How to Create a Restaurant Dashboard in Excel with ChatGPT
Thinking about creating a dashboard for your restaurant, but feeling a little intimidated by Excel? An Excel dashboard is a fantastic way to see all your key performance indicators - like daily sales, top-performing menu items, and peak service hours - in one clear, visual snapshot. This article will show you how to build a powerful restaurant dashboard from scratch, using ChatGPT as your personal expert assistant to make the process simple and fast, even if you’re not an Excel wizard.
So, Why Build a Restaurant Dashboard Anyway?
In the whirlwind of running a restaurant, it's easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind of managing staff, ordering inventory, and keeping customers happy. A dashboard cuts through the noise. Instead of relying on gut feelings, you get a clear, data-driven view of your business's health. It helps you answer critical questions instantly:
Which menu items are our all-stars, and which ones are duds?
When are our busiest and slowest hours of the day?
How is our average check size trending this month?
Did that Tuesday special actually bring in more customers?
Seeing this information visualized makes trends and outliers pop out, allowing you to make smarter decisions about everything from a FOH staffing schedule to a new marketing promo. It turns guessing into knowing.
First Things First: Gather Your Data
Before you can build a dashboard, you need the raw ingredients. The heart of your restaurant's data lives in your Point of Sale (POS) system (like Toast, Square, Lightspeed, or Revel). This is your richest source of information on sales, orders, and customer behavior.
For this tutorial, we’ll focus on foundational sales data. Log in to your POS system and look for an option to export your transaction or order history. You'll want to pull a report for a specific period, like the last month or quarter. The goal is to get a CSV or Excel file containing transactional data. The more detail, the better, but a good starting point includes columns like:
Order Date: The day the order was placed.
Order Time: The time of the order.
Order ID: A unique number for each transaction.
Menu Item: The name of the item sold.
Quantity: How many of that item were sold in the transaction.
Price: The price of the individual item.
Total Sale: The total value of the line item (Quantity x Price).
Category: The item's category (e.g., Appetizer, Entree, Beverage).
If your export looks slightly different, don't worry. As long as you have dates, items, and sales values, you have what you need to build a powerful dashboard. Just save the exported file to your computer, and you’re ready for the next step.
Step 1: Plan Your Dashboard with ChatGPT
A great dashboard starts with a good plan. Instead of jumping straight into Excel, let's use ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner to define what we want to measure and how we want our dashboard to look. This simple planning step saves a ton of time and confusion later on.
Brainstorming Your Key Metrics (KPIs)
Ask ChatGPT to help you identify the most important metrics, or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), for your restaurant.
Try this prompt in ChatGPT:
ChatGPT will likely give you a fantastic, organized list that might include:
Sales Performance: Total Revenue, Average Check Size, and Sales by Day/Time.
Menu Analysis: Top-Selling Menu Items (by quantity and revenue), and Sales by Category (e.g., Appetizers vs. Entrees).
Operational Efficiency: Table Turnover Rate, and Orders per Hour.
Pick a few key metrics from this list to start with. We’ll focus on Total Revenue, Average Check Size, Top-Selling Items, and Sales by Day of the Week.
Step 2: Prepare Your Data in Excel
Now, open your exported CSV file in Excel. A clean and well-structured data source is the foundation of a reliable dashboard. Follow these simple rules to set yourself up for success:
Use a Single Header Row: Make sure the first row contains clear, simple headers for each column (e.g., "Date," "Category," "Total Sale").
No Merged Cells: Eliminate any merged cells in your dataset. Each piece of information should occupy its own individual cell.
Format as a Table: This is a simple but powerful Excel trick. Click anywhere inside your data, go to the Insert tab, and click Table (or use the shortcut Ctrl + T). When the pop-up appears, make sure "My table has headers" is checked and click OK.
Formatting your data as a table is incredibly helpful. It automatically expands as you add new data, and it gives your data a name (usually "Table1"), making it easy to create clean, readable formulas.
Step 3: Build Your Analytics with ChatGPT's Help
This is where the magic happens. We will use ChatGPT to generate the Excel formulas and guide us through creating charts and tables. There's no need to memorize complex functions, just describe what you want, and let ChatGPT do the heavy lifting.
Create two new tabs in your Excel file. Name one "Calculations" and the other "Dashboard." This keeps your workbook neatly organized.
Calculating Core KPIs
Let's head over to the "Calculations" tab. We’ll use this space to compute our main KPIs.
