Advanced Insights 2.0 is currently available to Lightspeed Restaurant customers in Europe. To get access to this feature, contact your Sales Account Manager or Lightspeed Sales. For Lightspeed Restaurant customers in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, please visit our Advanced Insights page.
Visit Advanced Insight’s Menu Reports to learn which menu items are popular with your guests. You can compare item sales between shifts, view an item’s recent sales history, or use these insights to help develop new items for your menu and refine your offerings.
Accessing the Menu Reports
Your menu data is organized into two reports for granular insights: Item popularity and Magic Menu Quadrant.
Menu reports
- Item popularity: Discover your most popular menu items. You can sort by the number of sales or the total value of sales. You can also filter by group so you can see which specific drinks or meals are selling well compared to the others.
- Magic menu quadrant: Discover how your menu items are selling based on four categories: Hidden Gems, One Hit Wonders, Underperformers, and Greatest Hits.
The Item popularity report displays the popularity of your menu items and can be filtered by these methods, as well as by Accounting groups.
- Login to Back Office with your Lightspeed credentials.
- Navigate to Advanced Insights > Open Advanced Insights.
- In the sidebar navigation menu, click Item popularity or Magic menu quadrant.
By default, the report displays data for the last 7 days. To choose a different time frame, click the drop-down in the upper-right corner. For full details on filtering your reports, we give a detailed run-down in Filtering Reports.
Understanding the Item popularity report
The Item popularity report sorts your menu items by most popular to least popular. These items can be filtered by accounting groups. Clicking on an item will bring up the Staff Scorecard with more details.
Understanding the Scorecard
Use the Scorecard popup to determine what time and day an item sells best, and which servers are selling that item. This information can help you determine employee schedules and the best times to offer specials or clear out inventory.
The detailed information always displays the Default price, but only users who have entered stock information in the Back Office will see data in Unit cost and Profit. To learn how to enter Unit cost, refer to our page on Stock management.
For a breakdown of each graph in the Scorecard, view the chart below.
Scorecard graphs
- Best day sold: Displays a breakdown of units sold of this item per day, over an average of three months.
- Best time sold: Displays a breakdown of units sold of this item per time of day, over an average of three months.
- Top servers: Displays a breakdown of units sold of this item per server, over an average of three months. Also displays a calculation of the average amount sold by all servers.
Understanding the Magic menu quadrant
The Magic menu quadrant organizes your items into four categories: Hidden Gems, Greatest Hits, Underperformers, and One Hit Wonders, to give you comprehensive insight into an item’s performance over the last 12 months.
The four categories are measured by retention (the share of customers who return after ordering a menu item) and popularity (the total number of times a menu item is ordered at your restaurant). Click Show Names in the top right to display item names on the scatter graph. You can also click on any quadrant to zoom in on it.
Magic menu quadrants
- Hidden Gems: Low popularity, high retention rate. These items are popular with a few customers but inspire guests to return to your restaurant. Consider refining their menu description or promoting them.
- One Hit Wonders: High popularity, low retention rate. Guests often order this item, but they don’t return after ordering it. This metric might indicate that an item seems appealing on the menu but needs improvement in its execution.
- Underperformers: Low popularity, low retention rate. These items are not popular with your customers. When they do sell, customers don’t return for more. These are items you might want to improve or remove from your menu altogether.
- Greatest Hits: High popularity, high retention rate. Customers frequently order these items and return for more. Try highlighting these options on your menu.
Understanding Retention Value
Magic Menu Quadrant allows you to filter by different Retention values: Repeat visits and Same items ordered. Click the drop-down in the top right next to Show Names to select your filter.
Repeat visits allows you to see customers who ordered an item on a first visit, and then returned for a subsequent visit. These customers may not order the same item again but likely enjoyed their meal enough to want to return.
Same items ordered allows you to see customers who ordered an item on a first visit, and continue to order the same item on subsequent visits. These customers are likely to make steady visits, though may not expand past their favorite items.
Item Pop-up Card
Hover over a dot to view a pop-up card item's name and information, including number of units sold, retention rate, and rank within its Accounting group.
Magic Menu Quadrant Scorecard
You can click on any dot to display the Item's Scorecard. The Scorecard is identical to the Item Scorecard from the Item popularity dashboard.
What's next?
Menu Management
Manage your items, accounting groups, production instructions, menus, and price lists.
Learn more