How to Create a Restaurant Dashboard in Looker with AI

Managing a restaurant involves juggling various tasks such as sales, inventory, staff schedules, and customer feedback. All that data often lives in separate systems, making it difficult to get a full picture. A dedicated dashboard can consolidate everything into one place. This guide will walk you through creating a powerful restaurant dashboard using Looker (now part of Google Cloud) and its built-in AI features.

First, What’s the Point of a Dashboard?

Before diving into building a dashboard, it's essential to understand why it's worth the effort. It’s not about creating pretty charts for the sake of it. A well-designed restaurant dashboard transforms raw data from your daily operations into clear, actionable insights, providing a command center for your business.

Consider the daily questions you face:

• Are we staffed correctly for the dinner rush tonight?

• Which menu items are driving profits versus just selling a lot?

• Is that new lunch special actually bringing in more customers?

• How much food are we wasting, and can we reduce it?

A dashboard helps you answer these questions quickly and confidently. It gives you:

• Real-time Visibility: Track sales and labor costs as they happen, not at the end of the month. See your performance hour by hour to make immediate adjustments.

• Better Inventory Control: Monitor item sales to predict ingredient needs more accurately, reducing costly food waste and preventing a shortage of your most popular dishes.

• Optimized Staffing: Analyze traffic patterns to schedule more staff during genuine peak hours and cut back during lulls, helping you control your biggest operational expense: labor.

• Deeper Customer Understanding: Learn which dishes your regulars love, how average check sizes vary by daypart, and how dine-in, takeout, and delivery channels compare.

Step 1: Get Your Data Sources Organized

Your dashboard is only as good as the data fueling it. For most restaurants, this data is scattered across several platforms. The first and most critical step is to identify and connect these sources so Looker can access them.

Key Data Sources for Any Restaurant

Your tech stack probably includes several of these essential systems:

• Point of Sale (POS) System: This is a goldmine. Your POS (like Toast, Square, Lightspeed, or Revel) holds transaction-level details: every menu item sold, timestamps, order types (dine-in, takeout, delivery), payment methods, and tips.

• Inventory Management Software: Platforms like MarketMan or Orca track inventory levels, monitor food costs, and manage supplier orders. Integrating this helps you calculate your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) with precision.

• Restaurant Reservation System: If you use OpenTable, Resy, or a similar service, you have data on bookings, party sizes, reservation times, and no-shows. This is invaluable for forecasting and understanding demand.

• Employee Scheduling & Payroll: Software like 7shifts or Homebase contains labor costs, hours worked per employee, and staffing levels. It’s essential for calculating your labor cost percentage.

• Online Ordering & Delivery Platforms: Systems like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Tock track sales coming through third-party channels, along with their associated fees and customer data.

• Customer Feedback Platforms: Data from Yelp, Google Reviews, and internal surveys can be used for sentiment analysis to track customer satisfaction over time.

Connecting Data to Looker

Connecting these sources directly into Looker often requires an intermediary step. Looker works best when it's connected to a central data warehouse, like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, or Amazon Redshift. Your raw data from the platforms listed above gets copied into this warehouse, creating a single source of truth.

Setting this up can be a technical project. You might use tools called ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines to automate the movement of data from your POS, scheduling software, and other apps into the warehouse. While this requires some initial setup, it’s what enables Looker to analyze all your restaurant information in one unified environment.

Step 2: Define and Build Your Core KPIs

With your data flowing into one place, you can start building the actual dashboard. The temptation is to track everything, but this can lead to a cluttered view that’s impossible to read. The best dashboards focus on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that truly matter for running a successful restaurant. Let’s break them down by category.

Sales Performance Metrics

These are the North Star metrics that tell you about the financial health and growth of your business.

• Total Sales: The top-line revenue number. Visualize this as a trend over time — daily, weekly, and monthly — to spot patterns.

• Average Check Size: Calculated as "Total Revenue / Number of Customers." This shows you the average spend per guest. If it’s rising, your upselling efforts are paying off.

• Sales by Order Type: A pie chart or bar graph showing sales from Dine-In vs. Takeout vs. Delivery. This is critical for understanding where your revenue is coming from and where to focus marketing efforts.

• Sales per Hour: A bar chart that shows sales for each hour you’re open. This is your go-to visual for optimizing staffing and promotions.

• Top 10 Menu Items (by Revenue and Quantity): Identify your “stars” (popular and profitable) and your “dogs” (unpopular and unprofitable). A simple table or bar chart works perfectly here.

