What Should a Restaurant Track Every Night? A GM's Checklist

By Angelo & Christie · EON Report

Quick test: what happened in your restaurant last Thursday night?

Not the till total. You can pull that up in ten seconds. I mean the why. Why was it slower than the Thursday before? Who was on the floor? What did the kitchen run out of? What did you tell the opening manager?

If your honest answer is "I'd have to scroll back through the WhatsApp group", you're in good company. That's how most of us ran our restaurants for years.

The till tells you what. It never tells you why.

Your POS gives you sales and covers in seconds. What it can't tell you is that you ran two on the floor for a full house, that the walk-in was playing up, or that a regular left unhappy.

That lives in the closing manager's head. And when that manager moves on, it goes with them.

Picture a Thursday: 176 covers, two people on the floor. The till says record night. The closing note says "we left money on the table".

That one line is worth more than the sales figure next to it, because it's a reason, and a reason is something you can fix at the next rota meeting.

What to track in a restaurant every night

Keep it to what you'll genuinely fill in at 11:30pm after a double. This is the list we landed on:

1. 1Sales vs target, net of comps and voids
2. 2Covers and spend per head. Are you busy, or are people spending less?
3. 3Labour, as hours or as a percentage of sales
4. 4Waste and comps, in pounds, not "a few bits"
5. 5Kitchen and food safety. Fridge temps logged, food labelled and dated, surfaces cleaned down
6. 6Front of house. Toilets, tables, dining room reset
7. 7Issues, and what you did about them
8. 8Handover to the next manager. The one nearly everyone skips

Two numbers worth knowing

What's a good prime cost for a restaurant?

Prime cost is food plus labour, as a share of sales. For a full-service restaurant, around 60–65% is the usual benchmark for healthy. If you only watch one ratio, watch this one, because food cost can look fine while labour quietly eats the margin (or the other way round).

A word of honesty: don't stress about perfect food cost every night. Unless you're stock-counting daily, nightly cost of goods is mostly guesswork. Labour and waste are the two you can actually see in real time.

What about waste?

WRAP's research on UK hospitality put food waste at roughly £10,000 per outlet per year, and found that around three-quarters of the food wasted was avoidable. That study dates from 2013, so take the exact figure with a pinch of salt. The point stands: if you're not writing waste down every night, you can't cut it.

The part everyone skips: the handover

Closing managers are exhausted. Opening managers walk in cold. Somewhere in between, the broken fridge, the VIP booking and the delivery that never showed up fall into the gap.

A written handover, filled in the same place every night, is the cheapest fix there is. It also means your ops manager, your owner, or you on your day off can read what happened without texting anyone. And when the next GM starts (because in hospitality, they always do), the history is still there.