Restaurants run on thin margins and fast cash. Waiting for month-end financials means problems compound for three or four weeks before you see them. A weekly review keeps you ahead of the numbers instead of reacting to them after the damage is done.

Start with sales by category. Break the week into food, beverage (alcohol separated from non-alcohol), and any other revenue streams like merchandise or private events. Compare to the same week last year and to your budget. Look at daypart performance too. A dinner-heavy week with weak lunch sales tells a different story than the opposite, and that detail shapes how you staff and market.

Labor cost is the next number. Pull total labor dollars (wages, payroll taxes, benefits) as a percentage of sales for the week. Most full-service restaurants target 28 to 35 percent depending on concept. Quick service runs lower. If you’re a few points above target, the schedule needs adjustment now, not after payroll runs twice more.

Food cost percentage comes from a weekly inventory count. Beginning inventory plus purchases minus ending inventory, divided by food sales. Skipping the count and estimating defeats the purpose. The number you want depends on concept, but consistency week over week matters more than hitting a magic percentage. A jump from 30 to 34 percent means waste, theft, portioning issues, or a price increase from a vendor you missed.

Prime cost ties food and labor together. Add cost of goods sold and total labor, then divide by sales. This is the single number that tells you whether the restaurant can be profitable at current sales volume. Most operators want prime cost at or below 60 to 65 percent. If you’re at 70, no amount of rent negotiation or marketing fixes the underlying problem.

Comps and voids deserve attention every week. Pull a report by employee and by reason code. Comps for genuine service recovery are part of running a restaurant. Comps that cluster around specific servers, specific shifts, or vague reasons are a red flag. Voids work the same way. A manager who voids 30 transactions a week is either covering mistakes, training problems, or something worse.

Cash over/short tracks the difference between what the register says should be in the drawer and what’s actually there. Small variances happen. Patterns don’t. Consistent shortages on one shift or one cashier need investigation. Consistent overages can mean transactions aren’t being rung up properly, which is its own problem.

Delivery app fees need their own line of review. Third-party platforms take 15 to 30 percent of each order, and the deposits hit your bank net of fees, commissions, marketing charges, and adjustments. Pull the weekly statements from each platform and compare gross sales reported to net deposits. Margin on delivery orders is often half what dine-in produces, and if you don’t track it separately you’ll never know which channels are actually profitable.

Cash position closes the review. How much is in operating accounts, what’s owed in the next two weeks for payroll, rent, sales tax, and major vendor payments, and what’s expected to come in. Restaurants that go under usually saw it coming in the cash flow weeks before the financials caught up. A simple weekly forecast prevents most of those surprises.

Pulling these numbers manually every week takes hours and most owners give up after a few months. The cleaner approach is having your books and reports built so the weekly review takes 30 minutes. That requires accounting set up specifically for how restaurants and bars operate, not generic categories that lump everything together. Gina spent years as CFO of a local restaurant chain before founding our small business accounting, bookkeeping and tax services in Jacksonville, NC, and the weekly review structure is something we set up for restaurant clients so the numbers actually drive decisions instead of just sitting in a report no one reads.