5 Numbers to Check Weekly at Your Restaurant

One operator on Reddit put it this way: he does his finances at the end of the year, downloads his statements, and mass-imports them into Google Sheets. That's twelve months of flying blind, followed by one painful afternoon discovering what went wrong.

He's not unusual. Most independent restaurant owners across Canada run the same way. Not because they're bad at business, but because nobody showed them which numbers actually matter on a Tuesday morning versus which ones can wait until tax season.

Here's what we think: the habit of checking five specific numbers every week matters more than having a perfect accounting system. Twenty minutes on Monday morning with a calculator, a POS report, and a notepad will tell you more about your restaurant's trajectory than any quarterly review.

These are the five. None of them require software you don't already have.

What should your food cost percentage be this week?

Food cost percentage is the single most watched number in restaurant operations. And for good reason: at a 40-seat independent doing $700,000 a year in revenue, every percentage point of food cost represents roughly $7,000. A two-point drift from 30% to 32% costs you $14,000 annually. That's a month of rent in most Canadian cities.

The formula is simple: (Beginning Inventory + Purchases - Ending Inventory) / Food Sales x 100.

Most Canadian full-service independents should land between 28% and 35%, depending on concept. A casual spot with a simpler menu might hit 28%. A chef-driven restaurant sourcing local ingredients will sit closer to 35%. Both can be healthy if the number is intentional.

Concept Type	Target Food Cost	Red Flag
Casual / limited menu	28-30%	Above 33%
Full-service bistro	30-33%	Above 36%
Chef-driven / premium ingredients	33-35%	Above 38%

The weekly check takes five minutes. Pull your POS food sales total. Add up your food invoices for the week. If you do a quick physical count of your five or six highest-cost items (proteins, dairy, alcohol if applicable), you'll catch the drift before it becomes a quarterly surprise.

What you're really watching for: sudden jumps. A two-point spike in a single week usually means one of three things. A supplier price increase you didn't notice. Waste on a specific item. Or theft. Each of those is fixable, but only if you catch it within days, not months.

For your exact breakdown, try the food waste calculator to see what waste alone is costing your specific operation.

How much of every dollar is going to labour?

Labour is the other half of prime cost, and in Canada right now it's the number moving fastest. Minimum wages are rising across every province in 2026, pushing average restaurant labour cost ratios from roughly 30% toward 31-32% of revenue. In Ontario and British Columbia, where wages will exceed $18 per hour, the ratio could climb to 31-34%.

That one-to-two-point shift sounds small. It can reduce your profit margin by 20-40% in an industry where typical margins hover under 5%.

The weekly calculation: Total Labour Cost (wages + employer CPP/EI/WCB contributions) / Total Revenue x 100.

Revenue Range (Annual)	Healthy Labour Cost	Watch Closely
Under $500K	30-35%	Above 37%
$500K-$1M	28-33%	Above 35%
Over $1M	25-30%	Above 33%

Don't forget the employer burden. CPP, EI, and provincial workers' compensation premiums add 12-18% on top of gross wages. An employee earning $17/hour actually costs you $19-$20. If you're calculating labour cost from gross wages alone, your real number is higher than you think.

The weekly habit: pull your scheduling software or paper schedule, multiply hours by rates, add your estimated burden percentage. Compare to last week's revenue. You don't need it to be perfect. You need to see the trend.

If labour cost is creeping up while covers stay flat, that's a scheduling problem. If both are rising together, you might just be busier. Context turns a scary number into an actionable one.

How many covers did you serve this week?

Covers, or guests served, is your demand signal. It's the number that tells you whether the other numbers are moving because of something you did or because of something happening outside your doors.

A 40-seat restaurant running lunch and dinner service with decent turnover might serve 350-500 covers per week. But the absolute number matters less than the week-over-week trend.

Here's what covers tell you that revenue alone can't:

If revenue is up but covers are flat, your average cheque grew. That could mean menu price increases are sticking, or it could mean you're selling more alcohol. Both are worth knowing.

If covers are down but revenue is flat, you're extracting more from fewer guests. That works until it doesn't. Fewer guests today means fewer regulars tomorrow.

If covers are down and revenue is down, something shifted. Weather, construction on your block, a new competitor, a bad Google review that's scaring people off. This is the early warning system.

Track covers by service period if your POS allows it. Lunch covers dropping while dinner holds? That's a different problem than both falling. A 10% decline in Tuesday lunch covers over three consecutive weeks is a signal. A single bad Wednesday is just weather.

