Covers, spend per head and labour cost for every site, before the lunch rush.

A café group runs on a handful of numbers that change by the hour: how many people came in, what they spent, how many staff were on and what went in the bin. The tills know the first two. The rota lives in a spreadsheet. Waste is written on a clipboard by the back door. By the time anyone adds it up it is Thursday and the week has gone.

Halvard reads every till across every site as the sales happen, reads the rota sheet every hour and turns the waste log into a number. The revenue dashboard shows takings by site and by hour against the same day last week. The ops dashboard shows labour as a share of sales, live, so a manager can send someone on a break when a wet Tuesday goes quiet — not find out at month end.

The numbers managers ask for

• Spend per head by daypart. Breakfast, lunch and the afternoon lull behave differently. Seeing them apart is how menu changes get judged on evidence.
• No-shows with a cost attached. Bookings and cancellations come from your booking tool, and the empty tables are priced at your average spend per head.
• A terminal that goes quiet. If a till has taken no payment for 40 minutes during opening hours, the site manager gets a message. It is nearly always a dropped connection, and nearly always costs a queue.

Typical setup

Three sites with two tills each and a shared booking tool send about 240,000 events a month, inside the Team plan at £39. Groups with more than ten managers who all want their own login usually move to Business for the per-site views and the seats.