Food & Beverage health calculator

A full dining room is not the same thing as a healthy restaurant. Food invoices, labor, and waste decide whether a busy week paid for itself. This calculator is for independent operators who can name last month’s sales and a stack of supplier invoices, but who do not want to rebuild a P&L in a spreadsheet every Sunday night.

Who this is for

Use it if you run a cafe, bakery, bar, food truck, catering kitchen, or full-service dining room. It is less useful if you only have a concept and no operating history — you still need at least a month of sales and costs.

What to enter first

Start with total revenue for the period you care about (a year is easiest to compare with tax documents; a month is finest for a course correction) and cost of what you sold — for most restaurants that is food and beverage invoices, not rent. Add total labor next. Those three numbers produce food cost %, labor cost %, and prime cost %, which is where most independent shops either stay in business or slowly drown.

Worked example: 38-seat neighborhood cafe

This example is original to Business metrics. It is not a real business’s books. It exists so you can follow the arithmetic before you type your own figures.

  • Annual revenue: $512,400
  • Food and beverage cost:
  • Labor including payroll tax:
  • Other operating expenses (rent, utilities, insurance, software):
  • Implied net if those are all the costs: $28,400
  • 38 seats, 10 service hours/day, 26 days open per month
  • About 95 covers on an average open day
  1. Food cost % = 168,000 ÷ 512,400 = 32.8%. That sits inside a common independent-restaurant watch band of roughly 28–35%, depending on concept.
  2. Labor cost % = 174,000 ÷ 512,400 = 34.0%.
  3. Prime cost % = (168,000 + 174,000) ÷ 512,400 = 66.8%. Many operators treat 65% as a ceiling. This cafe is 1.8 points over — not a crisis, but not a cushion either.
  4. Net margin using the implied net = 28,400 ÷ 512,400 = 5.5%. Busy does not mean rich.
  5. Annual seat-hours = 38 × 10 × 26 × 12 = 118,560. RevPASH = 512,400 ÷ 118,560 = $4.32. The on-site band we use for a healthier cafe is much higher. The room can be full and RevPASH still low if checks are small or turns are slow.
  6. Annual covers ≈ 95 × 26 × 12 = 29,640. Average check = 512,400 ÷ 29,640 =

If this were your cafe, you would not start with a new espresso machine. You would look at check average, waste, and whether labor is scheduled to the actual covers — the same three levers the results cards emphasize when prime cost is in watch.

How to read the results

Read food cost and prime cost before you celebrate revenue. Net margin tells you what survived rent and everything else. Cash runway (from the universal cash fields) answers a different question: how many months you can operate if the next stretch is soft. Expand a KPI card for the owner translation, the executive phrasing, and actions when the status is watch or critical.

Mistakes that make the math useless

  • Mixing periods — annual revenue with one month of invoices. The ratio becomes fiction.
  • Leaving owner draws out of labor, then wondering why the shop “works” only because you did not pay yourself.
  • Treating catering spikes as the new run rate. Re-run a normal week before you hire.
  • Ignoring waste because it never hits a tax line the way invoices do. Waste is still food you paid for.

When to re-run the check

Re-run after a menu price change, a new protein contract, seasonal hiring, or any month where sales felt strong and the checking account did not move. Export a copy for your bookkeeper, or save a session file on your computer so next month is a comparison, not a cold start.

Should I use a month or a year?

Use whichever documents you trust. A year matches a tax return. A month catches bleed earlier. Do not mix them in the same run.

I do not know seat-hours. Can I skip RevPASH?

Yes. Leave seats, hours, and days blank. You still get food cost and prime cost. RevPASH appears when those fields are filled.