You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been. Forecasting is a big part of budgeting, scaling up for labor, purchase allotment and a whole lot of other systems that can make your restaurant an efficient machine of profit. But you can’t forecast your sales if you don’t know what you’ve done in the past. Even if all you can muster is a couple months worth of invoices, payroll reports and some sales figures — mixed together with memory —it’s better than nothing. You must know your history to accurately forecast your future.
By David Scott Petters, The Restaurant Expert.com