Multiple Point-of-Sale Reporting | How Tenzo enables it for restaurants

Tenzo’s unique schema unification process allows customers who may have multiple point-of-sale systems deployed across their organisation to see all of their reports in one place, allowing for multiple point-of-sale reporting.

Without Tenzo, there is no way to compare sales data from each system without manually pulling individual reports on each platform and then uniting them all in Excel. However, the problem with this approach is that it’s not only time consuming, but error prone as different systems will have different settings.

A simple example of this is whether the reports include VAT or not. If one includes VAT and one doesn’t, and you don’t know that beforehand, it completely throws off your numbers.

It might sound simple enough to generate these reports, but what if you have seven different points-of-sale, all of which take at least 20 minutes to generate a report? Time starts to add up. And by the time the report is generated, it’s become obsolete.

Use cases

There are seven main reasons why you may need multi-POS reporting.

1. Franchised businesses that don’t mandate a tech stack

Many franchised chains don’t set a mandatory tech stack allowing franchisees to choose the stack they think will work best for them and their business. This usually results in many POSs deployed across the franchisor’s estate with no easy way of seeing reports on revenue and therefore working out royalties in a timely manner.  

2. Large chains operating in several countries

Often a point-of-sale won’t be available in every country a chain operates in either because they don’t service the country or it is not legal in the country yet because of European fiscalisation laws. Many governments have strict rules for what is needed in a POS and not every POS meets every country’s requirements.

3. Real-estate businesses looking to understand revenue in their restaurant concessions

In this scenario, a landlord may be renting space in a retail environment (e.g. a mall) to several different operators but will want to keep an eye on revenue in each in order to optimise the mix of offerings. These will often run on their own tech stacks so again, getting aggregated sales data in order to benchmark in one report is incredibly difficult.

4. Investment groups

Hospitality investment firms may want to benchmark investments or see all investment data in one place to properly understand how sales are doing in each business and location. As above, these businesses will likely be using different points-of-sale.

5. Salvaging historical sales data

If a point-of-sale stops serving your industry or country, historical sales data is often lost and you have to start again. Being able to integrate multiple points-of-sale into one reporting platform allows businesses to keep that valuable historical information.

6. Retail arms integrated with restaurants

After the first lockdown, when restaurants had to diversify or die, many started selling kits and products online. These would normally be processed using an online sales platform like Shopify, but because sales weren’t logged in the restaurant’s POS, regular reporting would miss out a big chunk of revenue or forecasted sales. Often extra team members and inventory are needed to assemble these retail items so having all sales data in one place allows restaurants to schedule and order much more efficiently.

7. Leverage individual strengths

One final reason a business may have multiple points-of-sale might be to leverage best-in-class solutions from different providers. For example, you may want one system for your eat-in business and another for your takeaway sales.

How we achieve results

Data Manager

We created Data Manager as a schema unification tool for all of our integrations. Basically, every POS has a different schema (a different way of storing information) and trying to get several different POS schemas into one report is extremely complicated because you have to normalise all the information in order to display it in a sensical manner.

Our Data Manager means that we can achieve this with absolutely any POS. In fact, we currently have over 70 different integrations and are constantly adding more. That means getting your data from multiple sources into Tenzo is far simpler than it would be if building these reports yourself.

Automated reports for data visualisation and insights

Once the data is in Tenzo, we can serve it to you in automated reports that make comparing sales in multiple locations a three-second process. In just one click you can view not only overall revenue but also drill down into revenue per product category, item, day part, employee and more.

All the information you need is at your fingertips and no longer requires hours of spreadsheet wrangling just to get a simple number. You have real, actionable insights that you can then use all that saved time to implement in your business.

AI forecasting

Finally, once everything is unified you can employ AI forecasting tech on top of it to give far more accurate sales predictions. These predictions can be at an hourly level so that you can staff as efficiently as possible as well as at an item level so you know what to order and prep and when to do it.

This can increase your labour productivity (i.e. revenue per labour hour) by up to 15%.  

If you would like to find out more about Tenzo and we could help your business, please don’t hesitate to request a demo and a member of our team will be in touch.

Cover Photo by Jordan Heath on Unsplash