How to Create a Restaurant Dashboard in Excel with AI
A restaurant dashboard in Excel can show you exactly what's working and what's not, transforming your daily operations from guesswork to data-backed strategy. And with the help of AI, you don't need to be a spreadsheet master to build one. This guide will walk you through creating a powerful dashboard to track your most critical metrics, from sales and staffing to marketing performance.
Why Your Restaurant Needs a Dashboard
Running a restaurant often feels like juggling a dozen tasks at once. You're managing staff, overseeing inventory, handling marketing, and ensuring customers are happy. A dashboard brings all your key information into one place, giving you a clear, at-a-glance view of your business's health. It helps you answer vital questions like:
Which menu items are our top performers, and which are lagging?
Are our labor costs aligned with our daily revenue?
Which marketing channels are actually bringing in new customers?
Are we staffed appropriately for our busiest (and slowest) times?
Instead of relying on gut feelings, a dashboard empowers you to make informed decisions that can boost profits, cut costs, and improve the customer experience.
Key Metrics for Your Restaurant Dashboard
A great dashboard starts with tracking the right metrics. Trying to monitor everything is overwhelming. Focus on these key performance indicators (KPIs) divided into a few core areas of your business.
Sales Metrics
These metrics tell you how much money is coming in and how efficiently you're earning it.
Total Revenue: The most basic metric. Track it daily, weekly, and monthly to spot trends and measure performance against goals.
Average Check Size: Calculated as Total Revenue / Number of Customers. A rising check size can indicate successful upselling or popular high-margin items.
Sales by Category: Break down sales by food, beverage, appetizers, and desserts. This helps you understand what your customers are buying.
Top-Selling Items: Identify the most popular dishes on your menu. This is critical for menu engineering, promoting popular, high-profit items.
Operational Metrics
These KPIs give you insight into the efficiency and profitability of your day-to-day operations.
Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): The direct cost of ingredients used to create your menu items. Monitoring COGS as a percentage of revenue helps you manage food costs and price your menu effectively.
Labor Cost Percentage: Calculated as Total Labor Cost / Total Revenue. This is one of your biggest expenses. Tracking it helps you optimize staffing levels and scheduling.
Prime Cost: This is the sum of your COGS and labor costs. It represents the bulk of your controllable expenses, and a healthy prime cost is typically under 60-65% for most restaurants.
Table Turnover Rate: The number of times a table is used by a new party of guests during a specific period. A higher turnover rate means more customers served and more potential revenue.
Customer & Marketing Metrics
Understand who your customers are and where they are coming from.
Reservations vs. Walk-ins: Shows you how much of your business is planned versus spontaneous. This can help with staffing and inventory planning.
Customer Feedback Scores: If you use review sites or post-meal surveys, tracking your average score can highlight areas for service improvement.
Marketing Campaign ROI: If you're running ads on platforms like Facebook or Google, link your spending to direct results like online orders or reservations to see what's actually working.
Step 1: Set Up and Organize Your Data in Excel
Before you build your dashboard, you need to collect and clean your data. For most restaurants, this data lives in a few different places: your Point of Sale (POS) system, your reservation systems like OpenTable or Resy, and your marketing platforms.
The common process is to export this data as a CSV or Excel file and then combine it in a main spreadsheet. Here's how to structure it effectively:
Create Clean Data Tables
Your goal is to create one "master" data sheet organized in a simple, tabular format. This means each row is a single record (like a single sale or menu item from an order) and each column is a specific attribute (like Date, Item Name, Category, Price, and Quantity).
Here's an example of a simple daily sales data table you might export from your POS:
Date | Order ID | Menu Item | Category | Price | Quantity | Total |
2023-11-01 | 1001 | Classic Burger | Food | 15.00 | 1 | 15.00 |
2023-11-01 | 1001 | Fries | Food | 5.00 | 1 | 5.00 |
2023-11-01 | 1001 | Craft Beer | Beverage | 8.00 | 2 | 16.00 |
2023-11-01 | 1002 | Caesar Salad | Food | 12.00 | 1 | 12.00 |
2023-11-01 | 1002 | Iced Tea | Beverage | 3.00 | 1 | 3.00 |
Pro Tip: Keep your data "raw" on one sheet and build your dashboard on a separate sheet. This way, if you make a mistake, you can always go back to the original data.
