Restaurant Reports: The 5 Every Owner Should Track

What does it tell you? - Total sales today against yesterday - Number of invoices and the most ordered dishes today - How sales spread across the parts of the day

How do you turn it into smarter decisions? - Sales down = review the staff schedule and your promotions - Fewer invoices = possibly a marketing or competition problem - One dish spiking = order its ingredients ahead so you do not run out

Aim for a 5-minute read at the start of every day — no more.

This report exposes a truth that often comes as a surprise.

Your best-selling dish is not necessarily your most profitable one.

A real example: - A premium burger sells for SAR 45 and its ingredients cost SAR 30 = a margin of only SAR 15, or 33% - A lemonade sells for SAR 18 and costs SAR 3 = a margin of SAR 15, or 83%

Both earn SAR 15! But the lemonade is far more efficient.

What do you do with this report? - Point your marketing at the highest-margin dishes - Give the profitable dishes a different treatment on the menu so they stand out - Revisit the low-margin dishes: do you raise the price, or swap out the expensive ingredient?

Payroll is the second largest cost in a restaurant after food — and the hardest to manage.

What the report should show: - Sales by cashier or server - Actual hours worked against scheduled hours

Work out the payroll-to-revenue ratio yourself from the accounting reports in Snad; the healthy benchmark for restaurants should sit between 25 and 35% of revenue.

How do you use it? - Whoever sells more = reward them so you keep them - Whoever sells less = train them or redistribute their duties - Payroll above 35% = review the schedule and cut hours in the quiet periods

When are you packed? When are you empty?

This report shows: - How customers spread across the hours of the day and the days of the week - Peak and quiet periods, precisely - A comparison of seasons and occasions

In peak periods: - Make sure your strongest staff are on shift - Keep inventory complete - Consider taking bookings to manage the flow

In quiet periods: - Put fewer staff on shift - Run special offers to pull customers into those hours - Use the time for cleaning, prep and maintenance

One Riyadh restaurant saved 18% of its payroll costs simply by rebuilding the schedule around its time-period reports.

The food cost report gives you one number. The gap report gives you the reason.

Theoretical cost is what you should have consumed: each dish's recipe multiplied by the quantities sold at the point of sale (POS). Actual cost is what you really consumed: opening inventory + purchases − closing inventory.

The difference between the two is the gap, and it is the most expensive number in the restaurant because nobody invoices anyone for it.

Where does the gap usually come from? - Unchecked portion weights: twenty extra grams on every plate is invisible in the kitchen and very visible at month end - Prep waste, spoilage and expiry - Staff meals and hospitality that go unrecorded - Orders cancelled after they were prepared - Receiving discrepancies: the invoice says 20 kg and the scale says 18

Treat the gap with a weekly count of your ten most expensive items only, not a full count. Ten items take half an hour and cover most of your purchase value. Link it to the inventory module so the system works out the difference instead of you doing it by hand.

Do not compare your percentage against an outside benchmark. Compare the gap with itself, month by month: three consecutive months trending upward means a systematic leak, not a coincidence.

A report without a formula is just a screen of numbers. These are the formulas you should know by heart:

Pay attention to the word "net". Always calculate on sales before Value Added Tax (VAT) and after discounts and returns. Mixing gross with net is the most common error that makes a restaurant's ratios look better than they are.

To test your item margins quickly before you change the menu, use the profit margin calculator.

Your sales are not one block. A sale made in the dining room is not worth the same as a sale made through a delivery platform.

Deduct from each channel what genuinely belongs to it before you compare:

Do not rely on the rate quoted in the contract. Take the platform's monthly statement and divide the net amount transferred by the total value of the orders. The result is your effective commission, including the fees and the promotional discounts you agreed to during the month.

And for this comparison to work at all, set a channel code for every order in the point of sale from day one. Without that tagging, channel reports stay guesswork.

Some of your reports are not for management. They are a statutory obligation the restaurant is answerable for.

Source: Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA) — the VAT registration page, the Phase One readiness page, and the announcements for Wave 23 and Wave 25.

In practice: any restaurant whose taxable revenue exceeded SAR 187,500 in one of those years falls within Wave 25. Readiness details are on the Wave 25 page.

The waves that fall between these two were issued with their own thresholds and dates, so rely on the notice ZATCA sends you rather than on an estimate.

