Exporting Hourly Sales Report to Excel

[LFR]

Under reports in Toast some reports export to Excel, however when running Hourly Sales reports there is no export icon. Does anyone know how to change that.

[drdgreen]

I've tried exporting the PDF contents to Excel, but have found that the write-out is not consistently formatted.  Oftentimes, multiple items and quantities are written to a single cell.

What AI tool have you used to do the PDF reads? I'm leery of anything that is not highly formulaic.  I'm writing Excel/Power Query scripts which follow strict rules. If I'm ready a CSV or Excel file, I can trust the process.  If I'm confronted with a PDF, the potential for error creeps in.

Is there any way of getting the PDF exports in Excel instead? I've asked several folks at Toast, but am just told that the reports are what they are.  I don't understand why things are output in non-machine readable format or are not written out at all, e.g. Menus:Item Details.

[Rob]

I used chat GPT to convert a PDF to Excel, but for a more formulaic approach, I think Adobe has a built-in converter.

"Adobe Acrobat allows you to convert PDF files to Excel spreadsheets. Open the PDF in Acrobat, go to the "Export PDF" tool, select "Spreadsheet" and then "Microsoft Excel Workbook", and click "Export" - This is a line I found but based on the link attached, it seems like it can work, but not sure of the quality, etc. 

https://www.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/how-to/pdf-to-excel-xlsx-converter.html

I'm not sure why we decided on a PDF, but I imagine it had to do with formatting, and at the time, pdf might have been "easier" to implement? However, that's just a guess I have if I learn more about it Ill be sure to share it on your "Critical Reporting Deficiencies" post! 

[drdgreen]

I have used this exact feature, but I have found that the output is not consistent. Sometimes, an entire row in the table in the PDF (which may contain information on several items) is written into a single cell in Excel.  Because of this, I am forced to do a lot of manual cleanup.

I really need some insight into when reporting is going to be more robust.  We must be able to manage production and historical data in machine-readable formats. Our volume is simply too great for manual tallys and data entry.  We've been working for several months to develop a solution, but have hit some major hurdles with Toast reporting and have no line of sight into whether or when they will be resolved.

[drdgreen]

I have found a way to highlight and copy the Production Items table ( found in the Catering and Events:Prep Tools: BEO Report)  in the PDF file and have Excel read the image file from the clipboard; this seems to produce more reliable results.  Regardless, that we have to manually copy and paste data from PDF export files in this day and age indicates a critical deficiency; I need Toast to provide clean data directly, not in an obfuscated format.