Vast CFO

Labor Day weekend is the last clean read you get on summer, and with more than one location it is the only weekend all year where every site runs the same play at the same time.

Write down four numbers per location before Tuesday: covers, average check, labor % and food cost. Nothing else.

Then stop comparing each site to last year and compare them to each other. Same holiday, same weather, same menu. If one location's labor % is four points above the others, that is not seasonality. That is a scheduling habit at one site, and you now know which one.

Group averages hide this every single time. The weekend where conditions are identical across the group is the weekend the differences are real.

Have a good one out there.

Pull your merchant processing fees as a percentage of revenue. If you're at or above 3%, you're funding your processor more than most restaurant operators realize.

On a $2M revenue restaurant, that's $60K a year. Across a four-location group, you're looking at real money quietly leaving the business every month.

The usual fixes most restaurant operators never get around to: renegotiate the rate with your current processor (they have room and won't volunteer it), pull a competing quote every 18 months as leverage, audit the statement for surcharges that crept in (PCI non-compliance fees, batch fees, gateway fees, hidden interchange markup), and look at surcharging programs where your state and concept allow it.

Few operators audit the merchant statement at the same cadence they audit food and labor. That's the gap.

Full breakdown on the blog: https://www.vastcfo.com/merchant-processing-fees-for-restaurants/

August is the right month for restaurant operators to do a mid-year prime cost check, before the summer ends and the back-half of the year locks in.

Prime cost (food plus labor as a percentage of sales) is the one number that tells you whether the restaurant is structurally healthy. The target most full-service operators benchmark against is 60% to 65%. Quick service runs lower. Fine dining can run higher.

The mid-year check is simple but rarely done. Pull your trailing six months of P&L. Calculate prime cost monthly, not as a six-month average. Look for the trend. If it's drifting up 1% to 2% month over month, you have a creep problem, and creep at that rate compounds into a real margin hit by December.

The operators who hit their year-end profitability targets usually catch the drift in August. The ones who miss usually catch it in October when there isn't enough runway left to correct.

One blended budget across four locations will hide the one that is losing money. Usually for about nine months.

That is the cost of budgeting at the group level. Say location three runs a 68% prime cost while locations one and two sit at 61%. The consolidated number comes out looking acceptable, so nobody goes looking, because on paper nothing is wrong.

Build it per location. Fixed costs, prime cost target, and the covers each site needs to clear both. Then consolidate. The consolidation is the report. It is not the budget.

August and September are when this is possible. You have twelve months of clean history, a real read on autumn traffic, and enough quiet to think. In December you will be short staffed and working off a P&L distorted by the busiest weeks of the year.

https://www.vastcfo.com/restaurant-budgeting/

Selling a gift card is not revenue. It is a debt.

Worth sorting out now, because most restaurant gift card programs get planned in September and the accounting mistake gets baked in for the whole holiday season.

When a guest buys a $100 card, you have their cash but you still owe them $100 of food and drink. That belongs in a gift card liability account, not in sales. When the card is redeemed months later, the revenue is recorded but no new cash arrives, because it already did.

Book it as revenue on day one and two things happen. December looks better than it was, and your POS to bank reconciliation stops working, because the sales figure includes money that was never a sale.

Separate the sale from the redemption and both months tell the truth.

https://www.vastcfo.com/reconcile-restaurant-pos-sales-and-bank-deposits/

Your best selling dish and your most profitable dish are usually not the same dish.

Here is the trap most restaurant operators fall into. A chicken sandwich moves 1,000 units a month at a 32% food cost. A steak entree moves 200 at 28%. On a spreadsheet the steak looks like the better item. In reality the sandwich is carrying your rent.

Percentage tells you how efficient a dish is. Volume times margin tells you how many actual dollars it puts toward fixed costs. Menu decisions made on percentage alone quietly promote the wrong items.

Pull your P&L next to your POS mix report and rank items by total contribution, not by food cost %. The list will surprise you, and it usually reorders what your servers should be recommending tonight.

https://www.vastcfo.com/restaurant-menu-pricing/

Same vendor. Four locations. Four different sets of payment terms. Nobody has ever put them side by side.

It happens because each site was opened at a different time by a different person, and terms got set once and never revisited. Meanwhile you are the vendor's largest account and you are being priced like four small ones.

Pull every invoice from your two biggest suppliers across all locations, add up the annual volume, and go back to them with one number instead of four. Net 15 or net 30 across the group does not change what you spend. It changes when you spend it, which is usually the actual problem.

One rule makes the ask credible: do what you said you would do. Pay on the date you promised, at every location, every time.

https://www.vastcfo.com/managing-trade-payables-restaurant/

Every seat in your restaurant is either earning or costing you. There is no third option.

RevPASH, revenue per available seat hour, is the number that shows you which. Take a 50 seat room open five hours a night. A $5,000 Friday works out to $20 per seat per hour. Healthy for most concepts sits somewhere between $20 and $30.

The useful part is not the Friday number. It is Wednesday. When RevPASH collapses midweek, that is not a slow night, that is 250 seat hours you are paying rent on and not selling.

August is the right month to look. Summer traffic is thinning and the pattern shows up clearly before you set autumn staffing.

More restaurant KPIs worth tracking: https://www.vastcfo.com/restaurant-kpis-2025/

Four locations, four POS reports, one bank login, and a number that has never once matched.

That is not a bookkeeping failure. Your POS records every sale the moment it rings in. Your bank only shows what actually landed, after each processor took its cut and after the weekend cards finished settling. Run four locations and you are stacking four different settlement timelines on top of each other.

Reconciling the consolidated total is where operators get stuck. It cannot be done. Reconcile by location first, then by payment method inside each one. Cash to cash deposits. Card sales to that location's processor batches. Delivery apps on their own line.

Do it that way and the gap stops being a mystery. It becomes one slow processor at your newest site, which is a thing you can actually fix.

Full walkthrough here: https://www.vastcfo.com/reconcile-restaurant-pos-sales-and-bank-deposits/

Break-even is not a dollar figure. It is a number of people walking through your door.

Say your fixed costs run $40,000 a month and your variable costs eat 60% of every sale. That leaves 40 cents on the dollar to cover rent, insurance and salaried payroll. Divide $40,000 by 0.40 and you need $100,000 in sales to break even.

At a $30 average check that is 3,333 guests. Across 30 operating days, about 111 covers a day.

Now it is a number your GM can act on. Nobody can chase $100,000. Everybody understands 111 covers.

Post it where the team can see it. That one translation does more for a restaurant than another spreadsheet ever will.

Run yours: https://www.vastcfo.com/when-will-my-restaurant-break-even/