Guide

How to Find Your Slowest Days and Hours in Square

Every restaurant has slow stretches. The usual advice says Mondays and Tuesdays are the quietest days, and for a lot of restaurants that's true. But your pattern depends on your neighborhood, your hours, and your customers, and guessing wrong means staffing, prepping, and promoting around the wrong days.

Rather see your slowest days and hours on one chart than dig for them? See your restaurant's dashboard free, no card required.

The good news is that Square already records everything you need to find your real slow periods. Here's where to look, how to read it, and where Square's reports stop short.

Start by checking your reporting hours

Before you read any daily numbers, check your reporting hours in the Square Dashboard under Reports, then Settings. The start time you set decides which calendar day each sale counts toward. If you're open past midnight and your reporting day starts at midnight, your late Friday sales will land on Saturday, and both days will look wrong.

Set the start of your reporting day to when you actually open, so each day in your reports matches a real day of business.

Find your slowest days with Sales Summary

Sales Summary is the report that shows your sales by day of the week. In the Square Dashboard, go to Reports, then Sales Summary, and set a date range covering at least eight weeks. One week is too easy to skew with a holiday, an event, or a bad weather day.

Square shows a day-by-day breakdown for your date range and a summary organized by day of the week. That weekly view is the one to study. It shows which days consistently bring in the least, instead of which single day happened to be slow.

Find your slowest hours

Sales Summary can also group sales by hour. The hourly chart shows how much you collected in each hour of the day across your date range, which makes your dead stretches easy to spot, like a mid-afternoon lull or the last hour before close.

The chart shows dollars, not orders. To see how many transactions happened in a given hour, click that hour on the chart.

Look at orders, not just dollars

A slow period can mean two different things. Either fewer customers came in, or the same number came in and spent less. The fixes are different: fewer customers is a traffic problem, while smaller tickets is a menu or upselling problem.

Divide an hour's or a day's sales by its number of transactions to get the average ticket. If a slow day has a normal average ticket but few orders, you need more people in the door. If it has a normal number of orders but small tickets, look at what people are ordering.

Check whether slow days are getting slower with Sales Trends

Sales Trends compares your gross and net sales across days, weeks, and years. Use it to see whether a slow day is holding steady or sliding. A Tuesday that's slow but stable is a scheduling question. A Tuesday that keeps dropping week after week is a warning sign worth acting on.

Sales Trends is only available in the Square Dashboard, not in the point of sale app.

What Square's reports won't show you

Square's reports answer the basic question, but they stop short in a few places owners run into quickly:

You can't isolate one weekday over time. Square won't show you the hourly pattern of every Monday across the last three months as one combined view. Sales Trends compares one period against another, not a weekday against itself.

You can't combine item sales with day of the week. The day of the week view lives in Sales Summary, and it doesn't break down by item or category. If you want to know what sells on your slow days, you'd have to pull Item Sales one day at a time.

There's no average per hour for a given weekday. If you want your typical Saturday morning, you'd have to click through each Saturday and add it up yourself.

The standard workaround is exporting your transactions to a spreadsheet and building those views by hand.

What to do once you know your slow periods

Once your slow days and hours are clear, you can plan around them instead of reacting to them:

Staffing: schedule to the traffic you actually get, not the traffic you remember.
Prep and ordering: prep and order less ahead of known slow days to cut waste.
Hours: if an opening or closing hour is consistently empty, consider whether it's worth staying open.
Promotions: slow days are the natural place to try a special. Keep in mind that a discount comes straight out of your margin, so check what it really costs before running it.

See what this looks like

Below is a live Flumen restaurant dashboard. This is the single page view of the numbers that would otherwise require navigating several Square reports and a separate spreadsheet for costs.

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See your sales clearly, all in one place

Square's reports show you one view at a time. Flumen connects to your Square account and builds a dashboard with your average sales and ticket for each day of the week, your orders by hour, and which menu items sell on which days.

See Your Restaurant's Dashboard Free

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Frequently asked questions

What is the slowest day for restaurants?

For many restaurants it's early in the week, usually Monday or Tuesday, but it varies with your location, hours, and customers. Pull at least eight weeks of Sales Summary data in Square to find your own pattern.

Can Square show sales by day of the week?

Yes. The Sales Summary report in the Square Dashboard shows your sales organized by day of the week for any date range you choose.

Can Square show average sales per hour for a specific weekday?

Not directly. Square's hourly view covers your whole date range, not a single weekday across multiple weeks. To get that view, export your transactions and summarize them in a spreadsheet.

Want to understand the rest of Square's reports? See how to read your Square sales reports

See what Square's discount and comp reports show, and what they leave out