A wrong report is worse than no report, because you make a confident decision on a false number.

• The open "miscellaneous" button: every amount keyed in manually under a generic line disappears from the dish report. Give every item a button in its own name.
• A discount with no recorded reason: define the discount reasons (staff, complaint, promotion) and make selecting one mandatory. An unexplained discount eats the margin without leaving a trace.
• Cancellation after prep: the dish was made and its ingredients were consumed. If the cancellation is not logged as waste, the gap will show up in inventory with no known cause.
• Staff meals inside cost of sales: record them as a separate expense, otherwise the food cost percentage looks high with no explanation.
• Cash collection differences: compare the till close daily against the POS report and the payment network provider's advice. The same difference recurring on the same shift is not a coincidence.

Make reviewing these five a fixed item in every month-end close.

The dish profitability report ranks items by margin. The menu engineering matrix goes one step further: it crosses margin with popularity, so you come out with a ready decision for every item instead of a bare number.

Work out each item's share of sales within its own group: starters against starters, drinks against drinks. Comparing across groups lets drinks swallow the whole menu.

Delete with care. A losing item that a regular customer orders may be the reason a whole table walks in. Review the matrix every three months — an item needs a full cycle before you judge it.

The food cost percentage on its own does not pass judgement on a restaurant. The governing number is prime cost: the cost of goods consumed plus total labour cost, including social insurance, allowances and overtime.

Track it weekly, not monthly. A month exposes the problem thirty days after it happened; a week exposes it while you can still adjust the schedule and the orders.

Then turn your fixed costs into a daily number: rent, administrative salaries, subscriptions and electricity divided by the number of trading days in the month. Divide the result by the contribution margin ratio, that is (net sales − variable costs) ÷ net sales, to get the daily sales that cover your costs before profit begins.

This single number saves the cashier a whole spreadsheet: if today did not reach it, you lost money today, however good the traffic looked. To test different rent or pricing scenarios, use the break-even calculator.

The salary written in the contract is not what the employee costs. Add to it the fixed statutory obligations that must appear in the labour report before you calculate its ratio to sales:

Source: General Organisation for Social Insurance (GOSI) — the awareness platform and the FAQ pages, and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development — the knowledge centre.

The occupational hazards branch is mandatory for all workers regardless of nationality, while the pensions branch applies to Saudis. In practice the insurance cost differs from one employee to another in the same kitchen, so do not calculate it as a single rate across the whole payroll. Accrue end-of-service gratuity monthly instead of letting it hit you in one payment, and record housing and visas inside labour cost rather than general expenses. Load these items into payroll so the number comes out right the first time.

The most expensive leak in restaurants does not happen in the kitchen. It happens on the supplier's invoice. The supplier raises the price per kilo by SAR 2, and the invoice is paid as it stands because nobody compares.

Build a simple report: the unit price on the latest goods receipt against its average price over the past three months, multiplied by the quantity you buy monthly. The result is a clear impact in SAR that earns a phone call to the supplier.

Watch four items alongside it: - The quantity difference between the purchase order and the goods receipt note - A drop in pack weight while its price stays the same - One item bought from two suppliers at two different prices in the same month - An invoice paid with no purchase order behind it

Receive goods on the scale, not on a signature, and do not let the person who receives the goods be the one who approves the invoice. Link purchase orders to receiving in purchases so the system stops any invoice that contradicts the order before payment rather than after it.

The two worst shelves in a restaurant: a shelf holding an item that has not moved in a month, and an empty shelf for an item ordered every day. Both are losses, wearing different faces.

For every critical item, write three numbers on its card: average daily usage, supplier lead time in days, and safety stock. Reorder point = (daily usage × lead time) + safety stock. Order when you hit the point, not when the shelf empties in the middle of a rush.

On the other side, print two lists every week: items not consumed in the past two weeks, and items approaching their expiry date. Move them through a daily special or through recorded staff meals rather than binning them with no accounting trace. To set order points for your own items, use the reorder point calculator.

Reports fail because they have no owner and no slot. Give every report a single reader and a single number the decision hangs on.

Write the decision that came out of each review in one line, next to its date. The restaurants that improve are not the ones with the most reports. They are the ones that act on one decision a week and follow its effect in the next report.