Five numbers to check every Monday
The short list that predicts whether your week made money.
Most restaurant owners already have a Monday habit: check yesterday's deposit, glance at the schedule for the week, maybe skim last week's sales total. That's a start, but it won't catch a problem while it's still small. Five numbers, checked in the same order every Monday, tell you almost everything you need to know about how the week went.
None of these require pulling a new report or learning a system. Toast already has all five sitting in its standard reports; the habit is in checking them together, in the same order, on the same morning, rather than opening one report when something already feels off.
1. Prime cost percentage
Add your labor cost and your cost of goods sold together, then divide by total sales. That's prime cost, the single number that predicts whether you'll have money left after rent, insurance, and everything else that isn't food or people. A full-service restaurant running in the mid-50s to low-60s, as a percentage of sales, is in normal range. Above that for more than a week or two is worth a closer look.
2. Labor cost percentage
Wage cost divided by sales for the week. This moves around more than owners expect, since a slow Tuesday with a full schedule can spike the percentage even though the total dollar amount looks fine. Watch the trend across three or four weeks rather than reacting to any single one.
3. Food cost percentage
Cost of goods sold divided by sales. If this number is climbing and nothing on the menu changed, the usual suspects are portion sizes drifting, waste going unlogged, or a vendor price increase nobody caught. Worth a look at the invoices before assuming the worst.
4. Comp and void percentage
Every comp, void, and discount for the week, divided by gross sales. Most healthy restaurants sit under a few percent. A number that's creeping up without an event or promotion behind it is usually a pattern tied to one shift or one person authorizing them, worth a direct look before it becomes a habit.
5. Cash over or short
The gap between what Toast expects in the drawer and what got counted, tracked by shift rather than as one lump total for the week. A few dollars here and there is normal. The same register or the same shift running short week after week is the signal worth acting on, not the dollar amount itself.
Why weekly beats monthly
A monthly P&L catches a labor problem after it's already three or four weeks old. Checking these five numbers every Monday, even in five minutes with a notebook or a spreadsheet tab, catches the same problem while it's still cheap to fix. None of this needs a finance background. It needs doing the same way, on the same day, every week, so you're comparing against last week instead of starting from zero each time.
Going deeper
These five numbers are the entry point, not the whole system. They tell you when to look closer, not always why. A prime cost that jumped could mean a training-heavy week, a vendor price change, or a scheduling mistake, and telling those apart takes a little more digging than one Monday number.
The full accounting playbook in KJDC membership walks through a daily close routine you can do from your phone, a step-by-step process for pulling each of these five numbers straight from Toast's reports, and a monthly close checklist for handing a clean package to your bookkeeper instead of a shoebox of receipts.