Power BI Sales Dashboard for a Restaurant Chain

A fastly growing restaurant chain based in Chicago hired Scalan Labs to build a Sales BI Dashboard for gaining accurate insights into the overall sales trends of their business. The client wanted a customizable data visualization tool which would showcase restaurant sales data as graphical representations; for better analysis and quick decision-making.

For the project, the Scalans architects zeroed in on Microsoft Power BI – an interactive business intelligence software that helps translate raw data from sources like Excel spreadsheets or .csv files into easily interpretable visual analytics. We designed a simple dashboard for visualizing key sales metrics like top selling food items, profit margin, sales by employees, sales by food category, total sales per hour, day, week and month, etc.

With the aid of Power BI, the datasets were depicted in the form of visual elements like bar diagrams, treemaps, scatter plots, line graphs and bubble charts. These are interactive; they show changes in patterns when inputs are varied. Here’s a retail sample analysis using Power BI.

Special care has been taken not to clutter the UI; for this, appropriate spacing is given between each element and increased font size (for highlighting metrics like total annual revenue), contrasting colors and color gradients are used for enhancing readability.

Platform: Web
Tools:  Custom Visuals, Power BI, Microsoft Azure, SQL Data Warehouse, Visual Studio

After implementing the sales dashboard, the client’s restaurant managers found it very easy to study and deeply understand sales performance; without doing any aggressive calculations, as all the important metrics can be viewed in a single glance on the dashboard. 

Grey areas that needed improvement could be identified and sales could be forecasted according to the available trends. All in all, with the help of the tool, the client could draw strong inferences and make better-informed decisions for boosting business growth.

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-Steve Jobs, Former CEO, Apple.