The cross-check: compare your covers to your labour cost. If covers dropped 15% this week but you're staffed for last month's pace, you're paying for bodies you don't need on the floor. That's the kind of correction you can make in real time, not retroactively.

What is your average cheque telling you?

Average cheque, or revenue per guest, combines everything: your menu prices, your upselling, your wine program, your ability to get a table to order dessert. For full-service independents in Canada, the average sits around $53 per guest based on December 2024 data. Fine dining runs higher. Casual spots run lower.

But the industry average is almost irrelevant to your operation. What matters is your average cheque relative to your own history. A $48 average cheque is fine if it's been $48 for six months and your costs are built around it. A $48 cheque that was $54 three months ago is a problem.

The weekly calculation: Total Revenue / Total Covers = Average Cheque.

Declining average cheque usually means one of four things:

Your guest mix shifted. More lunch traffic (lower spend) relative to dinner.

Your servers stopped upselling. Training issue, morale issue, or just new staff who haven't learned the menu.

Guests are trading down. They're coming in but ordering cheaper items. In a market where 75% of Canadians say they're dining out less due to cost, this is real and it's not going away soon.

You changed the menu. Removed a high-margin item, repriced without checking the math, or introduced a popular but low-margin special.

Average cheque connects directly to menu engineering. If you haven't looked at which items are Stars (high popularity, high margin) and which are Dogs (low both), the average cheque number is your invitation to start.

How much cash do you actually have right now?

This is the number nobody talks about in restaurant finance articles, and it's the one that kills businesses. As one restaurant owner wrote online: his spot shows a profit on the P&L, but he still feels constant cash pressure. He's not confused. He's describing the gap between accounting profit and bank balance.

Cash position is simply: what's in the bank right now, minus what's owed in the next 7-14 days.

A profitable restaurant can run out of cash. It happens when accounts payable (food suppliers, rent, payroll) come due before accounts receivable (credit card settlements, catering deposits) arrive. It happens when a good month in sales masks the fact that you pre-paid for a patio build or a liquor order.

Cash Position	What It Means
2+ weeks of operating costs in reserve	Healthy. You can absorb a slow week.
1-2 weeks of operating costs	Manageable but tight. One bad week hurts.
Under 1 week of operating costs	Danger zone. A single surprise could mean missed payroll.

For a 40-seat restaurant spending roughly $12,000-$15,000 per week on operations (food, labour, rent, utilities), a healthy cash reserve means $24,000-$30,000 accessible. That might sound like a lot. But consider this: a single no-show-heavy weekend can cost a restaurant $390 or more per night. A broken walk-in cooler is a $2,000-$5,000 emergency. A slow week during construction season is $3,000-$5,000 in lost revenue with fixed costs unchanged.

The weekly check: log into your bank account. Write down the balance. Subtract payroll due this week, food invoices due this week, and your share of monthly rent. What's left is your real cash position.

If that number has been shrinking for three consecutive weeks, something is wrong. And you'll catch it here before it shows up anywhere else.

The 20-minute Monday morning routine

Here's what this looks like in practice. No software required. A calculator, your POS login, your bank login, and a notebook.

Step	What to Pull	Time
1. Food cost	Last week's food sales + food invoices	5 min
2. Labour cost	Hours worked x rates + burden estimate	5 min
3. Covers	POS cover count by service period	2 min
4. Average cheque	Total revenue / total covers	1 min
5. Cash position	Bank balance minus upcoming obligations	5 min

Write the five numbers in a notebook. Circle anything that moved more than 5% from last week. That's it.

Over four weeks, patterns emerge that no annual review would catch. Your Thursday labour cost is 38% because you're overstaffing for a dinner rush that stopped being a rush two months ago. Your food cost creeps up every time you run the braised short rib special because the yield is worse than you assumed. Your average cheque drops every time a specific server is on the floor.

These are the corrections that add up to $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 a year. And they start with 20 minutes on Monday.

The numbers don't have to be perfect. They have to be consistent. Track them the same way every week. Same time, same sources, same notebook. Perfection isn't the point. Awareness is. Because most restaurants that close didn't fail suddenly. They drifted, one unnoticed week at a time.

Sources: Toast Canada, Snappy 2026 Labour Cost Projections, Square Canada Restaurant Report, Restaurants Canada, CRA Payroll.

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