Operational Efficiency Metrics

These KPIs help you understand how efficiently your restaurant is operating and where you can tighten up to improve profits.

• Table Turnover Rate: Calculated as "Number of Parties Served / Number of Tables." A higher rate means you’re serving more guests and maximizing your space, especially during peak hours.

• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): The direct cost of all ingredients used. Typically tracked over time as a percentage of total sales. A sudden spike might indicate supplier price increases or food waste.

• Labor Cost Percentage: Calculated as "Total Labor Cost / Total Sales." Along with COGS, this is one of your biggest expenses. Monitoring it daily helps you prevent overstaffing.

Customer Insights Metrics

These metrics focus on understanding who your customers are and what they want.

• New vs. Returning Customers: If your POS tracks customer data, you can see how many guests are first-timers versus loyal regulars. This helps you gauge the effectiveness of loyalty programs.

• Reservations vs. Walk-ins: Shows you how much business comes from planned visits versus spontaneous ones.

• Online Ratings Over Time: A line chart tracking your average rating on platforms like Yelp or Google. This serves as a high-level gauge of customer satisfaction.

Step 3: Bringing Your Dashboard to Life with Visualizations

Numbers in a spreadsheet are useful, but well-designed visualizations make an impact. Clean layouts and the right chart types help people understand the data at a glance.

In Looker, you build your dashboard by adding "tiles," where each tile is a visual representation of a specific KPI.

Here are some go-to chart styles for a restaurant dashboard:

• Trend Lines: Perfect for tracking metrics over time, like daily sales or weekly labor costs. They make it easy to spot upward or downward trends.

• Bar Charts: Great for comparing different categories. Use them to show sales by menu category (appetizers, entrees, desserts) or to compare performance in your different locations.

• Pie or Donut Charts: Use these to show proportions or parts of a whole. A classic example is a chart visualizing the percentage of sales from each order type (dine-in, delivery, takeout).

• Scorecard or Single-Value Tiles: For your most important, high-level number, like today's total revenue, use a large, single-number display. This gives you an immediate status check. Keep your KPIs front-and-center.

• Tables: When you need to show fine-grained detail, like listing out your top-selling items along with their quantity and revenue. Tables provide this clear, organized view.

Take advantage of Looker's interactive features. Adding filters for date range, location, and meal period allows you and your team to slice and dice the data without needing to create new reports. Looker's "drill-down" capability is also powerful, you could click on the "Lunch" segment in a sales chart to automatically see a detailed breakdown of all menu items sold during that period.

Step 4: Supercharge Your Dashboard with Looker AI

This is where things get truly exciting. Looker's integration with Google’s AI technology moves you from simply viewing data to conversing with it and getting proactive insights. This means you are creating a better business in multiple ways through AI-powered features.

Here’s how you can leverage Looker's AI features:

Ask Plain-English Questions

Modern BI tools are moving beyond drag-and-drop interfaces toward natural language questions. Google's Looker lets you ask questions of your data just like you would a person. For a busy restaurant manager, this is a game-changer. Instead of navigating filters or asking your data analysts for help, your team members can just ask the AI.

• “What was my busiest hour last Saturday?”

• “Compare wine sales in July versus August.”

• “Show me the average check size for parties of four.”

This empowers your entire team, from the head chef to the general manager, to get answers instantly without needing technical know-how. This ensures that everyone can make data-driven decisions to deliver the best customer experience.

Anomaly Detection and Forecasting

Looker can be configured to automatically spot unusual patterns in your data that a human might miss. For example, it could flag:

• An unusual increase in spoiled inventory, suggesting a faulty refrigerator or an ordering issue.

• Lower-than-average liquor sales on a Friday night, which might indicate a new bartender needs more upselling training.

• A reservation no-show rate that's higher than the historical average, perhaps prompting a change to your confirmation process to help with no-shows.

Final Thoughts

Building a restaurant dashboard in Looker turns your complex operational data into your greatest asset. By connecting everything from your POS system to your scheduling software into one central hub, you can move from reactive problem-solving to proactive, data-informed strategy that drives higher revenue and happier customers.

At Graphed, we simplify the process even more. Just connect your data sources, and you can start building dashboards instantly. This eliminates the technical hurdles so you can focus on gaining insights and making smart decisions that benefit your business. In this way, you save yourself time and focus more on running your restaurant efficiently.