Nowadays, every restaurant or bar has its own digital POS (point of sale) system. Whether it be Micros, Breadcrumb, or any other of hundreds, chances are you’re using it to record all of your sales. For example, every time someone orders a Bud Light, your bartender enters it into the bar inventory system before serving them their desired beverage. Periodically, you will run a report from that POS system that is known by many names: PMIX (product mix report), item-level sales, etc.
This report will break down the performance in sales on each item you carry. The numbers from the report are fundamentally used as a health check for your bar or restaurant program. But what metrics are you really looking at? And how often should you be checking them? Let’s get into it.
While the actual format and output of your report will vary widely depending on your actual POS system, the most common item-by-item numbers that a PMIX report should contain include:
Newer, cloud-based POS systems will often offer viewable reports within the software itself. In contrast, many older systems like Micros or Aloha will force you to export the report, often in an inflexible and limited format such as a PDF.
Some systems can get quite extensive in their reporting. Breadcrumb, for example, offers sales data specific to each individual bartender or server.
Some systems can also provide the cost of goods sold on every product, though this is rare. However, it can be a huge pain to manually enter in the cost of each product into a POS system. In order to determine your individual costs, you’ll usually have to do the math yourself or look to bar inventory software to help you track it.
Most commonly, PMIX reports are run for either weekly or monthly time periods. But this frequency can vary depending on the size and nature of your bar and its program.
For example, smaller bars will often to sparse out their reports to monthly intervals, so they can gather a larger pool of data and prevent overreacting to temporary shifts in performance. In contrast, larger bars that innately have more data often run reports weekly in order to more precisely track performance and quickly identify shifts in sales trends.
Analyzing your PMIX reports can help you identify your best and worst selling products. This will help you make critical decisions around your menu offerings, like what to feature on happy hour specials, or what to include in a cocktail recipe.
You can also utilize your reports to gain deeper program knowledge, like identifying product variance and setting inventory pars for ordering product.
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