Use the Hourly Sales Chart to Staff Your Busiest Hours
How to read the AskBiz Sales by Hour chart to identify your peak trading times, stagger cashier shifts, and ensure you're never understaffed during your busiest windows.
Key Takeaways
- The Sales by Hour chart on Overview shows transaction volume for every hour of the trading day across your selected period.
- Switch to 'Last 30 days' to see your true hourly pattern — a single day can be misleading.
- The tallest bar is your peak hour: ensure you have your maximum cashier count active in that window.
- Hours with consistently zero or near-zero bars are candidates for shift-end times — not leaving a full team idle.
Reading the Sales by Hour chart in 30 seconds
Go to POS > Overview and select 'Last 30 days'. Scroll down to the 'SALES BY HOUR' bar chart. Each bar represents total transaction volume (or revenue — hover to see the value) for that hour aggregated across the past 30 days. The chart currently shows trading from 7:00 to 20:00 with a clear peak at 11:00–12:00, secondary peaks at 10:00 and 16:00, and consistently low activity before 9:00 and after 19:00. This 30-second read reveals your entire daily trading rhythm.
Why Last 30 days gives better staffing data than Today
Any single day can be unrepresentative — a Monday might be quiet, a payday Friday unusually busy. The 30-day view smooths out these fluctuations to show your true average hourly pattern. Use Today's chart to monitor whether today's trading matches the expected pattern (useful for spotting an unusually slow morning that might need a promotion push), but always base staffing decisions on the 30-day chart.
Identifying your three staffing tiers from the chart
From the hourly chart, categorise your hours into three tiers: Peak (the 2–3 hours with the tallest bars — in this example, 11:00–12:00 and 16:00), Moderate (hours with medium bar height — 10:00, 13:00–15:00, 17:00–18:00), and Quiet (hours with very small bars or none — before 9:00 and after 19:00). Staff your Peak hours with maximum cashiers, Moderate hours with your standard count, and Quiet hours with minimum staff. This three-tier model prevents both understaffing and paying for idle cashiers.
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Start for free →Using the chart to set shift start and end times
If your chart shows near-zero activity before 9:00, there is no business case for a cashier arriving at 7:30. Set the first shift to start at 8:45 — 15 minutes before the first noticeable bar — and the last shift to end 30 minutes after the final meaningful bar. This single adjustment, applied consistently, can reduce weekly cashier hours by 10–15% without impacting service during active trading hours.
Comparing hourly patterns between branches
Open Overview in two browser tabs. Set one to Branch: Town and one to Branch: Bondeni. Compare their hourly charts side by side. If Town peaks at 11:00 but Bondeni peaks at 16:00, you can move a cashier from Town to Bondeni for the afternoon shift rather than keeping both branches fully staffed all day. This branch-specific scheduling requires no extra staff — just smart redistribution based on data.
What a flat hourly chart tells you
A flat chart — where all bars are roughly the same height across the day — suggests either consistent steady trading (rare) or an issue with your trading pattern. If you expected a lunch peak and the chart is flat, check: Do customers have a reason to come in at lunchtime? Is your location accessible? Did a product outage reduce lunchtime traffic? The absence of a peak is as informative as the peak itself — it points to an opportunity to create traffic at a specific time.