Start with your daily sales report rolled up for the week. You want to see total revenue broken down by day, by daypart (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and by category (food, alcohol, merchandise). Compare this week to last week and to the same week last year. Patterns emerge quickly when you see them side by side. A Tuesday that’s 20% below normal tells you something happened worth investigating.

Food cost percentage is the report that separates profitable restaurants from ones that struggle. Take your beginning inventory, add purchases, subtract ending inventory, and divide by food sales. Your target depends on your concept but most restaurants aim for 28-35%. If you’re at 32% one week and 38% the next, something went wrong. Waste, theft, portioning issues, or price changes from vendors. You need to know immediately, not at month end when it’s too late to fix.

Labor cost percentage matters just as much. Take total labor costs including wages, taxes, and benefits and divide by total sales. Most restaurants run 25-35% depending on service style. Review scheduled hours versus actual hours worked. If you scheduled 400 hours and paid for 450, someone is clocking in early or staying late without approval. Weekly review catches this before it compounds.

Prime cost combines food and labor as a percentage of sales. This single number tells you more about your restaurant’s health than almost anything else. Keep it under 65% and you have room for rent, utilities, and profit. Let it creep above 70% and you’re heading toward trouble. Restaurant accounting should make this number easy to see at a glance every week.

Cash position isn’t glamorous but it keeps you open. Know exactly how much cash you have in the bank, what bills are coming due in the next two weeks, and whether you can cover payroll. Restaurants fail more often from cash flow problems than from lack of customers. A simple report showing bank balance minus upcoming obligations tells you where you stand.

Accounts payable aging shows which vendor invoices are outstanding and how long they’ve been waiting. Review this weekly to avoid late fees, maintain good relationships with suppliers, and catch invoices that were entered twice by accident. Vendors who supply restaurants talk to each other. Being known as slow to pay eventually affects the terms you get.

Inventory variance compares what your POS system says you should have used to what you actually used based on physical counts. If the system shows you sold 100 steaks but inventory dropped by 115, you have waste, theft, or a counting problem. Weekly inventory counts for high-value items catch shrinkage before it becomes a significant loss.

Sales mix analysis shows which menu items sell and which sit. If a dish costs more to make than others but isn’t selling enough to justify the prep, you need to know quickly. This report also reveals opportunities. An appetizer that’s suddenly popular might warrant a larger portion as an entree option.

These reports don’t need to take hours to review. Most can be generated from your POS system and accounting software in minutes. The discipline is carving out 30 to 60 minutes every week, ideally the same day, to actually look at them and ask questions about what you see.

The biggest mistake restaurant owners make is reviewing numbers monthly or quarterly when the business operates daily. By the time you see a monthly report showing food cost ran 5% high, you’ve already lost thousands. Weekly review gives you time to adjust ordering, fix portioning problems, or address labor scheduling before small issues become big losses.

Working with Andover, MA advisory services that understand restaurant operations can help you set up these reports once and automate as much as possible. The goal is making weekly review easy enough that you actually do it, not creating a system so complicated you avoid it.