Out with the old and in with the new

If your reporting looks like this:

• Manually inputting figures from the vendor to a spreadsheet - spending hours a week crawling through your end of night reports, POS, stock sheet, invoices etc is not only a waste of time but inefficient. Something is bound to be missed.
• Multiple staff members pulling figures into one spreadsheet - no clear structure, consistent breakdown and a whole load of numbers that don’t make sense together.
• Broken formulas that mess up everything and an angry accountant to answer to - need we say more?
• A weekly meeting to discuss the highest selling beer that week - we all know they’re a waste of time and the only person benefiting is the nit-picking founder
• Missing stock and no one to blame but the tequila-drinking staff - they obviously are drinking the stock too, but it’s easier to instigate a drinking ban than dig deeper for the cracks.
• Your social media girl hasn’t updated the reports since Covid - she doesn’t even know the name of the spreadsheet so you’ve had no ideas what offers have worked or how much engagement the last instagram post had.

Too many cooks in the kitchen, and the dishes are never consistent.

What it's really costing you

Add up the hours your managers spend on reports each week. Multiply that by their hourly rate. That's what the old way costs you, before you even count the stock you can't account for or the decisions made on numbers that don't add up.

Spoiler: it's a lot more than a pint.

Out with the old

The old way of reporting is seriously out. Cancelled, if you will. It's 2026 and we're trying to save the trees, so no more paper stock counts.

You need everything in one place, consolidated and easy to act on. If your GM disappears to Barca for two weeks, they should come back to reports they can read in five minutes. Not a fortnight of catch-up and a few strong words with the duty managers.

Your tech stack matters

If your POS, booking platform and ordering system don't talk to each other, you're doing three times the work to make sense of your numbers. £500 in the bank and no pre-order to match it? That's only the start of the nightmare.

Three quick fixes you can do today

1. Cut the crap. If nobody's made a decision off a tab in the last month, delete it. Keep what you actually act on: sales, labour, stock variance and what your marketing is bringing in.
2. One owner, one template. Pick one person to own the report and give it a fixed layout. Same columns, same order, every week. No more free-for-all.
3. Make the calls. Ring your POS, booking and ordering platforms and ask what they integrate with. Twenty minutes on the phone could save you hours every week.

Still stuck?

Hospitality is high-pressure enough. The last thing you need is to be filling in reports while there's a geezer at the bar insisting on the "perfect" Guinness.

If the only help on offer is an unhelpful chatbot, or you don't fancy holding for five different account managers, let us take a look for you. You get back to the important things, like that Guinness…