As taprooms are closing out 2023, what better time to look back at customer traffic patterns for the year?

Once a leadership team understands the previous year’s traffic patterns, they can develop smarter strategies and actions to both modify the patterns or make sure they are planning their operations and people accordingly... Have enough staff and supplies to keep customers happy but not too much to drive up costs and eat into profitability.

A simple dashboard can be very effective at visualizing the mass amounts of data that a taproom can produce. In this one we can see patterns at all levels of the calendar: month, day of week, individual day, and hour or day. This is great info for future planning.

In our example, this simple dashboard helps provide several different insights:

1. Summer months are the busiest for this brewery. Jun-Aug make up almost 1/3 of customer visits.

2. Thu, Fri, and Sat are generally the busiest days of the week.

3. All of the busiest days of the year were Sat or Sun and often around a holiday weekend.

4. In general, the taproom is busiest late afternoon and early evening. Sat from 2pm to 4pm is the busiest window of time, while Thu night (following Trivia) has the highest number of tabs processed.


That’s a lot of good info with just a brief look at the dashboard. And while some of this would be self-evident by people that work in the taproom on a daily basis, this will help reinforce what they are observing and will provide additional insights.

This also helps set a visible baseline for performance as we move into the new year, a taproom team can now easily track how customer traffic compares to last year and how their strategies are changing the patterns.

While nobody can deny that this is great info, it can be very difficult to get to directly from the brewery point of sale system. And even if the team is strong in excel, extracting all of the POS data and trying to analyze in excel can be very time consuming and cumbersome. Luckily, modern analytics systems handle all this data work automatically so the team can spend their time analyzing the results and developing future strategies and actions.