Reports overview
Reports turn your counts, receipts, waste logs, prep and sales into numbers you can act on. Owners and Managers can open every tab. Staff and Viewers can open the Waste tab only, because Staff log the waste that it groups. A link to any other tab shows them a message that the report is not available to their role. See roles and permissions.
Each tab answers one question. Pick the tab from the strip at the top of the page. Under every report, the Learn how this report works link opens the article for that tab.
Every tab and its article
| Tab | The question it answers | Plan | Article |
|---|---|---|---|
| Food Cost | What did food really cost between two counts? | Standard and up | Actual food cost for a period |
| Inventory | What is my stock worth now, and how did that change? | Any plan | Inventory Value report |
| Spending | What did I buy in this period? | Any plan | Spending report |
| Waste | What did I throw away, why, and what did it cost? | Standard and up | Waste report |
| Product | What happened to one product: stock, price, use and waste? | Standard and up | Product report |
| Menu Item | What does one dish cost to make, and what margin does it leave? | Standard and up | Menu Item report |
| Counting | How long do counts take, and who does them? | Standard and up | Counting report |
| Variance | Did I use what my sales and recipes say I used? | Standard and up | Variance report |
| Vendors | Which way to buy a product costs the least? | Standard and up | Vendor price comparison |
| Menu | Which dishes are popular, and which make money? | Standard and up | Menu engineering |
| Sales | How many units did I sell per day, against last year? | Standard and up | Sales report |
| Health | Which counts look wrong against receipts, waste and usage? | Standard and up | Inventory health |
| Alerts | Which alerts fired, and how did each one end? | Any plan | Alert history |
| Group | How do my kitchens compare, side by side? | Pro | Group report |
Some tabs show only when their feature is on for your kitchen. The Group tab shows only when your kitchen is in a restaurant group.
The Food Cost tab follows the same shape as the cost of goods sold lines in IRS Publication 334: inventory at the start, plus purchases, minus inventory at the end. Rinvy takes the start and end from two completed counts and divides the result by net sales.
Which tab opens when I tap Reports?
On the Standard and Pro plans, Reports opens on Food Cost. On the Free plan it opens on Spending, because Food Cost needs Standard. Staff and Viewers land on Waste.
A Free kitchen still sees the paid tabs in the strip. Selecting one shows an upgrade card instead of the report. Inventory, Spending and Alerts work on every plan.
Picking a period
Most tabs have a period selector with This Week, Today, Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days and Custom. This Week starts on Monday. The Sales tab has no Today, because sales from your POS arrive a day later.
Each tab opens on its own default period. Food Cost, Inventory, Menu, Group and Alerts start at Last 30 Days. Food Cost and Inventory read counts, and most kitchens count weekly or less often, so a 7-day period can hold no count at all. The other dated tabs start at Last 7 Days. When you switch tabs, the new tab starts at its own default again.
Four tabs have no period. Product and Menu Item use a picker for one product or one dish. Vendors compares the purchase options you have now, and Health lists the latest findings.
Rules that apply to every report
- Dates use your restaurant's timezone. A day starts and ends at midnight where your kitchen is, not in UTC. You set the timezone in Kitchen Settings. The timezone is a name from the IANA time zone database, such as America/New_York, which also holds the daylight-saving rules for that place.
- Costs come from your receipts. Most reports price a product at the weighted-average cost of this year's receipts, and fall back to the case cost on the product. See how Rinvy calculates product cost.
- Every tab has its own link. The address in your browser names the tab, for example
/reports?type=waste. Copy it to send someone straight to that report. The address does not keep the period you picked, so the other person sees the tab's default period. - On Standard and Pro, Export CSV at the top of the page saves the report as a spreadsheet file. It shows only when the tab has rows. Food Cost, Inventory, Spending, Waste, Counting, Variance, Vendors, Menu and Sales can export. In the iPhone and Android apps, the button opens the share sheet so you can save or send the file.
- A kitchen can hide costs from Staff and Viewers. Staff and Viewers then see quantities on the Waste tab, with no dollars.
- A report is only as good as its inputs. A missing count, receipt or waste log changes the numbers. When a number looks wrong, start with why does my inventory or report look wrong.
Why do two reports show different numbers?
Two reports can price the same stock at different costs, or cover different products. The usual cases:
- Product values stock at the average of every receipt the product ever had. Inventory uses this year's receipts. A product whose price rose this year has a higher value on Inventory.
- Inventory with Include archived on can be higher than the inventory value on the Home dashboard, which always leaves archived products out.
- The Food Cost statement leaves archived products out of the start and end stock by default. Its By product table includes them, because it lists what happened between the two counts.
- Spending adds up receipts by calendar day. Food Cost counts purchases between the moments of its two counts. The same week can show a different purchase total on each tab.
Waste is the exception. The Waste tab, the weekly review email and the Group tab all read the cost saved on each waste line, so they agree.