Step 2: Build Your Dashboard Visuals with PivotTables
Once your data is clean and organized, PivotTables are your best friend. They allow you to quickly summarize thousands of rows of data without writing a single formula. Let's create a couple of charts for our dashboard.
First, format your raw data as a Table by clicking anywhere inside your data range and pressing Ctrl + T. This makes your data dynamic, so any new rows you add will automatically be included in your analysis.
Create a "Sales Over Time" Line Chart
Click inside your data table, go to the Insert tab, and click PivotTable.
A new sheet will be created. In the "PivotTable Fields" pane on the right, drag the Date field into the Rows area and the Total field into the Values area.
You'll now have a table showing total sales for each day. Click on this new table.
Go to the PivotTable Analyze tab and click PivotChart. Choose a Line Chart to visualize the trend.
Create a "Top-Selling Items" Bar Chart
Go back to your raw data sheet and insert a new PivotTable on a new sheet.
This time, drag the Menu Item field to the Rows area and the SUM of Total to the Values area.
Right-click on the sum of sales column and choose Sort > Sort Largest to Smallest to see your bestsellers at the top.
With the PivotTable selected, insert a Bar Chart to easily compare item performance.
You can repeat this process for all your key metrics. Once you have a few charts, copy and paste them onto a new, fresh sheet called "Dashboard." This sheet will be your central command center.
Step 3: Leveraging AI in Your Excel Workflow
Manually creating PivotTables and charts is effective, but it can be time-consuming. This is where AI can step in to speed things up and uncover insights you might miss.
Using Excel’s Built-In "Analyze Data" Feature
Excel has a native AI feature that acts as an instant data analyst. It scans your data and suggests relevant PivotTables and charts for you.
Click on any cell within your formatted data table.
Go to the Home tab and click on the Analyze Data button on the far right.
A pane will appear with automatically-generated insights and visuals, like "Total Sales by Category" or trends over time. You can click to insert any of these directly into your workbook.
You can also ask it questions in plain English, like "What were the average sales per day?" and it will generate an answer for you.
Where AI Truly Shines (Beyond Standard Excel)
Excel’s AI is a great starting point, but it still relies on you manually pulling together clean CSV files from all your systems. This is often the most time-consuming part of the process, especially when you have to do it every week.
The real power of modern AI analytics comes from its ability to connect multiple data sources automatically and understand them as a whole. Imagine an analysis that combines your POS sales data with your Facebook Ads spending and your inventory costs simultaneously. This would reveal your true return on ad spend and give you an active view of menu item profitability without requiring a day's worth of spreadsheet work.
Today, AI-driven tools are built to handle this very process. They eliminate the constant exporting and data-wrangling, allowing you to ask high-level questions like, "Which lunch promotions drove the highest check averages last month?" and get an answer instantly. This approach moves you from spending hours building reports to spending minutes acting on them.
Final Thoughts
Building a restaurant dashboard in Excel gives you a clear, data-driven perspective on your business's performance. By focusing on the right metrics and leveraging tools like PivotTables and AI, you can move beyond assumptions and make smarter decisions on everything from menu design to marketing spend.
The most significant challenge is often the manual chore of getting all your data into one place. Exporting files every week from your POS system, delivery apps, and marketing platforms to update a spreadsheet is a huge time drain. That's why we created Graphed . It automates the entire process by connecting directly to your tools, keeping your dashboards updated in real time. Instead of fighting with CSVs, you simply ask questions in plain English - like "create a dashboard showing sales vs. labor costs for the last 30 days" - and the report is built for you in seconds.