Track the numbers that decide a restaurant month: plate cost, labor, daily sales, prime cost, and the monthly profit left after every operating cost.
A restaurant does not discover its profit at tax time. It creates that profit in purchasing, portioning, scheduling, and daily sales discipline. Bookkeeping should therefore separate food cost, labor, and the monthly P&L while they can still be changed. Prime cost—food cost plus labor—is the number to watch weekly because those are the costs management most directly controls.
The Restaurant Profit & Food Cost Tracker is built around that rhythm. It connects menu-item costs, daily sales, a labor roster, and a monthly P&L, then summarizes sales, covers, average spend, food and labor cost, prime cost, net profit, best and worst days, and the highest-margin and highest-cost dishes.
Keep daily entry brief and consistent. The workbook uses the blended food-cost percentage from the menu sheet for daily food cost and spreads monthly labor across logged days, so the month can be reviewed without recreating every number by hand.
In the Restaurant course example for October, food cost was $16,582.15 and labor was $21,150.83. Prime cost was therefore $37,732.98, or 50.0% of sales—below the common “under 60%” watch line used in the lesson. The percentage matters more than either dollar amount alone because a busy month can spend more and still be better controlled.
It is a focused profit workbook, not a point-of-sale system or a full accounting ledger. Enter sales and cost information consistently, reconcile the monthly totals to your records, and use the dashboard for management decisions. It does not need to replace the restaurant’s POS reports; it turns them into a monthly profit picture.
The $49 workbook includes Menu Items and Food Cost, Daily Sales, Labor, Monthly P&L, and a Dashboard. It works in Excel and Google Sheets; yellow cells are the only cells you edit.
Prime cost is food cost plus labor cost. As a percentage, divide that total by sales and review it weekly.
Yes. For each dish, it calculates a suggested price at your target food-cost percentage and flags dishes above target.
Yes. The Daily Sales sheet records covers, food and beverage sales, food cost, labor, daily profit, and margin.
Restaurant Bookkeeping: The System That Actually Gets Done · Restaurant Break-Even: How Many Covers Cover Your Costs?