What is the daily sales benchmark?
This benchmark provides a near real-time look into how other restaurants in your region are performing as compared to your own restaurant’s performance. We launched this feature based on the incredibly positive feedback we received to our weekly emails with sales benchmarks. (Note that this feature is not available yet for our Canadian clients.)
If you want to learn about adjusting how you see your sales: Sales Comparison View - By Week and Year
How do I understand the data?
The benchmark values are the benchmark group’s performance for the same time frame as your restaurant. So in this example, your own performance for Thursday vs. last week as +0.4% while your benchmark group's performance was -1.6%, so you’re doing better than benchmark week-over-week. However, your own performance last year was -58.7% compared to -38.8% for the benchmark so you are underperforming the benchmark year-over-year.
The data is helpful in putting your own performance into context. Any week you’re up +5% is a good week, but that performance is especially encouraging when everyone else is +2%.
Are you sharing my sales data?
No, we will never share any individual restaurant’s performance data. And we ensure that the geographies we report benchmarks for have enough locations so no one restaurant’s performance can be determined.
What other restaurants are in my benchmark group? How many are there?
All active MarginEdge restaurants in the defined geographic region that share your same Full Service or Fast Casual designation. The number of restaurants will vary, but we ensure there are enough restaurants so that we provide a meaningful comparison and to ensure no single restaurant’s performance can be identified in the data.
What is the exact definition of my geographic region?
For larger regions across multiple states, we use the US Census Regions. For state-specific benchmarks, we use the state of the restaurant. For more granular metro-area breakdowns, we use a standard definition defined by a list of zip codes.
As more clients enroll, we will be able to make smaller regions for you and will automatically show you data for the most granular geography you are part of. You can tell your region by looking under the chart of info on the email
How do you define Full Service vs. Fast Casual? What if I’m a little of both?
We use a pretty standard definition of full service as anyone with table service (guests sit, order, and are served). We recognize there are plenty of in-between areas like our CEO’s conveyor belt sushi restaurant, and in those cases, we use our best judgment. If you think your restaurant is classified incorrectly, please let us know and we are happy to change it.
Why are the benchmark values in the software sometimes different from those in the email?
Since we gather sales information from a variety of systems from all across the country, sales data from each restaurant comes in at different times throughout the morning. The values in the email are based on the sales data we have when we send the email, while the value in the software is based on the most recently available data.
Why are the benchmark values for two days ago different this morning than they were yesterday morning?
It’s a similar reason as to why data changes throughout the day. Sometimes if a restaurant is having issues with its POS system, we won’t get a day's sales data until a few days later. Once we receive it, we will include it in the calculation to provide the largest sample size, but it will cause numbers to shift slightly.
How do you account for stores opening and closing?
For a restaurant to be included on a given day, we require it to have sales data for both the “now” date as well as the corresponding comparison date last week or last year. If it doesn’t have data for either, we remove it from the comparison, ensuring that both the “now” and “then” values are looking at the same group of restaurants.