POS Reports: The Five a Café Owner Should Read Every Week

Almost every café owner looks at one number from their till: today's takings. It is the least useful number the system holds. It tells you what happened and nothing about why, and it moves for reasons — weather, a public holiday, a road closure — that you can do nothing about. The reports underneath it are where the decisions are, and most of them take under two minutes to read. Here are the five worth a standing slot in your week, and what each one is actually for.

1. Sales by hour

This is the report that pays for itself, because it is the only one that directly changes your biggest controllable cost. Pull sales by hour across a few weeks and the shape of your day appears: the 7am to 9am spike, the dead stretch after eleven, whatever your café does in the evening.

Then put your rota next to it. Almost every small café is carrying an hour or two of staffing that sits outside where the trade is — usually at the start of a shift, because the rota was built around opening time rather than around customers. Moving a start time by half an hour costs nothing and changes the labour line every week from then on. Our guide to staff scheduling works through how to read the hourly shape into a rota.

The decision it drives: where shifts start and end, and when to schedule prep, deliveries and deep cleans so they land in the quiet stretch rather than the rush.

2. Item mix — what sold, by quantity and by value

Sales by item is the report owners think they already know, and are usually a little wrong about. What you remember is what you notice being made, which favours the drinks that take effort over the ones that sell quietly all day.

Read it two ways. By quantity, it tells you what your café is actually for — which is often not what the menu is designed around. By value, and better still by margin, it tells you which items are carrying the business. An item that is fourth by quantity and first by contribution is the one to protect at all costs. Menu engineering is the full version of this exercise; the weekly version is just reading the top ten and the bottom ten.

The decision it drives: what gets a better place on the board, what gets repriced, what comes off the menu, and what you make sure never runs out.

3. Voids, refunds and discounts

This is the report nobody enjoys and everybody needs. Its purpose is not catching people — it is finding the sales that left your stock but never left as revenue.

Read it for pattern rather than for total. A steady low level of remakes is normal in any café that makes things by hand. What is worth a question is concentration: the same item voided repeatedly (usually a training or a recipe problem), voids clustered on one shift, or discounts that have quietly become the standard price for a group of regulars. Cross-check it against your stock variance — the two are often the same event seen from opposite sides, as our guide to where café stock disappears sets out.

The decision it drives: whether voids and refunds need manager approval, whether a recipe needs revisiting, and whether a discount that started as a favour is now a permanent price cut.

4. Payment mix

Cash versus card looks like an accounting detail. It is really three things at once.

• A cost line. Card takings carry a merchant fee your acquirer charges; cash carries counting time, banking trips and the risk of a variance at close. Neither is free, and the balance between them affects what you actually keep. Get the fee schedule in writing — our guide to card machines for UAE cafés covers what to ask for.
• A cash-flow signal. Card settlement arrives on your acquirer's cycle, not on the day of the sale. A café whose payment mix shifts heavily towards card has the same revenue and a different working-capital position.
• A control check. Your expected cash from the report should match the drawer at close. When it doesn't, the gap is the thing to investigate — that's the whole basis of the daily cash-up.

The decision it drives: whether your card arrangement is still competitive, how much float and banking effort the cash side justifies, and how tight your closing routine needs to be.

5. Sales by employee — read carefully

This one is genuinely useful and genuinely easy to misuse. Sales per person are shaped mostly by which shifts somebody works: a barista on the 7am rush will out-take an equally good barista on the afternoon every week of the year, and ranking the two of them by revenue tells you about the rota, not about them.

What it does tell you, once you compare like shifts with like, is average ticket. Somebody consistently five per cent above the shift average is doing something at the counter the others aren't — a suggested pastry, a size question, a second coffee for the colleague waiting outside — and that is a habit you can teach the rest of the team in one briefing. Used this way it is a training report. Used as a league table, it is mostly a way to lose good staff.

The decision it drives: what goes into your next shift briefing, and who is worth pairing with a new starter.

How the five fit together

Individually each report answers a narrow question. Read in one sitting, they cover the four things that decide whether a café makes money: when you are open versus when people come, what you sell, what leaks, and what it costs you to get paid. Slot them into the same weekly hour as your stock count and food cost — the weekly cost-control routine sets out the rest of that hour.

Two rules make the difference between a habit and a hobby. Look at the same reports on the same day, so you are comparing this week against your own last six rather than against an impression. And leave every session with one decision written down, even a small one. A report you read and did nothing about cost you the ten minutes and bought nothing.

Where MidaOne fits

All five of these come out of the same records your till is already creating, so the question is only whether your system will show them to you without an export. MidaOne reports on sales by hour and by day, by item and by category, by employee and by payment method, alongside a summary carrying cost of goods, gross margin, expenses, waste and net profit — and a waste breakdown by item. Because the till, stock and accounting are one system rather than three, the sales side and the stock side of the same week come from one record instead of two you have to reconcile. Shift closes show cash expected against cash counted, so the variance is sitting there rather than waiting to be reconstructed.

Frequently asked questions

None of this needs a data analyst or a spreadsheet you maintain in the evenings. It needs ten minutes, the same slot every week, and the discipline to write down one thing you are going to change before you close the laptop. The till has been collecting all of this since the day you switched it on. The only question is whether anyone reads it while it is still worth acting on.