Weather and sales

Every owner knows the rain changes the day. What almost nobody knows is how — which dishes go up, which collapse, and whether a wet day really costs what it feels like it costs.

Kasenso records the weather on every trading day and compares your own sales against it. Nothing to remember, nothing to tick off at closing time.

Set your location once

Weather can only be looked up for a place, so Settings → Weather is the one screen in Kasenso that needs to know where your shop physically is.

Tap Use my location from a device in the shop and Save. That stores your coordinates and your timezone — the timezone matters because a trading day ends at midnight where you are, which is not the same moment everywhere.

If your browser refuses to share a location — Android sometimes denies it without ever asking — type the latitude and longitude in by hand instead. Any map app will give you both from a long press on your shop.

Nothing else in Kasenso uses this. It is not shown to customers, it does not appear on receipts, and it is not part of your store listing.

Fill in your past days

The comparison is only worth reading once there are enough days behind it, and waiting three months to find that out would be a poor deal.

So after saving your location, press Fill in history. Kasenso looks up the weather for every day you have already traded and writes it against those days. A shop that has been open since May gets a full season of rainy days immediately, rather than starting from zero.

You only need to do this once.

Changing it later

You can edit the location whenever you like — press Update location from the new place, or type new coordinates in by hand, and Save.

What happens to what you have already recorded is the part worth knowing: days recorded at your old address are kept exactly as they were. They are not rewritten. Those days really did happen where you were trading at the time, and the rain that fell on them is a fact about that shop, not this one. Only days from the change onwards use the new location.

The same protection covers Fill in history. Pressing it after a move fills gaps only — days that have no weather recorded yet — and never overwrites a day that already has one.

To stop recording altogether, press Stop recording and Save. That clears the location for good; the nightly look-up stops, and everything already recorded stays where it is. Setting a location again later picks up from that day.

What gets recorded

One record per day: the condition (clear, drizzle, rain, heavy rain, storm, fog or snow), the day's high and low, total rainfall, and the strongest wind. Days with damaging wind or violent rain are marked severe.

Temperatures and rainfall are stored the same way everywhere and shown in whichever units you pick in Settings — °C and mm, or °F and inches.

Correcting a day

Rain in the Philippines is intensely local. A regional reading can say "light drizzle" on an afternoon your street was under water.

Open the Manager's Daily Report for that day, pick the right condition under Weather, and save. What you record by hand is never overwritten by the automatic look-up — you were there and the model was not.

This is also where to record the things weather data does not know about: a signal raised, a flooded road, a brownout that closed you at four. Those belong in Other Issues / Incidents on the same page.

Reading the comparison

Analytics → Weather & Sales splits your trading days three ways — dry days, light rain, heavy rain — and shows what an average day in each is worth.

Two things about how it is calculated are worth understanding:

Every day is measured against its own weekday. A rainy Tuesday compared with the week's average would mostly tell you that Tuesdays are quiet. Each day is scored against a normal day of the same weekday instead, so what is left is the weather and not the calendar.

Items are compared as a share of the day, not as raw counts. A wet day sells fewer of nearly everything, so raw numbers would show every dish falling and tell you nothing about what to prepare. Comparing shares answers the question you actually have: of what I sell in the rain, what is a bigger slice of it?

That is what the two lists give you. Sells more in the rain is your prep list for tomorrow's forecast. Sells less in the rain is what to make less of.

When it refuses to tell you anything

A bucket with fewer than six days shows a day count instead of a number, and the item lists stay empty until there are at least six wet days and six dry ones.

This is deliberate. Three rainy days is not evidence, and a confident-looking figure drawn from three days is worse than no figure — you would prep against it. Keep trading; it fills in.

In the middle of the monsoon you may find you have almost no dry days at all. In that case the useful comparison is heavy rain against light rain rather than wet against dry, which is exactly why the split has three buckets and not two.

Does this work outside the Philippines?

Yes. The weather look-up covers every country and reports snow, sleet, freezing rain and hail using the same international standard it uses for a Manila downpour. Your timezone is captured with your location, so a trading day is counted correctly wherever the shop is.

What it costs

Nothing. Weather is part of the free plan — the recording, the history backfill, and the daily record on your Manager's Daily Report.

The Weather & Sales comparison in Analytics sits with the rest of Analytics, which is Premium.