Food Service Metrics

We can build a customized executive scorecard that will help your executive team see how the business is operating compared to budget and forecast. The scorecard houses all of the top-line metrics that can help show where to focus your limited resources.

Income Statements are complicated and it can be hard to analyze them effectively. We have experience creating dynamic income statements that link directly to your accounting software so that there is no need for manual data transfer and income statement creation. We customize the dynamic income statement for the executive team so insights can be extracted easily. 

Despite having millions of data points to reference, menu decisions are often made based on intuition. We create custom menu matrices that help you quickly see your menu item's price, cost, contribution, and sales by region. These matrices can be used to quickly see contribution by menu category and by region. This is a must-have tool for any multiunit food service business.

Food cost and minimum wage increases have a massive impact on a restaurant's bottom line. It is hard to know if prices should be increased and by how much. We can create custom impact analysis based on the scenarios that you and your team have compiled. As an example, when minimum wage goes up and you want to save your margin, we can show you how much labour needs to be reduced or pricing needs to be increased in order to achieve the same profit margin.

There are several ways of displaying cover and sales trends including by day of the week and hour of the day. Displaying these trends in a heat map allows marketing to quickly see where to focus their attention.

Social media marketing can be a black hole if the message is not curated and targeted correctly. We have worked with several marketing teams to help develop social media campaigns based on organizational objectives and current trends. It's not always about blasting your brand across the internet; specific, targeted campaigns with strong call-to-action will provide much more ROI.

We help you analyze where your prices sit in comparison to your competitors. There are several new tools available that can help with this process so that you and your team can refrain from spending hours and thousands of dollars visiting competitive locations. We provide a comprehensive report that shows exactly how your menu items compare to your competitors by region.

One of the most important steps in any promotional initiative is to evaluate the promotion's effectiveness. Our team can help establish the success criteria to ensure that your promotions are focused on the right objective. We can then evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign based on the success criteria to show what went right or wrong and why.

If your forecasts were 100% correct, you would be the most profitable restaurant in the world.  Restaurants are variable businesses so if you could predict how many people will come into the restaurant and how much they will spend, you could perfectly match your labour and cost-of-sales to their budgeted percentages.

While a completely accurate forecast is nearly unachievable, we have proven techniques to get you very close. Most restaurants have a fairly predictable sales cycle so we will help you map out the forecast variables and build a forecast model to assist in revenue, cover and average check predictions.

Creating annual budgets is tough, especially considering all of the variables that impact a restaurant's income statement throughout the year. We have helped many accountants develop budgets for each GL on their income statement. We also help establish a budget review plan to realign budgets to results once per quarter. 

Proper budget management can help keep your team engaged and excited. Unrealistic budgets can kill morale and have a negative impact on retention.

There are a lot of ways to analyze an income statement.  Luckily, we have extensive experience analyzing restaurant-specific profit elements. As an example, we have helped several clients reallocate their labour costs to specific accounts related to either direct labour or indirect components (employee tax, bonuses etc.). This has helped managers understand which component of labour is affecting their labour cost percentage. 

This section of the income statement can have some of the lowest hanging fruit. There are many GLs that are often ignored due to their relatively small impact to profit. When aggregated together, some of the accounts can shift your profit margin substantially. We help businesses determine which accounts should be variable to sales and which accounts should move to a fixed budget methodology (janitorial, office expenses etc.).