The Insight Forecasting feature leverages historical performance data within Insight to predict future reservations, sales, guest counts, and other key metrics—empowering restaurants to make informed, data-driven decisions.
By projecting past trends into the future, it enables proactive planning, early risk identification, and greater operational stability, reducing uncertainty in day-to-day management.
The article covers the following topics:
What Insight Predictions Can Do
How to Enable the Forecasting Feature
Data Requirements for Forecasting
What Insight Predictions Can Do
1. Enable forward-looking planning
Gain visibility into future reservations, sales, and guest counts to improve accuracy in staff scheduling, seating optimization, purchasing, and overall operational planning.
2. Detect trends early
Identify whether performance is projected to increase, remain stable, or decline—allowing you to take timely action based on forward data, not just historical results.
3. Visualize risk scenarios
View not only expected forecasts but also conservative and optimistic ranges. This helps you plan under realistic best- and worst-case scenarios.
4. Reduce manual forecasting effort
Automatically generated forecasts displayed on the dashboard minimize guesswork, reduce manual estimation, and ensure consistent planning across the team.
Enabling The Feature
Follow the steps below to enable the Forecasting feature on an Insight dashboard:
Navigate to the target dashboard & open Edit mode
Open the Insight dashboard where you want to enable Forecasting. Click Edit Element in the upper-right corner of the desired chart.
2. Enable Forecasting
In the element settings panel, toggle the Forecasting option (bottom-left corner) to On, then click Save.
3. Verify Display
Once saved, the Forecasting function will be activated, and forecasted values will be displayed on the corresponding chart.
Each indicator displayed within the Forecasting view is explained in the next section.
Forecasting Metrics
- Forecast Period/ Forecast Horizon: The future time range for which the forecast is generated (i.e., the look-ahead period).
- Lower limit (Conservative Scenario): Represents a conservative estimate, assuming performance declines or conditions worsen.
- Expected Value: The most probable forecasted value, calculated based on historical data patterns and model reliability.
- Upper Limit (Optimistic Scenario): Represents an optimistic estimate, assuming performance improves under favorable conditions.
- Trend: Indicates the overall direction of the forecast compared to the previous comparable period (e.g., increase, stable, decrease).
Data Requirements for Forecasting
The Forecasting feature generates future projections by analyzing and modeling historical performance data.
Because predictions are based on past trends, a minimum volume of historical data is required.
Minimum Data Requirements by Aggregation Level
| Aggregation Level | Minimum Historical Data Required |
|---|---|
| Daily | 18 days |
| Weekly | 17 weeks |
| Monthly | 16 months |
If the required historical data is not available for the selected aggregation level, the forecast cannot be generated.
When enabling the Forecasting feature without sufficient data, the following notification message will be displayed: