Cleo · Free resource
Prime Cost Report
Prime cost is cost of goods plus labor, and it is the only large number on a restaurant P&L you can actually move inside a single week. Most operators calculate it monthly, once the month is already lost. This is the weekly workbook, rebuilt from a real bar and restaurant’s own file.
[Your Restaurant]
Prime Cost Worksheet · week of [start] to [end] · sample numbers, replace with your week
| SALES | TOTAL | % SALES | |||
| Food | $5,711 | 16.7% | |||
| Liquor | $26,443 | 77.5% | |||
| Bottle beer | $2,790 | 8.2% | |||
| Draft beer | $0 | 0.0% | |||
| Wine | $1,923 | 5.6% | |||
| Non-alcoholic and other | $0 | 0.0% | |||
| Gross sales | $36,867 | 100% | |||
| Less comps and discounts | ($2,726) | -7.4% | |||
| NET SALES | $34,141 | 92.6% | |||
| COST OF SALES | PURCHASES | % CAT | |||
| Meat | $0 | 0.0% | |||
| Seafood | $0 | 0.0% | |||
| Produce and dry goods | $1,610 | 28.2% | |||
| Liquor | $6,214 | 23.5% | |||
| Bottle and draft beer | $1,192 | 42.7% | |||
| Wine | $436 | 22.7% | |||
| TOTAL COST OF SALES | $9,452 | 27.7% | |||
| LABOR | WEEK | % SALES | |||
| Hourly wages | $8,192 | 24.0% | |||
| Salaried management | $2,400 | 7.0% | |||
| Payroll taxes and benefits | $1,742 | 5.1% | |||
| TOTAL LABOR | $12,334 | 36.1% | |||
| PRIME COST (net sales) | $21,786 | 63.8% | |||
| Gross margin | $12,355 | 36.2% | |||
The labor tabs never worked.
We rebuilt this from a working bar and restaurant’s weekly workbook. Seven tabs. Every invoice logged and split across sixteen categories, all year, without fail. And two tabs renamed “do not use”, which were the labor tabs, which is half of prime cost. The interesting part is why. It was not laziness. We pulled the formulas apart and those tabs were broken from the day the file was made.
Daily Labor Cost
Renamed “do not use” by the operator
| Cell | Formula | Result |
| D31 | Total labor hours | entered by hand |
| D32 | = Prime Cost Worksheet!F15 | empty cell |
| D33 | = IF(D32>0, D31/D32, 0) | 0.00 always |
| Sales per labor hour | $0.00 | |
| F15 on the source tab was never populated, so the divisor was always zero and the guard clause returned zero. No amount of careful data entry could ever produce a number here. | ||
Labor
Four totals off the payroll summary you already receive
| LABOR, WEEK TOTAL | AMOUNT | |
| Hourly wages | $8,192 | |
| Salaried management | $2,400 | |
| Payroll taxes and benefits | $1,742 | |
| Contract and event labor | $0 | |
| TOTAL LABOR | $12,334 | |
| % of net sales | 36.1% | |
| Every total is checked against its own parts, and any line that cannot reconcile says so on the face of the report instead of quietly reading zero. | ||
That is one of twenty defects we found and fixed. Others were quieter and worse: a labor total that silently dropped tips, a supplies column that belonged to no group total and so vanished from cost of sales entirely, and a variance row that averaged four percentages with four different denominators and reported 11.3% where the answer was 0.5%. A prime cost report that is wrong is more expensive than no report, because you act on it.
The report you get back.
Fill the invoice log and four labor totals. Everything below calculates itself, including the comparison to last week.
Prime cost, week ending [date]
| Cost line | This week | % of sales | Share | vs last week | Benchmark |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beverage cost | $7,842 | 23.0% | +1.4 pts | Over | |
| Food cost | $1,610 | 4.7% | −0.3 pts | In band | |
| Hourly wages | $8,192 | 24.0% | +2.1 pts | Over | |
| Salaried management | $2,400 | 7.0% | flat | In band | |
| Payroll taxes and benefits | $1,742 | 5.1% | +0.2 pts | In band | |
| Other cost of sales | $438 | 1.3% | −0.1 pts | — | |
| Prime cost | $22,224 | 65.1% | +3.3 pts | Over band |
Sample figures for layout only. Percentages run against net sales, after comps and discounts.
What is inside.
Seven tabs. Two you touch weekly, one you set up once, and a report tab with no input cells at all, so you can print it and hand it to a chef without anything getting broken.
Weekly Report, with no input cells
Prime cost against your benchmark, every variance in both points and dollars, and what this week's gap is worth annualised. Nothing on this tab can be typed into, so it is safe to print and hand to a chef or a GM without anything getting broken.
Invoice Log, where cost enters the workbook
Supplier, date, invoice total, then split across fourteen categories. A check column on every line must read 0.00, so an invoice that was not fully split is caught on the line it arrived on rather than three tabs downstream. A second check proves the category groups still add to the invoice total.