1. Total Revenue
Ask ChatGPT:
ChatGPT will provide the formula. In a cell on your "Calculations" sheet (e.g., A2), label it "Total Revenue," and in the cell next to it (B2), enter the formula:
=SUM(Table1[Total_Sale])
2. Average Check Size
Ask ChatGPT:
This is a more complex ask, but ChatGPT can handle it. It will likely suggest a combination of formulas. A common approach involves SUM and UNIQUE:
=SUM(Table1[Total_Sale])/COUNTA(UNIQUE(Table1[Order_ID]))
In your "Calculations" sheet, label a cell "Average Check Size" (e.g., A3) and paste this formula in B3.
Creating Summary Tables with PivotTables
PivotTables are Excel’s most powerful tool for summarizing data without writing complex formulas. They’re perfect for building the charts for our dashboard. If you've never used them, don't worry. We'll have ChatGPT guide us.
Ask ChatGPT:
Follow the steps ChatGPT gives you, which will look something like this:
Go to your data tab and click anywhere inside 'Table1'.
Go to the Insert tab and click PivotTable.
In the pop-up, choose to place the PivotTable in your "Calculations" sheet. Click on a cell in that sheet (e.g., D1) and hit OK.
A "PivotTable Fields" panel will appear on the right. Drag the 'Menu Item' field into the "Rows" area and drag the 'Total_Sale' field into the "Values" area.
Instantly, you'll have a summary table showing the total revenue for every single item on your menu. From here, you can easily create another PivotTable next to it to show Sales by Day of the Week. Just use the 'Date' field for your rows and the 'Total Sale' field for values. Excel will even let you group the dates by "Day" so that you have categories from Sunday to Saturday.
Visualizing Your Data with Charts
Now that we have our summary tables, let's create some visuals for our dashboard. Stick with clean and simple charts: bar charts for rankings and line charts for trends over time.
Ask ChatGPT:
Once again, ChatGPT will give you the steps:
Click on the PivotTable you created for menu item analysis.
Go to the PivotTable Analyze tab and click PivotChart.
Choose a Bar Chart and click OK.
To show just the top 10 sellers, click the filter arrow next to "Row Labels" in the chart, go to Value Filters, and select Top 10.
Repeat this process to create a vertical column chart or line chart for your "Sales by Day of the Week" PivotTable. Now you'll have two professional-looking charts ready for your dashboard.
Step 4: Design Your Final Dashboard
The final step is to assemble all your components - the KPIs and the charts - into a clean, one-page dashboard.
Move Your Components: Go to your "Calculations" tab. Select your first chart, cut it (Ctrl + X), then go to the "Dashboard" tab and paste it (Ctrl + V). Do this for all your charts and neatly arrange them.
Create KPI Cards: For your main KPIs like Total Revenue and Average Check Size, let's create "cards" at the top of the dashboard. Pick a cell (e.g., B2), type "=", and then click on the cell on your "Calculations" worksheet that contains your "Total Revenue" value. Hit enter. This links the cells, so when your calculations update, your dashboard does too. Repeat this for each KPI. You can format these cells with a larger font and a colored fill to make them stand out.
Add Slicers for Interactivity: Slicers add slick clickable buttons that make your dashboard interactive. Click on any PivotChart. Go to the PivotTable Analyze tab and click 'Insert Slicer'. Choose whatever field you might like to filter your whole dashboard by - things like 'Category' are a great place to start! You can now just click the slicer to instantly update all charts. For example, click the 'Appetizers Slicer Button' to show which are your top selling Appetizers in the chart below the slicer!
That's it! You now have a functional, automated restaurant dashboard! To update it, simply paste new data into your source table, right-click any PivotChart, and hit Refresh. Everything will update automatically.
Final Thoughts
Creating a restaurant dashboard in Excel gives you a clear, data-backed view of your business, turning raw sales numbers into actionable insights. By using ChatGPT as a guide, you can bypass the steep learning curve of Excel and quickly build a professional-quality tool to help you make smarter, more profitable decisions.
While DIY dashboards in Excel are powerful, the process of manually exporting data, cleaning spreadsheets, and refreshing reports can become time-consuming. At Graphed, we automate that whole process. We connect directly to your data sources like your POS and marketing platforms, and let you instantly build live, real-time dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. No formulas or CSVs required - just fast, clear answers to help you grow your business.