From Financial Statements to Operating Decisions — Part Two Revenue is usually the first number people look at on a restaurant’s profit and loss statement. Did sales increase? Did we beat the budget? Are we ahead of last year? Those are reasonable questions. But revenue alone rarely tells restaurant leaders what actually happened—or what they
Part One of From Financial Statements to Operating Decisions How Restaurant Operating Metrics Connect Daily Choices to Financial Results A profit-and-loss statement can make a business appear more mechanical than it really is. Revenue appears at the top. Expenses are organized into categories. Profit—or loss—appears at the bottom. Each line is expressed in dollars, percentages,
Why so many restaurant and taproom KPIs describe performance but rarely explain it Restaurants and taprooms have no shortage of data. Most operators can quickly pull reports showing sales, labor cost percentage, prime cost, sales per labor hour, average check, guest counts, overtime, discounts, ticket times, and restaurant-level profit. The challenge is not as simple
Why “the POS says one thing and the P&L says another” is more than annoying—and how a fractional CFO fixes it If you run a restaurant or taproom, you already live inside numbers all day: the POS is full of reports the schedule is full of labor data vendors and invoices never stop and then,
There’s a moment most owner/operators recognize: You’re busy. The patio is packed. Your beer is moving. Tickets are humming. And someone says, “We should open another one.” Sometimes it’s a second location. Sometimes it’s a private-event room. Sometimes it’s a kitchen upgrade, a patio build-out, a packaging line, or a small taproom bolt-on. And in