Your Monday location meeting in two minutes
The Monday meeting with your location managers usually starts with someone building the slide. Export last week's sales from the POS per location, labor from the scheduling app, food cost from the costing sheet, paste it all into one spreadsheet, add a column for last week, and color the cells. By the time it's ready, half the meeting is gone, and nobody remembers whether the labor figure includes the salaried manager.
If your locations run on Mays, the numbers are already side by side. Your AI app can lay them out and say what changed.
Part of our series Run your restaurant with your AI: one real situation per post, with the words you type and what happens in Mays. The prompts and results are illustrative examples.
What the owner types
"Rank my locations for last week: sales, labor %, sales per labor hour, food cost and no-shows. Then compare last week with the week before and with the same week last year, by location. What should I ask each manager about?"
What the AI does in Mays
Two read-only questions:
1. Locations side by side. For one period (here, last week; up to 92 days, each location on its own calendar), Mays returns every location you can see with each figure, its rank (1 is best: highest sales, lowest labor %, fewest no-shows), how far it is from the median, and per figure the median, the combined total and the best and worst location. The figures:
- net sales, orders and average ticket (from your POS orders);
- clocked labor hours and sales per labor hour;
- labor cost and labor % (only with pay access);
- theoretical food cost and %, and prime cost and % (with Insights and pay);
- no-shows and late arrivals;
- each location's top items, if you ask for them.
2. Period against period. For the same figures, Mays compares two ranges, combined and per location: the week before (the default), the same week last year (52 weeks earlier, so Monday lines up with Monday), or any two date ranges you name. Each figure comes with the difference and the % change. It can add item sales too: the top items with their change, and the biggest movers.
When Mays has no data for one side, because the POS was connected after that week or nobody clocked in, that figure comes back empty with a note, instead of a drop to zero. Totals compare only locations with data in both ranges.
What you see
The AI writes the meeting brief, for example (illustrative):
"Last week: Riverside ranked first on sales ($21,300) and sales per labor hour ($71); Midtown had the best labor % (26.8%) but the most no-shows (4). Against the week before, Midtown's sales were down 6% while labor hours were flat. Against the same week last year, both are up, but Midtown's food cost is 2.1 points higher. Ask Midtown about the no-shows and whether the schedule followed the dip in sales; ask Riverside what drove the iced drinks, which were the biggest mover."
The suggested questions are the AI's reading of the numbers. The numbers themselves come from Mays.
Run the meeting from it
Share the brief before the meeting, or open the chat on the screen and ask follow-ups as they come up:
- "Why is labor higher at Midtown than last week? Show it by day."
- "Which items moved the most at Riverside?"
- "Is Midtown's labor target this week realistic against the forecast?"
Every answer comes from the same data, so nobody is arguing about whose spreadsheet is right.
What it replaces
Before | With Mays connected to your AI |
|---|---|
Export from the POS, the scheduling app and the costing sheet | One source: Mays |
Paste into a spreadsheet, add last week by hand | Week-over-week and year-over-year in one question |
Work out ranks and the "average store" | Ranks and medians come back with the numbers |
A zero that's really "no data" | Missing data is named, not shown as zero |
Who can ask
Anyone who can see the dashboard in Mays, for the locations they can see; a location manager compares only their own. Dollar labor figures and prime cost need pay access and a connection that includes pay; food cost and prime cost need Insights. This is reading only, so no actions setting is needed.
What Mays doesn't do here
- No comps and voids by employee. The POS sync doesn't include who rang them.
- No food cost from inventory counts. Food cost here is theoretical (from recipes), because counts store quantities, not values.
- It doesn't add hours across locations for overtime. Each location is measured on its own.
If you'd rather run the review from a page, our weekly check for multi-location owners is a template you can print.
Try it next Monday
- Connect Mays to ChatGPT, Claude or Grok: mays.app/ai (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok). Connect Mays to ChatGPT, Claude or Grok explains what it can see.
- Ask for the ranking and the comparison in one message.
- Bring the questions, not the spreadsheet.
Try Mays free for 30 days, with no credit card, and connect it to the AI you already use.