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The Menu dashboard — what's actually selling, and what to do about it

Every plate and every glass you’ve ever rung up is sitting in one place, sorted by what it did for you. Choose Menu from your data dashboard’s sidebar and months of till receipts become a picture you can read at a glance: your best sellers, your quiet earners, the dishes pulling their weight, and the ones quietly costing you a menu line. This page is for the owner or head chef who wants to stop guessing which dishes to keep, push, reprice, or cut.

What it does

For most kitchens, “how is the menu actually doing?” is a question nobody can answer without an afternoon of spreadsheet work. You know the Tiramisù sells, but how many last December versus this May? Is pizza carrying the whole menu, or is it pasta? Which dishes take up a line and almost never sell? Those answers were locked inside months of till receipts nobody had time to add up.

The Menu page does the adding up for you, every night. It reads your real sales history — up to all of it, not just the last few months — and lays it out as plain-English charts: headline numbers, a trend over time, a category breakdown, a chart that sorts every dish by how well it does, the busiest day of the week, and a searchable list of the entire menu. There’s nothing to set up; you import your history once or just keep using the till, and the page stays current on its own.

Nothing here can be edited. This is a reading room, not a workshop — it mirrors what your till recorded, blended across your old system and new. Because every figure is what genuinely sold, you’re deciding on fact, not forecast. If a number looks wrong, the fix is upstream in the till or the menu, never here.

Food and drink, kept apart

The first thing to set is the All · Food · Beverage switch at the top of the page. It matters more than it looks.

Here’s the problem it solves. A bottle of water might sell three thousand times in six months; a signature pasta might sell three hundred. Put them on the same chart and the water flattens everything — every dish you actually cook gets squashed into one corner, unreadable. Drinks and dishes don’t belong on the same yardstick anyway: a ฿45 water selling by the thousand and a ฿320 pasta selling by the hundred are two different businesses sharing a kitchen.

So look at them separately. Leave the switch on All for the whole-venue picture, and a Food vs Beverage band near the top shows what share of your takings each side brings — tap either card to dive in. Switch to Food and every chart on the page redraws using only dishes; switch to Beverage and it’s only drinks. Each view compares like with like, so the picture finally reads cleanly.

The rule: look at food and drink on their own before you judge any single item. A dish that looks like a poor seller next to bottled water might be a star among other dishes — and the only fair comparison is against its own kind.

The four kinds of dish

The most useful chart on the page sorts every item into one of four kinds, from two simple questions: does it sell a lot? and does it earn well? Cross those two and you get four boxes. Restaurants have used this for decades; the dashboard draws it for you automatically and tells you what each one means.

The kindSells…Earns…What it really isWhat to do
Stara lotwellPopular and profitableProtect it. Feature it, photograph it, never let it slip off the menu.
Plowhorsea lotthinlyThe crowd-pleaser everyone orders but priced too lowNudge the price up a little, or shave the portion cost. Small changes here move real money.
Puzzlea littlewellHigh earner that few people orderReposition it — better name, better photo, higher up the menu. The margin’s there; the attention isn’t.
Doga littlepoorlyFew takers, low marginRework it or retire it. It’s spending a menu line and earning neither money nor footfall.

The chart places each dish left-to-right by how much it sells and bottom-to-top by its price, with a bigger bubble for more total revenue. Two faint lines mark the middle of your menu, so “a lot” and “a little” mean relative to your own dishes, not some outside benchmark. Hover any bubble to read the dish’s name, what it sold, and what it earned — and if one dish vastly outsells the rest, it sits pinned at the right edge with a thin ring rather than stretching the whole chart out of shape.

One honest caveat: today the “earns well” axis uses the menu price, not the true profit after ingredients — because the system doesn’t yet hold a reliable cost for every dish. So read the up-and-down axis as “premium versus cheap” for now. The four kinds still hold; when full ingredient costs land, the same chart sharpens into true profit without you changing how you read it.

How to use it

Start by setting two things: the period (top-right — 24h, 7d, 30d, 90d, 6m, 1y, All; six months is a good default, All reaches back to your very first imported day) and the scope (All, Food, or Beverage). Everything below re-reads itself from those two choices.

Read the headline tiles first for the shape of the period — items sold, revenue, average price per plate, and your top seller. Each tile carries a small up-or-down badge comparing this period against the one before, so you see at a glance whether things are growing. The big Revenue & volume chart underneath shows money and plates together: the purple area is revenue, the blue line is units, and the buckets widen as the range grows — daily for short windows, weekly for months, monthly for a year or more — so the line never turns to noise.

Then drop to the category breakdown — a doughnut of each category’s share beside a table with the detail. Linger on the growth column: each category’s change against the previous period, green when up, red when down. A category sliding quietly downward for three months is exactly what you want to catch here, not at year-end. The stacked Category mix over time below it shows how that balance shifts month to month.

Now read the four-kinds chart for the scope you’re in. Spot your Plowhorses (popular, underpriced) — usually the fastest money — and your Dogs (quiet, cheap) — the menu lines to question. When it sells then breaks units down by day of the week, and All items is a searchable, sortable table of the whole menu: type a dish or category, click any column to sort.

When something catches your eye, click into it. Click a category and you get the same treatment one level down — its trend, its busiest day, its own four-kinds chart, and a sortable table of every dish inside it. Click a single dish — from any list — and you see its whole life: how it’s trended month by month (watch the Tiramisù climb to a December peak and ease off through spring), its busiest day, its best-ever period, how many days it sold at all, and an Open in admin button to go change the price or description. However deep you go, the Food or Beverage view you started in follows you, so stepping back lands you where you were.

Worked example

Maria runs a trattoria and opens the Menu dashboard on a Monday morning, six-month period.

On All, the Food vs Beverage band tells her drinks are 26% of takings and food is 74% — healthy, but she wants to fix the food menu, so she taps Food. The whole page redraws around dishes only.

The four-kinds chart now reads cleanly — no bottled water crushing it. Up in the popular-but-cheap corner she finds her Margherita pizza: 1,180 sold at ฿240, a clear Plowhorse. Everyone orders it; it barely earns. Over in the quiet-but-pricey corner sits the Bistecca Fiorentina: 90 sold at ฿1,200, a Puzzle — the margin’s there, the orders aren’t. Her Spaghetti alla Carbonara sits top-right, popular and well-priced: a Star. And tucked in the bottom-left, the Minestrone: 70 sold at ฿180, a Dog.

She makes three decisions in five minutes. The Margherita Plowhorse goes from ฿240 to ฿260 — twenty baht across 1,180 plates is real money, and at that price nobody flinches. The Bistecca Puzzle gets a better photo and moves to the top of the mains — the margin deserves more eyes. The Minestrone Dog she clicks into: its trend has been flat-to-falling all year, it peaks on no particular day, and it’s the slowest mover in its category. She retires it and gives the menu line to a new dish.

Before she closes the laptop she checks the growth column on the category breakdown. Desserts are down 14% on the previous six months. That’s tomorrow’s question — but she’d never have seen it on a hunch.