- Upload your budgets and targets, by site and by revenue centre
- Build the flash exactly the way finance wants it read
- Send it to every team, automatically, before service
- What is a daily flash report in a restaurant?
- How do you track budget versus actual across multiple restaurant locations?
- Should restaurant budgets be set by site or by revenue centre?
- Do you need Power BI or a data team to build custom restaurant reports?
- How do you get restaurant managers to actually read a daily report?
Most groups see actuals against budget three or four weeks after month-end, when the month is already gone. This recipe uploads your budgets and targets by site — and by revenue centre, day part or whatever dimension you actually plan on — lets finance build the daily flash exactly the way they want it read, and sends it to every team automatically. Sales, labour and COGS against plan, in every inbox, before service starts.
Incipio’s finance team replaced their self-built Power BI reporting with Tenzo and saved £100,000 a year across six venues.
“Our main goal is to make decisions fully relying on data; to be more efficient and provide the teams with easy insight. Instead of spending time manually inputting data into Excel, they can focus on actions that bring value.”
Upload your budgets and targets, by site and by revenue centre #
Numbers without a target are just numbers — nobody can tell whether £6,793 on a Tuesday is good or bad until it sits beside what it was meant to be. Upload your budgets and targets as they already exist: by site, by day, and by any dimension you actually manage to — revenue centre, day part, trading area. Sales, labour cost percentage, covers, spend per head; whatever your plan is written in, Tenzo reports against it. A budget your teams cannot see against actuals is a spreadsheet, not a target.
Build the flash exactly the way finance wants it read #
Every finance team has a report format it trusts, and the quickest way to lose them is to make them read yours. The Card Creator lets you build from scratch — pick the fields, the filters, the comparison period, the layout — or start from a template and bend it. Weekly flash by site, sales and labour by hour, budget variance by revenue centre: the same data, cut the way each team already thinks about it. The right report for finance and the right report for a GM are different reports. Build both.
Send it to every team, automatically, before service #
Set the subject, the schedule and the user groups, and the flash lands every morning at the time you choose — with an AI summary on top saying what moved and why. Nobody exports anything on a Sunday night, nothing stops when the analyst is on holiday, and head office, finance and operators each get the version built for them. Here the summary reads “all locations beat budget by 3.9%” before anyone has opened a spreadsheet. Month-end tells you what happened. A daily flash tells you while you can still change it.
What is a daily flash report in a restaurant? #
A daily flash is a short report of yesterday’s trading against plan — typically sales, labour cost and COGS by site, against budget and against the same period last year — delivered before the next day’s service. It is deliberately not a P&L. It is the handful of numbers that let someone act today, rather than the full picture that arrives weeks after month-end. Most groups run a weekly flash alongside it, week-to-date against budget, for the Monday trade meeting.
How do you track budget versus actual across multiple restaurant locations? #
Upload budgets at the grain you manage to — site and day at minimum, revenue centre or day part if that is how you plan — then automate a report that puts actuals beside them every morning. Two things make it stick in practice: consistency, so the format is identical every day and people stop having to re-read it; and distribution, so it arrives in each team’s inbox rather than sitting on a dashboard they have to remember to open.
Should restaurant budgets be set by site or by revenue centre? #
Both, if you can. Site-level budgets tell you which location is behind; revenue-centre budgets — bar against restaurant, dine-in against delivery, breakfast against dinner — tell you why. A site that is on budget overall can be hiding a bar 15% down and a delivery channel covering for it, which is a very different conversation from a site that is simply quiet. Most groups start with sites and add revenue centres once the daily habit is established.
Do you need Power BI or a data team to build custom restaurant reports? #
No, and self-built BI is a common first attempt that becomes a common regret. Incipio’s Finance Director tried Power BI first and found every change had to be made in-house, took a long time without an expert, and when something broke only a handful of people could fix it. They replaced it with Tenzo and saved around £100,000 a year. The point of a hospitality-specific reporting tool is that the integrations, the metrics and the report builder already understand what a restaurant is.
How do you get restaurant managers to actually read a daily report? #
Make it short, make it arrive at the same time every day, and make it theirs. A GM will read a report built around their site, their targets and their day parts; they will not read a group finance pack. Send it to the inbox before service rather than leaving it on a dashboard, put a plain-language summary at the top saying what moved, and keep the format identical every day so it takes ninety seconds. Teleferic’s back-of-house team went from hand-building Excel reports to three cards sent automatically every Monday.
