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29 de mayo de 2026
Just because a dish sells fast doesn't mean it's profitable. Learn to cross-reference Madisa 3.0's "Top Items" section with a simple formula to uncover your bestsellers' real margin and control your business from anywhere.
Just because your venue is packed and the pace is frantic doesn't always mean your bottom line is where it should be. In the restaurant and retail sectors, there's a very common phenomenon: "false friends." These are those star products or dishes that sell constantly, keeping your team running, but when it comes down to it, they barely leave any profit margin.
To clean up your business accounts, you don't need complex external audits. You can start today using the real sales data already available in your Madisa 3.0 software and applying a simple mathematical rule.
The most common mistake is trying to analyze your entire menu or product offering at once. This usually leads to overwhelm and giving up. To do it efficiently, the focus should be on what actually drives your revenue.
The first step is to access the "Top Items" section of your control panel. Filter by the last 7 or 30 days and select the 5 to 10 products with the highest volume of units sold.
Looking at that list of your top-moving dishes, you now have your roadmap. Those are the products that determine whether your business makes or loses money each week.
You can find the real cost of these key products manually. You just need to sit down for a few minutes with your supplier invoices and apply a basic formula.
First, calculate the Net Sales Price (NSP) for each item on that list, meaning subtracting the VAT:
NSP = Menu Price / 1.10
Next, calculate the approximate Raw Material Cost (RMC) for that dish (the price of the meat, the side dish, oil, etc.). With these two data points, apply the Contribution Margin formula:
Contribution Margin = NSP - RMC
Practical example: If you sell a dish for €15 on the menu, your NSP is €13.63. If you estimate that raw materials cost you €5.50, your actual contribution margin for each dish leaving the kitchen is €8.13.
Once you have the margin for your top 5 best-selling products, compare them with the unit sales list from your software. This is where you'll uncover the "false friends":
High popularity + Low margin: If your best-selling dish yields minimal profit, you're working twice as hard to make half as much. Solution: Review the recipe to optimize waste, find an alternative supplier, or slightly adjust the retail price.
High popularity + High margin: These are your true "Star" products. Solution: Make sure they feature prominently on your physical or digital menu and encourage your team to actively recommend them.
Doing this review and adjustment regularly will allow you to maintain a much healthier business financially without sacrificing customer satisfaction.
Identifying what works and what doesn't in your business shouldn't require spending hours locked in an office checking paper tickets or manually adding up invoices at the end of the month. With our Madisa 3.0 system, all these statistics—total sales, volume by item, category performance, and average check—are always available to you in real time.
Whether you're holding down the fort at the venue in front of the POS, checking the day's performance on the go from your mobile, or planning next month's strategy on your computer from the comfort of home, your business's x-ray goes wherever you go. Because making good decisions is much easier when your numbers are clear, wherever you are.
