Sales Tracking By Order Size - Some Deep Thinking!

A caterer sells an incredible number of different product lines. Each one has different joys and problems associated with them. For example, a simple box lunch has different “manufacturing” requirements than a cocktail party. For that matter, a simple box lunch has a different impact on the business when it is for a group of 200 instead of for 20.

Speak with your accountant, or a selected member of your team, and begin to keep track on what you are selling by product line and order size. You will be amazed by what you learn. It will bring you much closer to both your food and labor costs and increased profitability because it may show you what you need to consider removing from your product lines or what you need to do about your minimum purchase policy.

Examples of Product Lines:

V.I.P. Box Lunches • Regular Box Lunches • V.I.P. Cold Buffets • Regular Cold Buffets • Self-Serve Breakfast • Full-Serve Breakfast • Cocktail Events • Weddings • Bar Mitzvahs • Picnics • Plated Dinners • Dinner Buffets

Notice, that if your company sells more than one kind of box lunch, then these are different product lines and need to be tracked separately.

As to size of order, I suggests that, in the beginning, you break your tracking down into groups of ten till you get over 100 and then group by 50 guests. For example, track each product line sold to clients in ascending groups of ten i.e., 10 to 19, 20 to 29, 30 to 39, ... and so on up to 100. After 100 track by groups of 50. You track sales by simply making a mark in the correct column. A box lunch for 26 guests would be marked in the column 20 to 29. When your tracking for a past month is down on paper (or excel spreadsheet), you can see the totals for each column.

After you’ve finished your tabulations, you will be able to see amazing ratios between what you are selling and your food and labor costs in the kitchen.

Be particularly aware of the following ratio:

Product line success = ratio of product line unit sales to monthly sales volume. In other words, how much of the company’s energies were used to create what percentage of the volume. Next, you will wish to review each product line breakdown to see what size orders are making up the total number of unit sales.

You may find such ratios as – only 12% of your monthly sales volume results from 55% of your labor costs in the kitchen – which is not a good thing! Or, you might find that simply by raising your minimums for certain product lines, you will increase your profit and lessen wasted labor hours in your kitchen.

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