Hospitality and retail trade rises and falls with the weather more than most operators give it credit for — and almost nobody records it alongside their takings. From v1.5.35, Pro tenants get a daily weather snapshot captured automatically for their address, surfaced in the Dashboard and in the Daily Sales report so you can spot patterns and plan a sharper week ahead.
The epos247 Team
Building the next-generation POS
Ask any pub manager why last Sunday was quiet and you'll get a confident answer. Ask them again in three months and you'll get a different one. The reasons we attribute to a quiet day at the time and the reasons we remember when we look back at the figures are almost never the same — and one of the most common culprits, the weather, vanishes from memory faster than any of them. "It rained" doesn't make it into the till report.
Weather drives more of your trade than most operators are willing to admit. A grey, drizzly Sunday demolishes a beer-garden lunch service. A bright Friday afternoon empties an indoor café. A heatwave doubles ice-cream sales and halves the soup order. None of this is news. What is news is that none of it has ever been routinely recorded alongside the takings — so when you sit down with a year's worth of EOD reports and try to spot a pattern, the weather column is missing.
From v1.5.35, on every Pro account, we record it for you.
Every night at 01:30, a job runs in the background and looks up yesterday's weather for the postcode on your business address. It writes a small snapshot into your tenant data — max temperature, min temperature, the headline condition ("Light rain", "Sunny intervals", "Overcast"), a weather-service icon, total rainfall in millimetres, max wind speed, and average humidity. One record per day, per venue. It backfills on a few seconds of API time and costs you nothing.
You don't have to do anything to enable it. There's no toggle to flip, no API key to configure, no extra screen to learn. If your account is on the Pro plan and your Back Office Settings have a valid UK postcode on the business address, you'll start seeing weather data appear on the Dashboard from tomorrow morning. Existing Pro tenants who want to seed their historical data — say, the last few weeks so the Daily Sales report has something to compare against from day one — can ask us to backfill on request.
Two surfaces in v1.5.35; more to follow as we learn what's most useful.
The honest answer is: nothing, until you've had a few weeks of data to compare. Weather data alone tells you very little. Weather data against your takings tells you things you didn't know about your own business.
A few patterns we'd expect most operators to find inside the first month:
Recording the weather is the easy half. The interesting half — which is where this is heading over the next few releases — is feeding the resulting weather/sales pairing into a forward model so the Dashboard can show you, for example, "Saturday's forecast is 21°C and dry; based on the last 12 comparable Saturdays you can expect roughly £2,400 of trade, ±£300." That's not in this release. The data capture is. Without the data, the model couldn't exist; with the data, building the model becomes a matter of arithmetic. Every day we record now is one more data point for the model to be calibrated against when it lands.
The weather capture is bundled with the Pro plan — no extra fee, no per-call charge to the tenant. It uses WeatherAPI.com's commercial-grade history endpoint on our account, so the data is sourced from national meteorological services rather than a scraped front end. Storage is on our side; you'll never see a line item for it.
If you're on the Lite or Basic plan and would like to see this on your dashboard, that's the kind of nudge we factor into the Pro decision. Talk to us about upgrading and we'll seed your historical weather as part of the move.
One last note. The weather feature doesn't show up anywhere on the POS itself. It doesn't slow anything down, doesn't add a permission, doesn't ask the staff a question at sign-on. It exists purely in Back Office, on the surfaces where you're looking at trends rather than at today's till. That's deliberate — the whole point is to give you something that quietly accumulates in the background while you run the business, and that earns its keep when you sit down on a Monday morning to plan the week.
Tomorrow morning, take a look. The strip will already be there with yesterday's weather captured. By the end of next week you'll have a row in every Daily Sales report that, frankly, you didn't know you needed until you saw it.
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