Understand your analytics
Five reports that answer the questions most owners actually ask — and how to read them without a spreadsheet.
Analytics in the left-hand menu contains five reports, and each one is built to answer a different question about the business. You do not need to understand all of them to get value out of the section; most owners live in one or two.
Pick your period first
At the top of every report there is a Time period to choose: today, the last 7 days, the last 4 weeks, the last 3 months, month to date, year to date and several others. You can also set your own start and end dates if you want to look at something specific, such as a festival weekend.
Whatever you choose, Dinerly compares it against the same length of time immediately before it. “Last 7 days” is therefore measured against the 7 days before those, and the arrows and percentages you see are always that comparison. They are not measuring you against a target you have set, because you have not set one — they are only telling you whether this period was better or worse than the one before it.
That is also why it pays to compare like with like. If you put a week containing a bank holiday up against an ordinary week, the percentages will swing dramatically and none of it will tell you anything useful about how the restaurant is actually doing.
The five reports
- Sales shows how much you are making, what is driving it and when it happens. If you only open one report, open this one.
- Orders shows how many orders you are taking and what they are worth, how the mix of delivery and collection is shifting, how customers are choosing to pay, what your average order is worth, and how smoothly orders are moving through the kitchen.
- Reservations shows bookings, covers and no-shows day by day, along with where your bookings are coming from, the party sizes you typically get and the time slots that fill up first.
- Reviews shows your satisfaction score and how many guests are bothering to leave feedback, and it lists the unhappy guests from the period so that you can contact them and try to win them back.
- Customers shows new faces against returning regulars, and how often people come back to you.
Three numbers worth watching every month
- Average order value. This is usually easier to move than the number of customers, because it depends on things inside your control: a better suggestion at the till, a side dish placed where people notice it, or a set menu that nudges the order up by a few pounds.
- Returning customers. If this number is falling while your total orders stay flat, it means you are winning new customers only fast enough to replace the ones drifting away. Winning a new customer costs considerably more than keeping an existing one, so the problem tends to show up in your margins before it shows up in your revenue.
- No-shows. Every no-show is revenue you were counting on and did not get, and it is one of the cheapest problems to fix, because asking for a deposit or sending a confirmation message costs you almost nothing.
Comparing locations
Every report shows the location you have selected at the top of the dashboard, so to look at another one you switch location and the reports follow. Payouts work the other way round, because money is settled across the whole business, but analytics deliberately stay per location. That is what you want when you are trying to work out which branch needs your attention this month.
Look at trends rather than single days. One quiet Tuesday usually means it rained. Four quiet Tuesdays in a row is a pattern, and a pattern is something you can actually do something about.
Last updated 20 September 2026