What it is
What is franchise analytics?
The term means two different things, and most of what you find searching it is the other one. For someone buying a franchise it means unit economics, average unit volume by brand, initial investment and payback period.
For an operator it means reporting and forecasting across a group of restaurants you already own or operate — daily sales, labor, food cost, third-party delivery, a consolidated P&L and a forward look, pulled from the systems you already run and delivered on a schedule. The unit of analysis is the store-day and the store-period, not the deal. The long version is here.
What does above-store reporting mean?
Above-store reporting is reporting built for the people who do not work in one restaurant. A general manager gets today's numbers for their building from the building's own systems. Everyone above them — district manager, director, COO, owner — needs those same numbers for many buildings at once, on the same definitions and the same clock, arranged so the outliers are obvious without opening each store one at a time.
Below store is what happens inside the four walls. Above store is what happens across them. More on who reads it and what each altitude needs.
Who is this built for?
Restaurant groups running roughly 20 to 150 locations, where there are more people who need numbers than there are people who will remember to log in and get them.
Below that a spreadsheet or a dashboard is usually enough, and we will say so on the call rather than after you have signed something. The crossover depends more on how many district managers you have than on the store count.
What it does
What actually arrives, and when?
Daily sales and labor every morning, before the first shift. Actual against scheduled labor every morning. Food cost variance weekly and at period close. A schedule review before each schedule is published, while it can still be edited. A sales and labor forecast weekly. A consolidated P&L and a full report pack at period close.
Each recipient gets the version scoped to their own stores — a general manager gets one restaurant, a district manager gets theirs, an owner gets the group. There is a site you can log into, and the design assumption is that you never have to. Why that distinction matters.
Does it run on 13 periods, or only calendar months?
Your calendar. 13 periods of four weeks, 4-4-5, or calendar months if that is genuinely what you use.
It is set once and applied everywhere, so sales, labor, food cost and the P&L all close on the same dates. This sounds like a detail and is not: two reports using two different date ranges, both correct, is the single most common source of “these numbers disagree” in a multi-unit group.
What happens when a store's data does not come through overnight?
The report says so. A location that did not report is flagged as missing rather than counted as zero, and a source system that was down produces an alert rather than a quiet gap.
This is worth asking any vendor, because the common failure is the silent one: a zero averaged into a group total looks like a bad day rather than a missing feed, and somebody acts on it.
Can my analyst get the data out?
Yes. There is an API and the reference is published at /docs/api. If you have someone who wants the numbers in a warehouse or a model of their own, that is a supported way to work rather than something to be argued about.
How it works
Do I have to replace my point-of-sale, payroll, inventory or accounting system?
No. Everything stays exactly where it is. This reads from the systems you already run and produces the operating view on top of them.
It is not an accounting platform and it does not own your ledger — your accountant keeps closing the books the way they do now. Which specific systems get connected is worked out in discovery, because the answer depends on what you have and how it is configured.
Do you need my point-of-sale password?
No. We do not ask for or hold your point-of-sale credentials, we open no tunnel into your environment, and we install nothing on your systems.
How data access is arranged, scoped and stored is set out in the security documentation and covered directly in discovery rather than assumed. It is usually the second question a COO asks, and it should be.
Getting started
How long does setup take?
Under a week from your first data feed to your first full period of reporting. That is the honest number and we are not going to dress it up.
Most of that week is waiting on access to be arranged rather than work on your side. Expect to spend a couple of hours confirming your store list, your period calendar, your labor and food cost targets, and who receives what. If your particular setup makes it longer, we will tell you during discovery rather than after.
How does pricing work?
We do not publish a price, because what it costs depends on how many locations you run, how many brands, and what has to be connected.
The number comes out of the first conversation rather than off a page — and you will have it in that conversation, not three meetings later.
Is there a demo or a free trial?
Not a self-serve sandbox. A demo environment full of invented restaurants tells you very little about whether the reporting would work for your group, and filling one in is not a good use of your evening.
The useful version is twenty minutes on what you run today, what your period calendar looks like, and which reports are arriving too late to act on. Some of the time the answer is that you do not need us yet, and that is a fine outcome for a twenty-minute call.
Ask something that is not here
Tell us how many locations, how many brands, and what Monday morning currently looks like. That is enough to work out whether there is anything here for you.
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