Free restaurant prime cost tracker
Food plus labour as a share of sales, week by week. The two lines that decide whether a restaurant makes money.
Rent is fixed. Utilities barely move. Prime cost — cost of goods plus total labour — is the part you can actually change, and it is where profit is won or quietly lost. Checked monthly, a bad trend has already cost you a month. Checked weekly, you can usually point at the thing that caused it.
Download the weekly tracker
.xlsx — 13 weeks, Excel / Google Sheets / Numbers
⬇ Download free — no emailThe mistake that makes most templates useless
Plenty of free trackers ask for your purchases and call that cost of goods sold. It isn’t.
COGS = opening inventory + purchases − closing inventory
Why it matters more than it sounds. Take a $2,000 delivery on the Friday of a slow week and your "food cost" spikes — even though you haven’t cooked any of it. Run the walk-in down over Christmas and your food cost looks brilliant, right up until you restock.
Purchases-only templates produce a food cost % that swings for reasons that have nothing to do with the kitchen. Operators then go looking for waste, portioning problems or theft that were never there. Counting inventory movement is what turns the number into a signal instead of noise.
What the sheet tracks each week
- Net sales — everything is a percentage of this.
- True COGS — opening inventory, food and beverage purchases, closing inventory.
- Food & beverage % of sales.
- Total labour — hourly wages, salaries, and payroll taxes & benefits. Leaving taxes and benefits out is the other common way a tracker flatters you, and they are not small.
- Labour % of sales.
- Prime cost % — and anything over your target turns red automatically.
- Thirteen weeks, so a full quarter fits on one screen and trends are visible.
A worked week, from the file
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Net sales | $42,000 |
| Opening inventory + purchases − closing ($8,500 + $12,400 − $8,100) | $12,800 |
| Food & beverage % | 30.5% |
| Labour ($11,200 wages + $3,400 salaries + $2,900 taxes & benefits) | $17,500 |
| Labour % | 41.7% |
| Prime cost | 72.1% |
A 30.5% food cost looks respectable on its own — which is exactly why food cost alone is a misleading thing to watch. Labour at 41.7% pushes prime cost to 72.1%, well past a 60% target, and that restaurant is in trouble despite a perfectly normal-looking kitchen.
What to do when prime cost is too high
- Find out which half it is. Food and labour need completely different responses, and the split tells you immediately.
- If it’s food: cost your dishes properly first — the plate cost calculator handles yield, which is where the hidden cost usually sits — then look at your worst offenders with menu engineering.
- If it’s labour: compare scheduled hours against actual sales by daypart. Overstaffing a quiet Tuesday costs the same as a supplier price rise and is far easier to fix.
- If it’s both, and sales are falling: the problem is usually sales, not cost. Cutting further into a shrinking top line rarely ends well.
Common questions
What counts as labour?
Hourly wages, salaried management, payroll taxes and benefits. If you leave taxes and benefits out, your labour % can look several points better than reality.
Do I have to count inventory every week?
For a genuinely accurate number, yes — and a consistent partial count of your highest-value items beats a perfect count you only do occasionally.
What target should I use?
Full service commonly sits around 60–65%; quick service usually lower. Set your own in the sheet — the target cell drives the colour coding.
Is anything I type sent anywhere?
No. It’s a file on your computer. This site has no trackers, no analytics and no cookies.
The rest of the free set: the plate cost calculator and recipe costing sheet, and the menu engineering template.