The free restaurant daily P&L template.

Prime cost is the restaurant number, so this template computes it

Ask any operator what to watch and the answer is prime cost: cost of goods (food and beverage) plus labour, as a share of sales. It’s roughly two-thirds of a restaurant’s spending and — unlike rent — it’s the part you can move this week. Hold prime cost at or under about 65% of sales and there’s room to profit; let it run past 70% for a stretch and the profit is gone whatever the top line says.

This template splits food and beverage cost so you can see which side is drifting, adds labour rostered today, and shows prime cost as a live percentage on every row. You get the number the enterprise systems charge thousands for — on one sheet, for a single restaurant, free.

Why a daily number beats waiting for the month

Restaurant365 built a business partly on one honest argument: your monthly P&L arrives too late to change anything. A monthly food-cost figure is an average of thirty decisions you can no longer unmake. A daily one shows you the Thursday the delivery came in high or the Saturday you over-rostered, while the next order and the next rota are still yours to set.

The difference between a good month and a bad one in a single-location restaurant is usually a dozen small daily corrections that never happened because nobody saw them in time. This template is built to make them visible tonight — and it costs a spreadsheet, not an ERP implementation.

How to use it (after the last table)

Once: in Start here, enter tax rate, card fee, your monthly fixed costs and open days. Salaried kitchen and management pay is a fixed cost; hourly floor and kitchen staff you roster day to day go in the daily sheet.

Every night: enter cash and card takings from the till, today’s food and beverage invoices, and the hours worked. The sheet returns tonight’s net revenue, EBIT, prime-cost percentage and a month-to-date line, so one heavy-cost service shows up against the week rather than hiding in a monthly average.

Pair it with the free restaurant prime-cost calculator when you want to model a target rather than record a day.

When one location becomes two

This template is deliberately for a single restaurant run by the person who also expedites the pass. If you grow to several locations with a bookkeeper and a kitchen manager per site, the honest answer is that you’ll eventually want either dedicated restaurant software or, at minimum, an app that keeps every location’s daily P&L in one place without a folder of spreadsheets.

nouz is the middle step for a busy single-site owner: the same prime-cost-first daily P&L, entered in about a minute on your phone at close, with history kept so you can trend food cost across a season. See it on a sample restaurant in the demo — no account, no card.