifts.
Reporting for the operator
The reports are written for whoever runs the venue. They show both levers as they stand now, in a form that supports a decision this week.
Diagnostics beside every pull
Checks run alongside every ingestion, so a broken or missing feed is flagged. A silent failure that produces a clean-looking report on half a week of data is the most expensive failure this kind of system has. The checks exist to catch it.
It pulls from the systems the venue already pays for.
- 01The venue’s existing management system, for sales, inventory and labour
- 02A scheduled ingestion path that replaces the manual export
- 03A queryable data store
- 04Operator-facing reporting on the two levers
- 05Diagnostics that run beside every pull
The reporting is the visible part, and the smaller one. The cost sits in ingestion, because a till system hands over its data in a shape nobody would have chosen. Every source that can change without warning has to be watched.
In the cost guide’s terms, this is scheduled collection plus a daily report. In that range, effort depends on how many sources there are and how often they change.
It runs every day against the venue’s own sales, inventory and labour data. The checks beside each pull decide whether that day’s report can be trusted at all.
The system is built, delivered and running. The interactive demo shows the same reporting on white-labelled sample data.
The system above replaced work people were doing manually.
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