Most restaurant owners check one thing at the end of each day: the total sales number. Did we have a good night? $4,200? That's decent. $2,800? Slow one.
That number is real and it matters. But it's also the least useful piece of information in your POS report. The numbers that tell you whether you're actually running a healthy operation are usually three or four clicks deeper, and a lot of owners have never looked at them.
Gross Sales vs. Net Sales: Know the Difference
Your POS report almost always leads with gross sales — the total value of everything rung in before any adjustments. But what you actually deposit is net sales, which is gross sales minus voids, comps, and discounts.
The gap between those two numbers is important. A restaurant doing $4,200 in gross sales but $3,700 in net sales has $500 disappearing somewhere. That's either generous, intentional, or a problem — and you need to know which.
What High Voids Actually Tell You
A small void rate is completely normal — orders get entered wrong, guests change their minds. But if your void rate is consistently above 2–3% of gross sales, something is off.
High voids can mean a training issue (staff entering wrong items repeatedly), a menu engineering problem (confusing options that lead to errors), or something more serious — in some cases, voids are used to manipulate cash handling. It's worth knowing your number and watching for spikes.
If your void rate jumped on a particular shift, that's a conversation to have with the manager who was on. It's probably nothing — but it's always worth asking.
Comps: Useful Tool or Silent Drain?
Comping a guest who had a bad experience is good hospitality. Comping without tracking it is how a small, manageable cost becomes a significant one.
Your POS should let you run a comp report that shows the total value comped, who authorized each comp, and ideally the reason. Most systems allow managers to add a reason when they apply a comp. If yours does and nobody's using that feature, start requiring it.
A healthy comp rate is typically under 1% of gross sales. If you're consistently above that, look at whether your kitchen is having quality issues, whether a particular manager is too liberal with comps, or whether you have a comp policy at all.
Category Sales: Where Your Revenue Is Actually Coming From
This is the report most owners skip entirely and it's one of the most useful ones your POS generates. Category sales break down your revenue by section — food vs. beverage, or by menu section (appetizers, mains, desserts, cocktails, beer, wine, etc.).
Tracking this over time tells you:
- Whether beverage is being sold actively. Beverage has some of the highest margins in the building. If your beverage-to-food ratio is low, your servers may not be offering drinks at the right moments, or your beverage program needs attention.
- Which menu sections are performing. If your appetizer sales are consistently low, guests aren't being offered them effectively — or they're priced in a way that makes them easy to skip. Both are fixable.
- What a menu change actually did. You added a new entrée three months ago. Is it selling? Category reporting tells you.
The Shift Report vs. The Period Report
Most POS systems generate two different views of sales data. The shift report (sometimes called a day report or end-of-day report) shows what happened in a single service or day. The period report aggregates over a week, month, or custom date range.
Both matter, for different reasons. The shift report is for operational decisions — was tonight's service strong or weak, should you prep more or less tomorrow, what did the comps look like? The period report is for financial decisions — is this month tracking ahead of last year, which days of the week are consistently your best, where is your revenue trend heading?
Connecting POS Data to the Rest of Your Numbers
The POS report tells you about revenue. To get a full picture of your business, you need to put that revenue next to your costs — which means connecting it with your payroll data, your food and beverage spend, and your fixed expenses.
That's a more complete picture than any single report gives you on its own, and it's exactly what a tool like SandCastle is built to do. But even before that step, simply reading your POS report more completely changes what you notice and what questions you ask.
Revenue is just the beginning of the story. The rest is in the report.