The four numbers that decide whether a restaurant makes money
Most restaurants do not fail because of bad food. They fail because nobody was watching the numbers closely enough to notice a two-point drift in food cost, a schedule that stopped matching demand, or a menu whose prices had quietly fallen behind its ingredient costs. By the time it shows up in the year-end accounts, a year of margin has already gone.
The tools on this page cover the calculations restaurant operators actually need week to week. Every one of them is free, runs in your browser, and stores nothing.
1. Food cost percentage
What share of every sales dollar goes on the ingredients themselves. Most full-service restaurants target 28–35%, quick-service closer to 25–30%. It moves fast when portions drift or supplier prices rise, which is why weekly tracking beats monthly. Start with the food cost percentage calculator, and if the number looks wrong, work backwards through your recipes with the recipe costing calculator to find where theory and reality diverged.
2. Labor cost percentage
What share goes to your team — and it must include payroll taxes, benefits, and insurance, not just gross wages. Leaving the burden out understates the true figure by 10–20%, which is often the exact margin an operator thinks they have. The labor cost percentage calculator gives you the figure and the benchmark to judge it against.
3. Prime cost
Food cost plus labor cost, together, as a percentage of sales. This is the number experienced operators and restaurant accountants judge an operation on, because it cannot be gamed. Buying pre-prepped ingredients lowers labor and raises food cost; prepping in-house does the reverse. Prime cost captures the total either way. Most healthy full-service restaurants keep it at or below 65%. The prime cost calculator combines both inputs into a single view.
4. Break-even point
The sales level at which every cost is covered and the next dollar becomes profit. Knowing it changes how you read a trading week — a quiet week stops being "a bit slow" and becomes a quantified loss you can respond to. The break-even calculator turns your fixed costs and contribution margin into a monthly sales target, and into a cover count your floor managers can actually work with.
Pricing and performance
Cost control only gets you halfway. The other half is charging correctly and knowing whether the business is genuinely growing.
The menu price calculator turns a plate cost and a target food cost percentage into a defensible selling price — the cost-plus method that underpins most menu pricing in the industry. Use it alongside the recipe costing tool, since a price built on an inaccurate plate cost is wrong before you start.
The like-for-like sales calculator strips new openings and closures out of your sales comparison so you can see whether your existing sites are actually improving, rather than whether you simply have more of them.
And the par level calculator sets inventory par levels from usage, delivery lead time, and safety stock — the practical mechanism that stops both stockouts and the over-ordering that quietly inflates food cost through spoilage.
Where to start
If you are not currently tracking anything, start with prime cost. It is the single most informative number in restaurant finance and it only needs two inputs you already have. Once you have a weekly prime cost rhythm established, add break-even so you know what a good week actually looks like, then work down into recipe costing and menu pricing to fix whatever the top-level numbers reveal.
For the reasoning behind each of these metrics, our restaurant finance guides cover the same ground in more depth, with worked examples.