How to Have Claude Read Last Week's Sales Report and Flag What to Look At

Recipe

For Restaurant Operators

How to Have Claude Read Last Week's Sales Report and Flag What to Look At

An 18-minute Saturday-morning recipe for the operator who'd rather skip Excel.

You're a 3-store operator. Monday morning, last week's sales export is sitting in your inbox. You don't want to open Excel. Drag the PDF into Claude, paste one prompt, wait 15 seconds. You get back the three things worth looking at — worst store, best store, and which numbers smell wrong. 18 minutes, start to finish. No IT, no integration, no vendor logins.

Total time

18 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Makes

One weekly sales read

Tool

Claude or ChatGPT

Ingredients

The prompt

I'm a restaurant operator with 3 stores. This is last week's sales report. Tell me three things — worst store and why, best store and what's worth studying, and which numbers look suspicious enough to warrant a phone call. Use store names. Be specific.

Copy

The method

You're three stores deep. Monday morning. Last week's Toast or Square or whatever-POS export landed in your inbox at 6am. You stare at the seven columns and twenty-one rows and your second coffee hasn't kicked in yet. Two years ago you'd open Excel, pivot the table, sort by week-over-week variance, and start dialing GMs. Today you don't have to. Claude can read the same export in 15 seconds and tell you the three things you'd have found in 25 minutes of Excel, in plain English, with store names. Tested in our own kitchen, used by Expo customers running 8 to 70 locations.

  1. Open Claude. Drag your sales report PDF directly into the chat window. You'll see the file icon appear in the message bar, that confirms Claude has it.
  2. Paste the prompt above. If you have 5 stores, change "3" to "5". If you have 25 stores, change it to 25 and add: Focus on the bottom-quartile stores by week-over-week variance. Same logic, different cohort.
  3. Wait 15 seconds. Read what comes back. Pick the one finding you care most about and ask Claude to dig deeper on just that one. Don't ask about all three, you'll get diluted answers. Pick the one that would matter most if it turned out to be true and follow up only on that one.

On the plate

The good draft

Westgate was down 12% week-over-week on dinner sales; Riverside was up 8% on lunch with the same staffing — worth a call to the Riverside GM to find out what changed. It names your stores and points to specific numbers.

The bad draft

Sales performance shows variance across locations; recommend investigating underperforming sites. Generalities, no store names — it means your report didn't have enough detail. Re-upload with day-of-week or daypart broken out and re-prompt.

Notes from the kitchen

What if my Toast report comes out as a screenshot instead of a CSV?

Claude reads screenshots fine. Drag the screenshot in and it'll OCR the numbers itself. CSV is cleaner, fewer transcription errors, but screenshots work.

Can I use ChatGPT instead of Claude for this?

Yes. Both tools handle the file-upload-plus-prompt pattern identically. ChatGPT's free tier limits file size; if your report is over 10MB, use Claude or upgrade ChatGPT.

What if Claude gets a store name wrong?

Tell it the correct name and ask it to re-read with the right names. Don't restart the chat, Claude remembers the correction for the rest of the conversation.