Customize Your Business Day for Precise Sales Reporting
Midnight no longer has to be the end of your day!
Unlike most retail stores and quick-serve restaurants, full-service restaurants and bars often operate a “business day” that continues past midnight. Whether last call is at 12:30 am or 4 am, any food or drink sold after midnight has historically counted towards a different day’s sales than those that occurred before midnight. This has made it difficult to see how your restaurant really performed on Saturday night for example, since every time a late-night seating ordered a round of digestifs after midnight, those drinks were actually being counted towards Sunday’s numbers.
Today, however, is a new day. You can now set a custom start (and end) time for your business day and run sales reports based on whatever time you’ve chosen. Open late in Omaha? Set your day to start at 2 am and you can now run your reports so that you see sales from 2 am to 2 am every day! Nightclub in New York? Might want to go with 4 am instead. This has been a feature we’ve heard a lot of requests for and a huge time saver compared to exporting transactions and calculating daily totals in a spreadsheet app.
How to adjust the start of your day
Get started by logging into BackOffice and choosing “Locations” from the “Settings” menu. From there, find the location for which you want to edit the business day and click the name to edit. Choose a time from the “Start of Business Day” dropdown that matches the beginning of the new 24-hour period you’d like to use for your reporting and click “Save” to commit the changes.
In order to allow for the most intuitive reporting, we actually recommend using your store’s closing time, rather than your opening time, as your Start of Business Day reference point. First, using your closing time helps prevent you from conflating Saturday afternoon’s sales with Friday night’s, as could be the case if you set an open time of 5 or 6 pm. Second, we suggest choosing a time 1-2 hours after your actual closing time, depending on how long it takes you to close out checks each night. For example, if you close at 2 am, and choose 3 am as your Start of Business Day, you will be able to view and analyze all of Friday’s sales on Saturday afternoon while you gear up for another big night.
Reporting with your newly defined business day
Once you’ve chosen your business day setting, your time-based reports will automatically respect it. That includes ShopKeep Pocket, as long you are on version 4.3.0 or later!
This means that if you set your day to start at 3 am, your reports will now show sales from 3 am to 3 am by default for each day. So if it’s Tuesday afternoon and you closed the last bar tab at 2 am earlier that morning, that bar tab will be counted as part of Monday’s (or yesterday’s) sales figures.
Running a tax or labor report and still need to look at calendar days for something like October sales numbers? Simply adjust the radio button in the date picker drop down to “Use calendar day starting at 12AM”, and the report will go back to the original midnight to midnight settings, showing only sales that took place in the calendar month of October.
We’re confident you will really enjoy this update, but let us know what you think in the comments section or by emailing [email protected]! Want to learn more? Study the details in our helpful support article.
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