Insights: Your Books, Read Every Day

The books already know

Most of what goes wrong in a restaurant shows up in the books weeks before anyone notices it on the floor.

A supplier nudges the price of oil up by a few cents every delivery. Discounts creep from 2 % to 6 % of takings. A Tuesday comes in at half its usual size. Each one is written down the day it happens, and each one is easy to miss when you are busy running the place.

Insights reads those records for you every day and raises the ones that matter. It turns the bookkeeping you already do into answers about your business.

What it watches

Every check compares your business with its own history, not with someone else’s average.

• Buying too often — an item bought more often than you usually buy it, more bought than used, and a purchase that looks entered twice.
• Sudden cost changes — a vendor’s unit price or monthly spend moving away from its own history, an expense category that jumps, and food cost drifting from its usual share of sales.
• Sudden income changes — a day’s takings far from the same weekday’s normal, up or down, days with no sales at all, and a shift in how customers pay.
• Profit leakage — discounts and voids above your normal, waste trending up, the same stock shortfall count after count, dishes sold below cost, delivery deductions creeping up, and QR money still sitting in Cash on Hand with no bank receipt.
• Books that need attention — days with money in and out that nobody has reconciled yet, so the other checks have honest numbers to work from.

An alert you can check

Every alert answers the same questions, so you never have to take it on faith.

• What happened — a plain headline, such as “Cooking oil bought more often than usual”.
• Against what — the normal it was compared with, in words: “you usually buy it every 7 days”.
• The evidence — the purchases, sales or counts that triggered it, each linking to the record.
• Why it was flagged — the rule and the thresholds it was judged on, so you can see exactly where the line was.
• What you can do — open the records, acknowledge it, dismiss it for 30 days, or mark it useful or not useful.

An alert that cannot show all of this is not sent.

Built to be trusted

A false alarm costs trust, so Insights is deliberately conservative.

• Rules, not guesses — no AI and no black box. Every check is a baseline from your own books, a threshold and a minimum number of examples, and every alert shows its numbers.
• Two conditions and a money floor — a change has to be large in percentage and unusual for that history, and worth enough money to matter. 25 % of $4 is not news.
• Silence before guessing — a check with too little history skips rather than guesses, so a new workspace starts quiet.
• A few bright lines — selling below cost, a possible duplicate purchase, a week with no sales and QR money unsettled for over 7 days are always flagged, whatever the history.
• Days you were closed — tell it you were closed — from Insights settings or straight from a “no sales” alert — and those days are never judged.
• Yours to tune — owners and managers can switch each check off or adjust its thresholds in Insights settings. The system never changes them by itself.

Your vendors and your dishes

The same facts power two more views.

• Vendor scorecard — each vendor’s share of your spend, twelve months of spending, every item’s latest price against its usual range, and the vendor’s alerts.
• Item profitability — every dish with a recipe ranked by what it really contributes, with the ingredients driving its cost and what its margin would be if prices returned to normal.
• On Telegram — turn on Insights alerts in Settings → Notifications and the important ones arrive in your BasilBook chat, a few a day at most, so the group never floods.
• In the mobile app — Insights is under More → Finance on the phone and beside the Dashboard on iPad: the alerts, their evidence, the settings and item profitability.

Who gets it

Insights is available to every workspace on the Professional plan today.

• Professional — find it as Insights in the sidebar. On Free it is not included.
• The whole team reads it — anyone in the workspace can open alerts and mark them useful. Owners and managers acknowledge, dismiss and tune.
• Read-only on your books — Insights never writes to your ledger, stock or sales. It reads, compares and tells you.