Restaurant operators spend thousands of dollars per location per month for advertising, buildings, parking lots, specials, and employees just to attract people to their businesses. Unfortunately, once the "prospects" are in the building, the selling often stops.  They are greeted at the counter or table by a sometimes-harried or inattentive server, who often have more important things on their minds than looking after another order.

Your employees are great people and are looking for every opportunity to up-sell, cross-sell and use every technique to be sure that you as the operator will gain maximum returns on your investment.  A great motivation tool, as well as a loss management tool is correct evaluation of the server sales.  Unfortunately, the sales data from point-of-sale (POS) systems is not enough.

It all starts with measuring server performance accurately. All sales and ordering figures need to be adjusted for shifts, days of the week, and departments  If you have a computer-based POS (point of sale) system, you might have leg up.

In order to get corrected or normalized numbers, you need to adjust all the raw sales numbers to reflect the actual sales per shift. This is accomplished by finding the time of the first order and the time of the last order of each server for each shift and calculating the actual selling time.  You now need to adjust each item or category sales quantity by multiplying the quantity sold by the number of hours in shift and dividing by the actual selling hours.  This adjustment is necessary so that you can compare the ordering rate per shift for each of the employees.

These calculations are time consuming, but necessary in order to be able to use the numbers either as loss management or sales motivation tools.

A great motivation tool, as well as a loss management tool is correct evaluation of the server sales.

A computer-based analyzer is available from In Sight Commander Systems, that connects to your POS system and automatically adjusts and reports server performance analyses. 

Brian McMillan is Director of Product Development of In Sight Commander System, Inc.  a software development company specializing in restaurants and video surveillance systems.  He can be reached at (714) 940-9800 or http://www.insightcommander.com/