New York restaurants: rain, rush hours and reports from Clover

Othra gives New York City restaurants on Clover a plain-English way to see how rain, snow and the hour of the day shape their sales, and to turn any of those answers into a PDF report. It reads your Clover orders (read only), works out every figure from them itself, and costs $19.99 a month per restaurant.

New York is a big, crowded market. According to the National Restaurant Association, New York State had 50,533 restaurant locations, 856,700 restaurant and foodservice jobs and $98.4 billion in sales in 2025, and restaurants are the state's second-largest private employer. In a market that size, it pays to know your own numbers.

This guide covers the weather, the rush hours and the reports you owe the people you answer to, plus how to check the sales tax and tips your Clover collected.

Does rain change your sales? Your own Clover data can tell you

Rain and snow are a regular part of doing business in New York City, not a rare event. According to NOAA's 1991–2020 normals for Central Park, the city averages 49.52 inches of precipitation a year, 125.4 days a year with at least 0.01 inch, and 29.8 inches of snow. That is roughly one day in three with some rain or snow.

What those days do to your sales is a separate question, and the answer depends on your block, your menu and your mix of dine-in, takeout and delivery. Othra does not guess: it lets you measure it from your own orders.

How Othra sorts your days by weather

Othra looks up the daily weather at your restaurant's ZIP code (from Open-Meteo) for the days it reads, up to the last three months, and sets sunny, cloudy, rainy and snowy days side by side. A day with at least 0.04 inches of rain counts as rainy. NOAA's wet-day count uses a lower bar (0.01 inch), so expect Connect to show fewer rainy days than the NOAA figure suggests.

Questions worth asking:

• “How did my sales on rainy days compare with sunny days over the last 90 days?”
• “How did snowy days compare with cloudy ones?”
• “Show my sales by weather for the last month.”

The answer sets the kinds of day side by side, with the number of days, average sales a day, share of sales and the difference from an average day for each, and states the start and end dates, the number of days and the number of orders it covers. If there were no snowy days in the period, it says so instead of filling the gap with a guess.

Plan prep and staff from the forecast

The other half is looking ahead. The Othra header shows the weather now where your restaurant is; hover over it to open the next 24 hours and the next 5 days. Put that forecast next to what your own rainy and snowy days looked like, and you can set prep quantities and the staff schedule from your numbers rather than a hunch.

Which hours are your real rush hours?

Your real rush hours are the ones your Clover orders show, and Othra breaks sales down by hour and by weekday so you can see them. In New York City that matters, because labor is expensive: according to the Office of the Governor of New York, the minimum wage in New York City, Long Island and Westchester is $17.00 an hour from January 1, 2026. An hour of staff scheduled where the orders are not is a cost you pay every week.

Questions worth asking:

• “What are my busiest hours on weekdays compared with weekends?” The answer shows sales by hour as columns and names the busiest hour.
• “Which weekday is my slowest?” You get sales by weekday with the best and slowest days called out.
• “How did the last four weeks compare with the four weeks before?” For periods up to about six weeks, Othra compares the period before automatically.

With the Employees permission, Othra also shows sales, refunds and average ticket by staff member as ranked bars: number on the left, name inside the bar, amount and order or refund count on the right. For more on staff, tips and refunds, see our New Jersey guide; the same questions work in Manhattan or Queens.

Every new chat opens with today's sales and orders so far, compared with the same time last week, so you know before the dinner push whether the day is running ahead or behind. If you just want the figures, the Statistics page shows Today, 7, 30 or 90 days with cards for sales, orders, average ticket, tips and more, plus the busiest hour, best day and slowest day. There is no AI on that page, only figures computed from every order.

Is NYC Restaurant Week worth comparing?

Yes: NYC Restaurant Week is one of the clearest before-and-after periods a New York restaurant gets. According to NYC Tourism + Conventions, it runs every winter and summer. Whether you take part or your neighbors do, it is worth asking what those weeks did to your orders.

