How I check prime cost every Monday (in about 5 minutes)

Every Monday morning, before anything else, I look at last week's numbers. It takes me about five minutes. Those five minutes have saved me more money than almost anything else I do in the restaurant.

Here's the routine, what it took to get here, and the problem it caught that we'd never have found by gut feel.

What has to happen before Monday

The check only works if the numbers behind it are complete. So before I look at anything, I make sure of three things:

1. Inventory was counted Sunday night. That closing count is what turns "what we bought" into "what we actually used".
2. Every invoice from the week is in. If one delivery is missing, food cost looks better than it really is.
3. The week's labour hours are in. Same idea: a missing day of timesheets makes labour look great, and it isn't.

If any of those is missing, I fix it first. A number built on incomplete data is worse than no number, because you'll believe it.

The four numbers I look at, in order

1. Food cost %. What we used last week (opening inventory, plus purchases, minus closing inventory) as a percentage of sales.
2. Food cost differential. The gap between our actual food cost and what it should have been, based on what we sold and what each recipe costs. If the gap grows, product is going somewhere it shouldn't: waste, over-portioning, mistakes or theft.
3. Labour cost %. All wages, plus payroll costs, as a percentage of sales.
4. Prime cost %. Food cost plus labour. This is the one number that tells me whether the week was healthy. We try to keep ours in the mid-50s.

If all four are where they should be, I'm done in five minutes. If one is off, I know exactly where to start looking.

How we used to do it (and why it didn't work)

At first, we didn't check anything. We went with our gut. The problem with gut feel is that you find out about a bad month after it's over, when the money is already gone.

Then we moved to Google Sheets. That was better, but it came with its own problems:

• Not everyone was comfortable in a spreadsheet. Some of my team just didn't like using them, so counts didn't always get entered.
• Everything was typed in by hand. Counts and invoices were typed into the sheet, and there were always typing errors. One wrong number in the wrong cell and the whole week is off.
• Too many sheets. We ended up with several sheets to manage, and keeping them all in sync got messy.

That's a big part of why I built ChopOps: one place where the counts, invoices and labour come together, without the copy-and-paste.

The week the numbers caught a chicken problem

One Monday, our food cost and our food cost differential were both a couple of points too high. Sales were normal. Prices hadn't jumped. So the product was going somewhere.

Chicken is our biggest cost, so we started there. We watched the line and found the answer quickly: staff were giving too much chicken per order. Nobody was doing anything wrong on purpose. When you're busy, a little extra goes in the box, and it adds up across hundreds of orders.

The fix was simple: we started pre-portioning our chicken, so every item uses the right amount every time. The next weeks' numbers showed it.

Without a weekly check, we'd have kept giving that chicken away and never known why the month felt tight.

My advice if you've never checked prime cost weekly

Just start, right away. You could be leaving money on the table every week, and checking doesn't take long. Even if you do it in Google Sheets, it's better than nothing.

Pick a day, get your count, invoices and labour in by then, and look at the same four numbers every week. You don't need to understand everything on day one. You just need to notice when something moves, while it's still small enough to fix.

If you want to try it today, run last week's numbers through the free prime cost calculator, or track them week to week in the prime cost tracker.