Weekly Input
Daily sales by category, comps, ending inventory, and labor as four totals off the payroll summary. Beginning inventory reads through from last week automatically, so nothing gets retyped. Guest count and an optional hours cell return average check and sales per labor hour.
Prior Week
Last week in one paste instead of a column of hand-typed figures. In the workbook this was rebuilt from, that column did not reconcile with itself: the parts summed to 148 against a stated total of 149, and one variance carried the wrong sign entirely.
13-Week Trend
The current week is live rather than waiting on a paste, twelve logged weeks sit behind it, and the averages are sales-weighted rather than an average of percentages. One week is an anecdote. The trend is the argument.
Setup & Benchmarks, and a Read Me
Service model, gross or net basis, burden rates and target overrides, with published ranges and sources beside each target. Picking a model repoints every benchmark in the file. Dropdowns instead of free text, so a typo cannot silently break a lookup.
Your target depends on what you run.
A bar and a fine dining room have no business chasing the same number. Pick your service model in the workbook and every benchmark repoints to it. Published sources genuinely disagree, so the range sits next to the target and both can be overridden.
| Service model | Food cost | Beverage cost | Labor | Prime cost target | Published range |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quick service | 28% | 20% | 28% | 57% | 55–62% |
| Fast casual | 29% | 21% | 30% | 59% | 55–65% |
| Full service | 31% | 24% | 33% | 63% | 58–67% |
| Fine dining | 34% | 27% | 35% | 65% | 60–72% |
| Bar led | 27% | 21% | 27% | 55% | 50–60% |
Compiled from White Hutchinson, Restaurant365, Restaurant Owner, 7shifts and The Fork CPAs. Sources and links are on the Setup tab of the workbook.
Who this is for.
- Independent bars and restaurants with one location and no controller on staff
- Operators whose bookkeeper closes monthly and reports a number six weeks after the week that produced it
- GMs held to a cost target who need to see the miss on Monday, not at month end
- Owners opening a second room who want the first one measured before they commit
Why weekly.
A month gives you one chance to correct course, and it arrives after the month is closed. Weekly prime cost turns a post mortem into a decision. If beverage cost runs four points hot in week one, you can change the pour, the price, or the order before it happens three more times. That is the entire argument for the cadence, and it is why the report is built around the week rather than the period.
Questions.
Is this really free?
Yes. Download it, rename it, use it every week. No watermark, no paywall, no usage limit. We ask for an email because it helps us understand who is using our templates.
Can I use this in Google Sheets instead of Excel?
Yes. Upload the .xlsx to Google Drive and open with Google Sheets. The cross-tab links, the variance formulas and the dropdowns all convert cleanly.
What do I have to fill in each week?
Your invoices in the log, your daily sales, and four labor totals off the payroll summary. Inventory counts if you take them. Everything else in the file reads through from those. Realistically it is the time it takes to code a stack of invoices, which is work you already do, plus about a minute for labor.
Do I need to count inventory every week?
Counting gives you true cost of goods: opening inventory plus purchases minus closing inventory. Skipping the count and using purchases alone is a reasonable proxy in a steady week, and plenty of operators run it that way. It breaks down exactly when it matters most, in the weeks you stock up for a holiday or run down before a close, where purchases overstate or understate what you actually consumed. The workbook accepts either and flags the weeks where the two diverge enough to distrust the number.
Should prime cost run against gross or net sales?
Practitioners genuinely split on this, and it is not a rounding difference. On the sample week in the workbook, flipping the basis moves prime cost from 63.8% of net sales to 62.6% of gross, a 1.25 point swing off a single setting. Net sales is the stricter and more common basis, because comps and discounts are revenue you never collected but still paid cost against. The workbook makes it a dropdown rather than an assumption, so whichever you pick, you know which one you picked and your weeks stay comparable.
What should my prime cost actually be?
It depends on what you run, and a bar and a fine dining room have no business chasing the same number. As rough bands: quick service around 57%, fast casual 59%, full service 63%, fine dining 65%, bar-led 55%. Published sources genuinely disagree, so the workbook shows the range next to the point target and every target has an override cell. Pick your service model on the Setup tab and every benchmark in the file repoints to it.
Why weekly instead of monthly?
A month gives you one chance to correct course and it arrives after the month is closed. Weekly turns a post mortem into a decision. If beverage cost runs four points hot in week one, you can change the pour, the price, or the order before it happens three more times.
What is the relationship to Cleo Pay?
This workbook tells you what your week cost. It does not pay anybody, and it only knows what you type into it. Cleo Pay handles the invoice side: bills captured and coded on arrival, approval routing, payment, and a QuickBooks sync, so the purchases half of prime cost stops being something you maintain by hand. The template is a standalone gift either way.
Cleo Pay
The purchases half, without the typing.
Every category total in this workbook starts as an invoice someone had to open, code, and key in. Cleo captures the bill on arrival, codes the line items, routes the approval, pays the vendor, and syncs to QuickBooks.