Build a Restaurant Dashboard with AI: Covers, Food Cost and Labour

A restaurant dashboard should show this week's covers, food cost and labour by service, not last quarter's totals from the accountant. Tell Mythex which numbers you watch and where they come from, and it builds the dashboard on a real database, reading your POS and booking exports.

Who it's for

Owners and general managers who learn their food cost when the accountant sends the quarterly figures, and who sense that Tuesday lunch is overstaffed but have never seen it on one screen.

What you can build

Covers per service and per weekday
No-show rate by booking channel
Weekly food cost as a share of food sales
Labour cost against sales for each service
Average spend per head and table turns
Wastage cost by reason and by dish

The numbers worth a weekly look

Keep the weekly page short enough to read standing at the pass. Covers by service tell you where the quiet slots are. Food cost percentage, worked out from purchases and stock counts against food sales, should be tracked every week so a supplier price rise shows up before it costs a month of margin. Labour against sales per service shows where the rota is heavy. Average spend per head shows whether upselling and menu changes work.

Covers per service
Food cost percentage, weekly
Labour against sales per service
Spend per head

Compare labour by service, not by week

A weekly labour figure can look fine while hiding the problem: too many people on Tuesday lunch and too few on Saturday night. Splitting labour cost and covers by service, and charting them side by side, usually shows one or two shifts to move. That change improves margin and service on the same night.

Where the data comes from

Most restaurants already have the raw numbers in other places: sales exports from the POS, bookings from the reservation system, purchase invoices and the rota. Ask for CSV imports for each, or a simple form where the manager enters weekly purchases and the stock count. The dashboard does the arithmetic once the data is in one database.

Mistakes to avoid

Do not build forty charts; a page nobody opens changes nothing. Do not mix drinks and food in the cost percentage, because their margins differ completely. And check no-shows by channel before blaming guests in general; the source with the most no-shows is where deposits or reminders belong.

A prompt to start from

Build a dashboard for my restaurant. Import weekly POS sales exports (split food and drink, by service), booking exports with source and no-show status, weekly food purchases and stock counts, and staff hours with pay rates. Show covers per service by weekday, food cost percentage per week, labour cost against sales for each service, average spend per head and no-show rate by booking source.

Questions

Can it read my POS data?

The simplest route is a CSV export from your POS, which you upload weekly. A live connection depends on your POS offering an API and would need to be connected with your own account.

How does it calculate food cost?

Opening stock plus purchases minus closing stock, divided by food sales for the same period. Ask Mythex to build that from your stock counts and purchase entries.

Can I see the dashboard on my phone?

Yes, the published dashboard works in a phone browser. On Pro it can also become an Android and iPhone app that opens your published app.

Can managers at two sites use it?

Yes. Ask for a site field on every record, logins per manager, and a view that compares sites side by side.

Is it free?

The Free plan needs no card and gives daily credits to build and publish. Pro is $25/month and adds a custom domain, code editing, export and GitHub.

Templates to start from

Italian Restaurant Website Template — Filterable menu with dish detail pages
Sales Pipeline CRM Template — Drag-and-drop deals with forecasting
Analytics Dashboard Template — KPI cards, charts, and activity table
Metrics Dashboard Template — Governed metrics and self-serve charts
Budget Dashboard Template — CSV import with variance analytics
Customer Health Dashboard Template — Churn scoring with explainable charts
Account Health Dashboard Template — Renewal view with risk scores
Sales Attribution Dashboard Template — Multi-model revenue attribution