Tracking Daily Performance: The Item Sales by Day Report 📅🍔
Ever wonder if your signature "Fish Tacos" actually outsell "Burgers" on Fridays, or if your salad category completely drops off over the weekend? The Item Sales by Day Report is designed to answer one crucial question: "How did each menu item sell on each day — and how does that break down across the week?"
This report combines the calendar view of a daily sales summary with the granular detail of your product mix. It gives you a single, unified workspace to see exactly what sold and when, neatly organized by sales category. This insight is a game-changer for adjusting prep sheets, planning kitchen labor, and measuring the success of daily promotions! 🍳🚀
📊 What You'll See on the Report
The data is separated into clean, easy-to-read tables for your venue:
Category Tables: The report generates one dedicated table for each sales category (e.g., Hot Beverages, Entrees).
Day-by-Day Columns: Within each table, every menu item gets its own row, followed by paired columns tracking Quantity (Qty) sold and Gross Revenue ($) for each date or day of the week.
The Grand Total: A master total column sits at the far right of the grid, summarizing your overall volume for the entire selected timeframe.
📝 Report Example (Organized by Date)
🔄 Grouping Options: Changing Your Perspective
By adjusting the Group By dropdown in the portal, you can completely restructure the report's columns to look at your business through different lenses:
| Group By | What the Columns Show | Best Used For... |
|---|---|---|
| None | One column per specific business date (e.g., June 1st, June 2nd, June 3rd). | Reviewing short-term, date-specific performance—perfect for looking over a weekend or a single week. |
| Day Totals | One column for each generic day of the week (Mon–Sun), adding together all matching days in your range. | Identifying your strongest and weakest days of the week for specific menu items over time. |
| Day Averages | One column for each day of the week, displaying the mathematical average for those days. | Normalizing your data when comparing longer timeframes spanning multiple weeks, ensuring weeks of different lengths are compared fairly. |
💡 Quick Tip: When you select Day Averages, the final column on the far right automatically shifts to display your Avg Qty and Avg $ per day, rather than a raw, cumulative sum!
🛠️ Strategic Ways to Use This Data
Smart Kitchen Prep Planning: Use the Day Totals grouping to build highly accurate kitchen baselines. Knowing exactly how many burger patties or salmon portions your kitchen historical sells on a typical Thursday versus a Saturday prevents morning prep waste and evening line shortages! 🥩🥗
Spotting Launch Trends: Run the report in None mode over a two-week range to see how a newly introduced menu item behaves day-over-day. This lets you spot whether a new dish is gaining steady traction, declining, or leveling off.
Measuring Promotional Impact: Did you run a "Taco Tuesday" or a weekend beverage special? Compare that specific date’s column directly against the surrounding days of the week. This lets you calculate the immediate sales spike of the featured item, as well as any positive "halo effect" it had on your side items and appetizers.
Auditing Whole-Category Health: Because items are nested inside their overall sales categories, you can quickly evaluate if a whole section of your menu is struggling on specific days (like your Dessert category slumping early in the week), allowing you to construct targeted weekday promotions.
🎛️ Filters Available
You can tailor your data views in the NX Portal using several flexible filtering parameters:
Sales Categories: Narrow your view to focus on one or two specific sections of your menu at a time.
Order Types: Separate your metrics to see how items perform across Dine In, Takeout, or Online Ordering streams.
Revenue Centers: Isolate your sales numbers to specific areas of your physical building (e.g., Main Dining Room versus the Bar Floor).
Employees: View item-level sales distribution trends attributed to specific waitstaff members.
Include Items with No Sales: Toggle this on to view your full menu matrix, including items that generated zero sales on some or all of the selected dates.
Include Zero-Priced Items: Choose whether to display or hide free, promotional, or complimentary $0.00 items on your tracking grids.
Need Help? 💡
Why does an item show sales, but its gross revenue reads as $0.00?
This typically happens if the menu item is a free inclusion or a $0.00 modification. If you want to clean up your columns and remove these, adjust your report filters and turn off the Include Zero-Priced Items toggle.
My date columns are missing a day we were open.
Ensure your system's business days were fully finalized at close. If a night shift forgot to execute an end-of-day sequence, that day's specific item ticks might still be rolling into your open, active check logs instead of your closed date parameters.