A question in Othra can cover up to about three months of orders, so ask soon after Restaurant Week ends, while it is still inside that window. Try “Compare the Restaurant Week weeks with the same number of weeks before.” The answer shows sales, orders, average ticket and best sellers for both periods, with the dates and order counts each covers. If you ran a discounted set menu, the discounts figure shows that too.

Because each question reaches back about three months, compare each Restaurant Week with the weeks around it rather than winter with summer, and save a PDF report each time so both seasons stay on file.

New York numbers at a glance

Each local figure in this guide suggests a question for Othra.

How do you turn a conversation into a PDF report?

Ask Othra to “make this a PDF report”, or press Report, and it writes a report on the subject of the conversation. It does not dump the chat: it works out what you were looking at and builds a document around it.

The report puts the Othra logo on the left and your business name on the right, followed by a summary, the figures, charts (columns, lines, staff bars and weather) and recommendations. Every figure in it comes from the answers saved in that chat.

That makes it useful for meetings outside the kitchen: a partner who wants to see how the quarter went, an investor weighing a second location, or a lease talk with your landlord. You bring a clean document instead of a phone full of screenshots.

Reports that work well:

• A weather report: rainy, snowy, cloudy and sunny days over the last three months, with what you plan to change.
• A rush-hour report: sales by hour and weekday, with staff bars if Employees is connected.
• A Restaurant Week report: the event weeks against the weeks before.
• A monthly summary for a partner: sales, orders, average ticket, best sellers, refunds and discounts.

How to check the sales tax and tips your Clover collected

With the Payments permission, Othra reads the sales tax and tips your Clover collected, along with cash, credit and debit shares. According to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance (Publication 718), the sales tax rate in New York City is 8.875%.

Ask “How much sales tax did we collect last month, and how does it compare with sales?” and set the result next to that 8.875% rate. If the numbers look out of line for what you sell, check the tax settings on your items in Clover and talk to your accountant.

Tips work the same way: ask for tips collected over a week or a month, and the answer shows the total with the days and orders it covers. From payments, Othra uses only amounts, tips, tax and payment type, never card numbers.

What else does Ordero offer New York restaurants?

Othra is one product from Ordero, AI software for US restaurants made by Ordero SI LLC in Austin, Texas. Two other products suit busy New York restaurants, and neither takes a commission on any order.

• [Ordero Voice Agent](https://ordero.si/products/voice-agent) answers your phone in your restaurant's name in eight languages: English, Spanish, Turkish, German, French, Arabic, Korean and Hindi. It says it is an automated assistant and that the call may be recorded, takes orders from your real menu (sizes, toppings, half-and-half pizzas), handles several calls at once, passes the call to staff when a caller asks, and never takes card numbers. Plans start at $500 a month.
• [Online Order System](https://ordero.si/products/online-ordering) gives you your own ordering page at ordero.si/yourname, with an AI chat that takes orders from your menu. Customers pay at pickup or on delivery. It costs $50 a month.

For a deeper look at reading Clover sales in the five boroughs, see Ordero's Clover sales analysis guide for New York City restaurants.

How do you connect Othra to Clover?

Connecting takes one Clover API token. Othra costs $19.99 a month per restaurant, billed by Stripe, and you can cancel any time.

1. Open Othra at ordero.si/connect and sign in with an Ordero account, or create one.
2. In the Clover web dashboard, create an API token with Read on Orders, Inventory and Merchant, plus Payments (for tips, tax and payment types) and Employees (for sales by staff).
3. Paste the token with your Merchant ID. Othra checks it and connects.
4. Ask your first question. The first read of a month or more takes the longest; after that, answers come back in seconds.

Not ready to connect? Try the free sample data: a made-up pizzeria with three months of orders. Othra is read only, so it never creates, changes or deletes anything in Clover, and disconnecting deletes the stored access. Clover is a trademark of its owner; Ordero is not affiliated with or endorsed by Clover. New to the product? Start with What is Othra? or see pricing.