Restaurant Revenue Calculator

Restaurant revenue comes down to three numbers: how many guests you serve, what each one spends, and how often you open the doors. This calculator multiplies them together and scales the result out to a week, a month and a year, so you can see what a change to any one of them is actually worth.

The monthly figure is the annual divided by twelve rather than the week times four — four weeks a month loses you a month of trading over a year, which is how projections quietly come in low.

Use an honest average

The most common way this calculation goes wrong is optimism about covers. A Friday night is not a Tuesday, and a projection built on your best service will miss by a wide margin across a year. Take a full recent week, divide covers by trading days, and use that.

The same goes for the ticket. Divide total sales by covers, not by checks — a party of four on one bill is four covers, and mixing the two denominators inflates the average. If you are not sure which you are looking at, the average ticket size definition walks through both.

Which lever to pull

Once you have a baseline, change one input at a time. Add ten covers a day and see what the year does. Add two to the average ticket and compare. In most dining rooms the ticket moves more easily than the cover count, because covers are capped by seats and service hours while the ticket is capped by nothing but what you put in front of the guest.

If covers are the binding constraint, the fix is usually turnover rather than square footage — the table turnover calculator shows how many times you are actually turning each table, and where the dead minutes are.

Revenue is not profit

This is a top-line projection. It says nothing about what you keep. Run the same covers and ticket through the break-even calculator to find the revenue you need before you make anything, and the profit margin calculator to see what is left at the bottom. A revenue number that grows while prime cost grows faster is not good news.