Comparing the Uncomparable

Story

Accounting in the restaurant business is a complex combinations of rules, exceptions, and digging through data to accurately assess performance. That measurement will dictate bonuses for managers, inform hiring of staff and direct new investments by owners. Many restaurant operators manually measure “Comparable Days” as one of their data points, but how do we automate something so nuanced? 

Problem

In quick service restaurants especially, operators hope to compare every day their restaurant is open to the same day last year and measure performance. The root of our problem was determining if that day last year was truly “comparable”. What if you’re comparing a busy Friday night to a sleepy Thursday? What if it snowed that day, there was a convention in town, or the restaurant had just opened?

My goal was to design a simple tool to account for these subtle complexities, and enable companies of any size or accounting expertise measure comparable days. 

Approach

Determine the criteria that defined “comparable”

Through a series of user interviews with restaurant CFO’s, controllers, accountants and operators I learned the criteria that defined a comparable day from the non comparable. With point of sale integrations we could determine if no meaningful transactions took place, while allowing for low dollar amounts a new restaurant might test before they open. Brand new locations, or those recently renovated, needed a set amount of time to get past the opening rush and generate meaningful data.

Define that criteria across hundreds of locations (or more!)

I tested wireframes for a mixed approach of quantified rules and qualitative messages would give controllers…well, control - while letting operators tell a story. The end result let corporate accounts responsible for hundreds of locations define a rule once, across their organization. Individual store managers could then provide additional detail to explain bad weather, burst pipes or abnormal traffic. 

The combination of these two criteria became crucial for an unexpected reason - manager accountability. Keeping the store open was a key performance indicator, and it was vital that circumstances beyond their control were documented. 

Report the outcomes and enable decision making

Lastly, I tested different solutions to display and report on this data. Two key solutions emerged. One was to let store-level operators easily check on comparable status at a glance. By opening a location’s page in Restaurant365, they could determine the current status of a given store and see any input or estimated changes from the store manager. 

District, regional and corporate leaders need to see these quantified on reports. To do that we designed tools for our custom report builder. One was to display the ratio of comparable to non-comparable days in a period, and how stable that location currently was. We also built a function to allow any sales figure to be compared to the corresponding day last year and display a variance.

Results

The resulting combination of rules, status messages and reports allowed large chains and small ownership groups alike to measure comparable days with clarity and control. If need be, a team with low headcount could only implement comparable day rules. This meant with a single setup step taking about 2 minutes they could supply comparable data to every report they processed.