Forward bookings and restaurant business planning

1 min read

Forward bookings in simpleERB

In our latest release (15.5.1) we have one feature that we would like to talk about in more depth. This is “Forward Bookings”. It is a simple report but we think it could be very useful to you in your planning.
It allows you to compare your forward bookings for a period on a given date, usually “today”, with your forward bookings for the same period last year, or in previous years.
An example would be:
You are doing your planning for Xmas, what extra staff do you need, how many Xmas crackers to buy etc.
You can now create a report which shows you how many covers you have booked as of today, for the period 01 Dec 18 to 31 Dec 18 compared to the forward bookings you had on this date last year for the period 01 Dec 17 to 31 Dec 17.
So if you see that you only have 85% of last years bookings, then you now know that you probably need to do some extra marketing, create special offers in simpleERB and email them to your customer base.
If however, you see that you are 25% up, then you will need to recruit more staff than you had last year and certainly buy more Xmas crackers!
As a next step you can look at your cash position in the previous period and make informed estimates as to what it will be in the coming period based on the data from this report.
You can get the report here if you are a simpleERB user