How many calls does a restaurant get? How to measure your own

To find out how many calls your restaurant gets, export two weeks of incoming calls from your phone provider. Split them into answered, voicemail and unanswered, group them into 15-minute blocks, and match them against phone orders in your POS. The worksheet below walks through each count and the sums.

This page is about counting. Once you know your busiest 15 minutes, our rush-hour phone coverage guide shows how many people that block needs and where overflow calls should go.

What does Maple's phone audit say about call volume?

Maple's restaurant phone audit publishes shares of calls and gives no count per restaurant. Its data was queried on April 28, 2026, and covers paying Maple restaurants, with a 90-day window for the day and hour charts. In that group, calls built from 10 a.m., peaked at 5 p.m. local time and faded after 9 p.m. Roughly 19% of calls arrived on a closed day, before opening or after closing.

The audit describes restaurants that use Maple. It is not a sample of all US restaurants, and its figures on why people call come from keyword matching on AI-written call summaries. At restaurants that take phone orders, 39.8% of calls showed ordering intent. Use these shares to check your own pattern, and let your own log set the numbers.

Day and its share of weekly calls in the audit	Your share (your day's calls divided by your week's calls)
Monday: 11.2%	____
Tuesday: 11.9%	____
Wednesday: 12.4%	____
Thursday: 13.9%	____
Friday: 20.1%	____
Saturday: 18.0%	____
Sunday: 12.4%	____

The published shares add up to 99.9% because each one is rounded.

Where do you find your call records?

Start with the phone provider, because it records every call that reached your number, including the ones nobody answered. Three examples from the providers' own help pages:

• Ooma Office: an admin can view all company calls and download the call log as a CSV file, filtered to incoming calls. On Ooma Office Pro, a Call Resolution column marks each call as answered by a user, sent to voicemail, disconnected by the caller or unanswered.
• RingCentral: the company call log in the Admin Portal filters by inbound calls and dates, shows a Result column (connected, accepted or missed) and a call length, and downloads as a CSV file.
• Google Voice: admins can search Voice log events, which include the calling number, the number called, the date and the call length, and export the results to Sheets or a CSV file.

If your line has no web portal, ask the carrier what call records it can send you. Failing that, keep a paper tally at the host stand for two weeks, with a mark for every call and a circle for every call nobody picked up.

How do you count phone orders in the POS?

Give phone orders their own label in the POS so they show up as a separate line in your sales reports. On Toast, you can create a custom dining option, such as "Phone pickup," with takeout behavior. The Sales Summary report then shows order counts and sales for each dining option, filters by hours and days of the week, and exports as a CSV or Excel file. Toast notes that the report counts a sale when the check is first opened, so an order keyed in just before a time block ends falls in that block.

Other POS systems use names such as order type or order source for the same idea. Train staff to pick the phone label on every phone order for the two weeks you measure, or the count will come out low.

How do you find your busiest 15 minutes?

1. Open the call log export in a spreadsheet and keep incoming calls only. Delete internal and outgoing calls.
2. Add a column that rounds each start time down to its 15-minute block: =FLOOR(B2, TIME(0,15,0)), where B2 holds the call time.
3. Add a column for the day of the week.
4. Build a pivot table with blocks as rows, days as columns and a count of calls in each cell.
5. Mark the biggest number at lunch and at dinner on each day. Those are the blocks your staffing plan has to cover.
6. Repeat the pivot with only missed calls. If missed calls bunch into the same blocks as the peaks, the phone is short of hands in those blocks.

Hourly totals hide bunching. Twenty calls in an hour is easy if they arrive evenly. If ten of them land between 6:00 and 6:15, one person cannot answer them all.

How do you fill in the worksheet?

Copy this table and fill in the last column from one week of your records. The example column is a made-up counter-service restaurant, there to show the sums.

Measure	Where to find it	Example week (made up)	Your week
1. Incoming calls	Provider call log, incoming only	412	____
2. Answered by staff	Result or resolution column	318	____
3. Sent to voicemail	Result or resolution column	41	____
4. Unanswered or caller hung up	Result or resolution column	53	____
5. Share of calls missed	(line 3 + line 4) divided by line 1	94 of 412, or 22.8%	____
6. Missed calls whose number got through later that day	Sort the log by caller number	29	____
7. Missed calls that did not reach a person later	Line 3 + line 4, minus line 6	65, or 15.8% of calls	____
8. Phone orders	POS report for your phone label	176	____
9. Phone orders per answered call	Line 8 divided by line 2	55%	____
10. Busiest 15-minute block	Pivot table	Friday 6:00 to 6:15 p.m., 14 calls	____

Line 7 is the number to watch, because those callers did not reach a person. Some may have ordered somewhere else and some may have wanted only your hours. The log cannot tell you which, so listen to a sample of voicemails and call back a few numbers from line 7 to ask what they wanted.

Line 9 tells you how much of the phone's work is orders. A low figure means many calls are questions, and our phone scripts and voicemail greetings can answer the common ones faster. For missed calls outside your hours, a missed-call text can point callers to online ordering.

How much do calls change by season?

Two weeks in one month can mislead you about the rest of the year. The Census Bureau's monthly sales for food services and drinking places, published on FRED as series MRTSSM722USN without seasonal adjustment, show how much the whole industry moves. In 2025, sales ran lowest per day in January, about $2.83 billion a day ($87.8 billion over 31 days), and highest per day in May, about $3.42 billion a day ($106.0 billion over 31 days). May's daily figure was about 21% higher than January's.

Those are national dollar sales, and calls at your restaurant may not follow them. Use them as a reason to measure twice a year, once in a slow month and once in a busy one. Your own POS sales by month from last year tell you which months those are. Also note anything unusual in the weeks you count: a holiday, a local event, a closed day or a new delivery app all change the phone.

What should you do with the numbers?

1. If line 5 is high and the misses sit in a few peak blocks, fix staffing and overflow for those blocks first, using the coverage guide.
2. If misses spread across quiet hours, look at where the phone rings. Our restaurant phone system guide covers ring groups and handsets.
3. If many calls come while you are closed, decide what those callers should hear or be sent.
4. After any change, count two more weeks and compare them with weeks from a similar time of year, so the season does not hide the effect.

If you add an answering service, keep the same worksheet so you can compare before and after. Maple Voice answers calls 24/7 with hours and FAQ answers, automated call transfer and call analytics, for $150 a month billed monthly or $85 a month billed annually. Pro adds phone orders into supported POS systems, and the product page lists the tests to run before you connect your live number.

Published by Maple, which sells AI phone answering for restaurants. This AI-assisted guide combines Maple's published phone audit, Ooma, RingCentral, Google and Toast help pages and Census Bureau sales data from FRED with an original worksheet. The example week is made up. It does not report a count at any real restaurant or promise a result.