Unifying Your Food Spend Data with ezCater Reporting

Do you know how much your company is spending on food each month? With 19% of expenses commonly misreported, according to GBTA, and catering costs frequently buried in other departmental spending, visibility into your company’s food spend is a game of hide and seek. Without insight into your food spend, steps that are taken to manage your budget are based on guesswork. So, how can you gain visibility into your business’ food spend to ultimately control your budget?

With ezCater, your employees gain a simpler, stress-free process to order business catering, but it also provides you with the insight you need to control your food spend without sifting through endless expense reports. As your employees place orders through your company’s ezCater account the platform tracks each order, so you capture data on spend and increase your visibility. As a Corporate Admin, you have access to overview metrics, user reports, order reports, and an Account Strategist to support reporting customization, so you can pull reporting on specific orders and users. Identify ways to optimize your spend by analyzing granular order level data or high-level trends in company spending, then take your learnings to control your food spend.

ezCater Corporate Home Page Metrics

Your Corporate Admin home page shows high-level metrics on spend, orders, users, policies, and payment for your organization. Consider this your 5,000-foot view. See what your annual spend is to date, how many scheduled orders you currently have, and how many orders you have completed this year. If you’re curious about how many departments are using ezCater, or how many users you have, you can see that here as well.

Next to these high-level numbers are two trendline graphs that visualize your total spend and active users within the past 12 months. If you’re looking to get more into your food spend than a trendline, you can export reports from your reporting tab.

ezCater Reports

Unifying your food spend data is only the start. Order-based reports and user-based reports can be created and exported from your reporting tab to give you a holistic view into your food spend.

Curious to see where your employees are ordering from? What are they spending on tips? An order report will reveal your food spend on an individual order level. See who placed the order, each order total, food total, the delivery amount, tip amount, tax, headcount and specifics about the event. Check on your company’s weekly Tuesday lunch order to see if you’re on track with HR’s budget or if you need to change the weekly budget. After exporting your data, use the .csv file to plot event time against food total, or pivot data to view caterers with the lowest price per head average.

If you would rather view your food spend by a user, a user report shows how many orders each ezCater user within your company placed in your selected time period, what they spent, and their price per head. Look into what your sales team spent in February when they were on the road and analyze the value of the spend. You can also gain visibility into users’ ezRewards habits by viewing their earned ezRewards points, ezRewards points put towards a gift card or those put towards food.

If you provide ezCater with users’ departments, each user can be associated with their respective department to help you analyze department spend through additional fields and filters. Need a billing department, cost center, or building code to be associated with a report? Looking to match your invoice fields? Custom fields and reference codes can be added to fit your needs and streamline your processes as well.

Using ezCater Reporting

With your food spend aggregated in one location, your ability to identify trends and manage your budget is simplified. With insight into your spend, you can add policies around total order size, price per head, tip, or budget per month. But, there’s more you can do than tracking your food spend and adding parameters to manage company spend. Gain further control of your budget and business with any of the below analyses of your food spend:

• Manage regulatory compliance by tracking price per head
• Track monthly food totals per department to compare spending and manage department budgets
• Gain insight into tipping totals and over-tipping
• Compare department high performers with trends in their food spend to see correlations between performance in meetings and food spend to create best practices
• Forecast future food spend based on past spend
• Predict and budget for new hires food spend based on existing users spend