Restaurant Analytics
Restaurant End-of-Day Report: What to Check Before You Close
An end-of-day report, often called a Z report, is the record of one business day: what you sold, the tax, tips and service charges on top, what was refunded or cancelled, and how guests paid. Check it every night before you lock up, while the shift is still fresh, so that a missing payment or an odd refund can be explained by the people who were there.
What a Z report is
The name comes from cash registers. An X reading showed the day so far and changed nothing; a Z reading closed the day, printed the totals and started the next day from zero. Today the same idea lives in software: one report per business day that does not move once the day is over.
Treat it as a record, not a dashboard. A dashboard tells you how things are going. A Z report tells you what happened, in a form you can print, file and hand to your bookkeeper. Whether your country requires a particular format or a certified register is a question for your accountant, because the rules differ from place to place.
The numbers to check every night
You do not need to read every line. Read the same few lines, in the same order, every night, and compare them with a normal day of the same kind.
| Line | What it tells you | What to look for |
|---|---|---|
| Sales and order count | How busy the day was | A big gap from the same weekday last week |
| Tax | What you collected for the tax authority | Tax that does not move with sales |
| Tips | What guests added for staff | A day with sales but no tips, or the reverse |
| Service charge | The fixed charge you added to bills, if any | Bills that should carry it and do not |
| Refunds | Money given back after payment | Any refund nobody on shift can explain |
| Cancellations by reason | Orders that never became sales | One reason, one table or one shift that keeps coming up |
| Discounts and promo codes | Sales you gave away on purpose | A code used far more than expected |
| Sales by product | What actually left the kitchen | A dish that sold out early, or did not sell at all |
Refunds and cancellations deserve the most attention. They are the lines where honest mistakes and dishonest ones look the same until someone asks.
Counting the cash drawer
If you take cash, the end-of-day numbers can only tell you what should be in the drawer. Someone still has to count what is in it. A simple routine works for most small restaurants:
- Start each day with the same, known amount of change in the drawer, and write it down.
- At close, count the drawer away from the counter, ideally with a second person present.
- Take away the starting amount. What is left should match the cash payments for the day.
- Write down the difference, even when it is zero, with the date and the names of the people who counted.
- Look into small differences that repeat. A single short day happens; the same gap every Friday is a pattern.
Keep card and other payments apart from cash in this count. Card payments are checked against what your card provider pays out, not against the drawer.
Looking back at yesterday
The nightly check catches problems. A short look back before the next service helps you act on them: what to prep more of, which dish to push or pull, which shift needs another pair of hands. A daily summary email is enough for this. It should cover your own calendar day, from midnight to midnight where you are, and not the server's day somewhere else.
For the longer view, see the restaurant metrics worth tracking every week.
And to turn the by-product lines into menu decisions, read how to identify your best-selling dishes.
End of day with Thmenu
Thmenu has a Z report in the panel for any day you pick, counted in the time zone set for your restaurant in Settings. Until you set one, the Z report uses a default time zone (Europe/Istanbul) and says so at the top of the page, so set yours first. It shows order, paid and cancelled counts, sales, subtotal, tax, tips, service charge and refunds, then sales by product, cancellations by reason and the promo codes used with their discount. You can print it or save it as a PDF. The Z report does not break sales down by payment method, so it gives you no cash total for the drawer count: the cash taken is the sum of the payments recorded as cash at the cashier station.
You can also turn on a daily summary email of the previous full day. It is off until you switch it on in Settings. It is sent once a day at a fixed time for all restaurants. In the Americas that time falls in the evening, so the email about one day may arrive late the following evening rather than the next morning. It covers the previous full day in your restaurant's time zone, or in UTC if no time zone is set, and shows sales, orders, tips, your five best sellers, guest feedback and new reservations. On a day with nothing to report, no email is sent.
At the cashier station in the panel, you record how a table's bill was settled — cash, card or other, as several entries when it came in more than one — and then close the bill. Thmenu does not count your cash drawer or reconcile the till: counting the drawer is the manual step described above.