The free café daily P&L template.
Built for the counter, not the accountant’s office: log tonight’s cash and card takings, what you spent on food and drink, and today’s wages — the sheet turns it into tonight’s actual profit, rent slice included.
Direct .xlsx download · no email required · Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice & Numbers
Start here
Tax rate, card fee, monthly fixed costs (rent, insurance, subscriptions) and days open — typed once, used everywhere.
Daily P&L
Day-rows with café columns: cash takings, card takings, food & drink cost, wages worked today, other variable costs → net revenue and EBIT per day.
Prime-cost view
A running food-&-drink + wages total against revenue — the two costs that decide whether a café day paid, visible without a calculator.
Why cafés need a daily P&L, not a monthly one
A café’s two big costs — food & drink and wages — move every single day. Waste on Monday, an over-staffed Tuesday, a supplier price bump on Thursday: by the time a monthly statement surfaces them, they’ve repeated for weeks and the money is gone. The daily P&L catches them the night they happen, while you can still change the order or the rota.
Even Restaurant365 — enterprise software for restaurant groups — argues your monthly P&L arrives too late to act on. They’re right about the problem. You just don’t need an enterprise back-office to fix it: you need one honest number at close, and five inputs to get to it.
The café-specific lines that matter
This template splits the two costs that make or break a coffee day. Food & drink cost is everything you bought to sell — beans, milk, pastries, syrups — counted the day it lands, not the day it’s used, because that’s when the cash left. Wages today is the hours you actually rostered, so an over-staffed slow morning shows its damage immediately rather than hiding in a monthly payroll lump.
The sheet then computes your prime cost percentage — food & drink plus wages, divided by the day’s takings. Prime cost is the single number experienced café operators watch, because it’s the half of the P&L you actually control day to day. Hold it around 60–65% and there’s room left to profit; let it drift past 70% for a run of days and the template will show it long before the month does.
How to use it (at the till, after the last customer)
Once: in Start here, enter your tax rate, card fee percentage, your monthly fixed costs and days open per month. Fixed salaries go here; hourly staff you roster day to day go in the daily sheet.
Every night: type the Z-report’s cash and card totals, today’s food & drink purchases, and the wages worked today. The sheet computes tonight’s net revenue and EBIT, plus a month-to-date row so a bad Tuesday is visible inside a good week.
Read the prime-cost line before you leave. If it’s creeping, the fix is usually one of three things — portioning, waste, or a shift you didn’t need — and all three are cheaper to fix tomorrow than at month-end.
When to move from the sheet to the app
The spreadsheet is the right first step and it’s free. The moment it stops working is always the same: a run of busy days where you don’t open it, and the gap never gets backfilled. If that’s happened to you before with a café tracker, it’ll happen again — not from laziness, but because 9pm after a full service is the worst time to open Excel.
nouz for cafés is this template as an app: the same food-cost-and-wages maths, the same prime-cost view, but entered in about 60 seconds on your phone and kept as history you can actually trend. See it running on a sample café in the demo — no account needed.
Common questions
Is this free? What’s the catch?
Free, no email, no sign-up. It’s an .xlsx file that opens in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice or Numbers. The only “catch” is the honest one: a spreadsheet works until the night you skip it.
Does it handle cash and card separately?
Yes — card takings get your card fee applied automatically; cash doesn’t. That’s how the real formula works: transaction fees only ever apply to card revenue.
What about wages — daily or monthly?
Wages you roster daily (hourly staff) go in the day’s row. Fixed salaries belong in monthly fixed costs on the Start here sheet, where they’re sliced across your open days automatically.
What counts toward prime cost?
Food and drink cost plus labour. The template adds those two and divides by the day’s gross takings to give a prime-cost percentage. It’s the number to watch daily because it’s the part of the P&L you can move fastest.
Can it tell me my break-even day?
The Start here sheet shows the revenue a day needs before it turns profitable, from your own numbers. For a deeper version, use the free café break-even calculator — no download needed.
Goes well with
Or skip the spreadsheet.
nouz runs the same daily P&L — formulas, fixed-cost slicing and history handled — for your café. See it working with sample data first; no account needed.
Open the live demo