Restaurant365 recommends reviewing five KPIs every week: prime cost (a healthy benchmark is around 60% of sales), sales per labour hour, inventory turnover, food waste and labour cost percentage (25–35% depending on restaurant type). Its argument is that weekly checks let you act on a problem, where a monthly P&L confirms it after the fact.
Why a monthly report is too slow
By the time anyone reads a monthly P&L, the period it describes is already over. Restaurant365's guide to restaurant KPIs argues that a short list of numbers, reviewed weekly, picks up problems that a monthly report can only confirm once the damage is done.
The five numbers
- Prime cost: your total labour cost added to your total cost of goods sold, expressed as a percentage of sales. Restaurant365 puts a healthy benchmark at around 60% of sales, with full-service restaurants typically at 60–65% and quick-service at 55–60%.
- Sales per labour hour: shows whether a shift has too many or too few staff for what it is actually selling.
- Inventory turnover: warns of surplus stock holding up cash, and also of running so lean that you risk stockouts.
- Food waste: worth tracking on its own, since Restaurant365 notes that restaurants waste up to 10% of the food they buy before it reaches a plate.
- Labour cost percentage: with a target range of 25–35%, depending on the type of restaurant.
Timing matters as much as the numbers
The guide's deeper point is about when you look, not only what you look at. A creeping food cost, a shift with too many people on it or waste that keeps rising all eat into margin for as long as nobody notices. A weekly routine does not need cleverer numbers than a monthly report. It needs the same few numbers checked often enough that there is still time to fix what they show.
Restaurant365 sums it up by saying that restaurants which follow and act on weekly KPIs do more than steer clear of problems: they stop them from happening in the first place.
What this means for your restaurant
- Set a fixed weekly slot to review prime cost, sales per labour hour, inventory turnover, food waste and labour cost percentage.
- Compare your prime cost with Restaurant365's benchmark of around 60% of sales (55–60% for quick-service, 60–65% for full-service), and your labour cost with the 25–35% range.
- Measure food waste directly rather than assuming it is small, since Restaurant365 notes that up to 10% of the food a restaurant buys can go to waste.
- Use sales per labour hour to spot over- or under-staffed shifts while there is still time in the month to change the roster.
Sources
- 5 Restaurant KPIs to Track Weekly for Improved Performance — Restaurant365
This article summarises the reporting and guides listed above; the figures belong to those sources and are attributed in the text. Check anything that affects your business against your own platform agreements, payout statements and advisers.