Toast Benchmarking: Advanced Sales Projections

In this Article:

Advanced Sales Projections with Toast Benchmarking allows you to forecast sales and make informed operational decisions helping you prepare for the upcoming weeks of service more efficiently and reduce waste. There are two versions of Advanced Sales Projections: Lite and Essentials. 

 

• Advanced Sales Projections Lite is available to all Toast POS customers, and includes sales projections for the next seven days.
• Advanced Sales Projections Essentials is available to Toast POS customers with the Restaurant Management Essentials subscription and includes projections up to 28 days in the future. 

 

 

 

To access Advanced Sales Projections in Toast Web, navigate to Reports > Projections > Sales projection.

 

The Sales projection tab serves as a homepage for your projections. Projections are based on identified patterns within your historical data, and a banner indicating our confidence level in the predictions is displayed to help you make informed decisions using this data. 

 

Projections and confidence level percentages do not include external factors such as weather or local events. The weather information displayed here is for your convenience allowing you to adjust your forecasts up or down based on your unique local knowledge. 

 

You can select any of the daily projections, as seen in the image below under the Next 3 days header, to navigate to further details in the Daily breakdown tab.

 

You can also select Adjust projection on any day displayed in your Sales projection tab to edit the projection based on your local knowledge. You can edit your sales projections if desired to reflect local conditions such as weather, event bookings, holidays, and more. 

 

Any adjustments made to a projection will save, and when you hover over the projection, you will be able to see when the projection was last adjusted, who adjusted it, and the reason it was adjusted. 

 

Selectable reasons include:

• Event bookings/Buyout
• Local events/Holidays
• Weather conditions
• Staffing or supply
• Other

 

Depending on if you use Advanced Sales Projections Lite or Advanced Sales Projections Essentials, you will see a section displaying either Next 7-day projections or Next 28-day projections respectively. Here, your projections are broken down into the following columns:

• Projected net sales: An estimated number and a projected range is included by date
• Projected order volume: This is based on the projected net sales and the average ticket size for your restaurant. 
• Weather forecast: Weather projections are typically available up to 14 days out.

Note: If you have Advanced Sales Projections Essentials with 28-day projection access, you will not see weather data for days 15-28.

 

 

The Historical Accuracy section transparently displays recent net sales compared to predicted net sales to help you build confidence in the projections supplied. 

 

 

 

The Daily breakdown tab includes a graph displaying net sales in dollars, comparing the current day of the week to the same day of the week over the last four weeks, as well as to the same day of the week during the same weeks last year.

 

 

The Daily breakdown tab will also include hourly weather data if you would like to look at this more closely when adjusting your projections.