Toast has a great blog that covers the many ways that you can use sales data to make business decisions. For example, there’s this article about sales forecasting https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/restaurant-sales-forecast

The article describes how you might calculate sales based on capacity and average revenue from a main dish. This is a good way to get an approximate idea of sales for busy times and quiet times.

However, you have many different dishes at different price points/profit and sales can fluctuate based on many variables, aside from busy and not busy time/days. There exists a statistical analysis that can help!

A regression analysis takes into account many different variables: time, day of the week, nearby events in the area, whatever you think is relevant and important. After you feed a bunch of data from your sales system (Toast or other) into this sort of analysis, you can get an idea of how these variables impact sales. Knowing that you can get an even more precise forecast of sales and for inventory, as well!

So for example, this analysis might say that Sundays result in $1000 more sales than weekdays and when there is an event at the local theater that will be $2000 more in sales but if it’s February that will be $500 less and so forth. You can than make some more precise (but not perfect!) forecasts for sales.

And you can do it on an menu item level—what sells when, given the above variables. And with that forecasting information, you can optimize inventory. If you know how much is selling when, you can order accordingly.