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.

This is one move from the Expo recipe library, short, specific, do-this-on-Saturday guides for multi-unit operators learning to use AI without anyone selling them something. The longer story behind why this works lives in Start Using AI in Your Restaurant This Weekend. Next week's recipe extends the same chat window into a Monday GM email draft.