Unit economics and margins across multiple locations
Cost of goods, waste, and reporting that arrives early enough to act on rather than early enough to explain.
11 playbooks 1 tool
On this page
Why is your P&L too late to act on?
A monthly P&L reports a period that has already closed. Every decision it might have changed was made weeks ago, and the money is spent.
It is also aggregated. By the time eight units become one statement, a good unit and a struggling unit have cancelled each other out and the total looks unremarkable.
The fix is not a faster P&L. It is picking two or three numbers you can see weekly per unit, and accepting that they will be approximate. An approximate number on Tuesday beats an exact one next month.
Where does margin actually leak?
Portioning and waste, usually. Neither shows up as a line item, because both appear as cost of goods being slightly high, everywhere, all the time.
The second leak is price drift. Supplier prices move in small increments and menu prices do not, so a dish that was profitable when you costed it quietly stops being profitable without anything appearing to change.
The third is buying the same item at different prices across units. Nobody notices, because each invoice looks reasonable on its own and nobody compares them side by side.
What should you compare between units?
Percentages, not totals. A bigger unit will always have bigger numbers, so raw figures tell you about size rather than performance.
Compare cost of goods as a percentage of sales, labor as a percentage of sales, and sales per labor hour. Those three separate a unit that is busy from a unit that is well run.
Then look at the spread rather than the average. The gap between your best and worst unit is the actual opportunity, because your best unit has already proved the number is reachable in your business.
How often should you look at a unit's numbers?
Weekly for the few that can still be changed: labor percentage, cost of goods, sales against forecast. Monthly for everything else.
Daily is usually a trap. Daily numbers are noisy, one bad Tuesday means nothing, and reacting to noise trains managers to manage the report instead of the unit.
Set the threshold that triggers a conversation before you look, not after. Deciding what counts as a problem while staring at a number you dislike is how every unit ends up with an exception.
Tools
Free, no email required.
Food waste analyzer
Estimate what waste is costing per location from your own figures, and see which items drive it.
Playbooks
Step by step, for one specific job each.
Ask your P&L a question in plain English
Ask which units ran food cost above your threshold last month and get an answer, without a dashboard or an analyst.
Daily morning digest, one number and what moved
One message each morning with the metric that matters most and the few things that changed overnight.
Unit-vs-unit benchmarking
Find what your strongest units do differently and make it visible to the rest.
AI anomaly detection in financials
Catch the small margin slip in a unit that is otherwise performing well, while it is still small.
Recipe-level cost variance
Find the dishes quietly losing margin as supplier prices drift, and adjust yields before raising prices.
Predictive ordering by SKU
Suggested purchase order lines tied to a demand forecast. The manager approves rather than builds.
Expiry and spoilage alerts
A daily list of items at risk per unit, with the move to make on each one: sell, transfer or comp.
Multi-unit inventory rebalancing
Move slow stock from one unit to another before either has to write it off.
Next-quarter revenue forecasting
Trailing data plus seasonality producing a forecast you can budget against.
Custom updates per manager
Each manager gets their own digest with their own numbers, instead of a shared dashboard nobody opens.
Build dashboards by chatting with your data
Describe the view you want in plain language, get the chart, and keep the ones you reuse.