How do I tell which dishes are actually making money?
Put three numbers side by side for every dish: what it sells for, what one plate costs you to make, and how many you sold, from your till's item sales report. A dish that sells well on a thin margin and one that barely sells both deserve a look, and your till already holds half the answer.
You know which dishes the kitchen hates making and which ones the regulars order. That is not the same as knowing which ones make money, and the gap between the two is where a busy service can still leave you with nothing at the end of the month.
Half the answer is already in your till. Most tills can show what sold, by item, for a date range. In Square, open Reports, pick Item Sales, set the dates and export it as a spreadsheet. Other tills have the same report under a name like item sales or product mix. The last four weeks is plenty to start with.
The other half is what one plate costs you. Take your best sellers first, not the whole menu. For each one, list what goes on the plate and what you paid for it on your last supplier invoice, then add it up. It does not need to be exact to the cent to tell you something.
Now put them side by side. Take the plate cost off the menu price and you have what each plate leaves you, before wages and rent. A dish that sells a lot at a thin margin is worth a price change, or a smaller serve of the expensive part. A dish that costs little and sells well is worth putting where people see it first. A dish that sells little and costs a lot is worth asking about, even if it is someone's favourite.
If you are happy to use a chatbot, paste the exported sales and your plate costs into the free version of ChatGPT and ask for one table sorted by what each dish brings in. Check its sums against a dish you know well before you trust the rest. If you would rather not, a spreadsheet with the same columns does the same job.
Then look again next month, after any change, and see whether the number moved. The same report also shows what sells on which day of the week, which is how tomorrow's prep and Monday's order stop being a guess. The point is not a perfect costing. It is swapping a gut feel for a number you can check.
A Three Fixes report looks at how you price, prep and order today and writes the steps to get these numbers out of the till and the invoices you already have.
Sourced: Exporting a report from the Square Dashboard as a CSV file to open in any spreadsheet, Square Support Centre Australia (https://squareup.com/help/au/en/article/8362-print-export-or-email-your-reports)
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