We currently use ClickBacon for running reports on COGS, labor cost, prime cost, etc. -- in conjunction with spreadsheets that we have designed to track specific metrics that are important to us (including COGS and labor costs week over week). We also use several other tools from Bacon/The Restaurant Boss for evaluating our menu (based on popularity/profitability), working on price adjustments, etc.
Recently we've been developing our own tools for par sheets, prep lists, and order guides.
To do our reports, I end up pulling information from Square -- from the sales reports and the labor cost reports primarily -- and importing them into separate spreadsheets to run comparisons and evaluate our progress.
Can confirm we do something very similar to @mksavage! We use a range of tools because it's near impossible to find that one piece of software which covers all of our bases.
We're more of a QSR than an actual restaurant and use:
- Square POS with permissions enabled for the whole team to keep them accountable for daily sales targets
- Square KDS because printer hardware is expensive and I would get recurring nightmares about paper tickets going missing
- timecard management via Square Team which I sometimes have to manually correct because people forget to include breaks/clock-in/out
- Xero for bookkeeping; also great for exporting accurate reports to stakeholders like our accountant and insurance broker
A lot of our communication, team management and filling out of par sheets happens in Notion though. And that includes how I calculate for COGs:
There's probably a lot of inefficiencies built into how we do things but I've reconciled myself to the fact there's no perfect system!
Happy to provide further detail,
@QuokkaCoffee -- Really appreciated seeing your Notion sheets for tracking costs. I've never used Notion before (we currently do something very similar in Google Sheets). In the "Ingredients" column on the 2nd sheet, is it pulling the cost of each item listed (ice, cup, etc.) and then building the recipe/cost at the same time? Instead of having to manually do the math each time?
Wow, this is so interesting @QuokkaCoffee! It sounds like you've built a really intuitive and helpful too. I love how it's possible to use the databases for cross-purposes like creating par sheets, etc. That would be so helpful!
Sounds like I also need to look into David Scott Peters -- I'd never heard of him, but it seems like he has some helpful guidance! We've learned a lot from The Restaurant Boss, but we're in the same boat -- we were never taught how to do the costing (or many other things), we sort of fell into restaurant ownership and have been figuring it out as we go along (and are also often convinced we're not doing it right). Thank you so much for sharing, you've given me a lot to think about!
Hi @Ramsey_A! Thanks for the follow-up!
- Yes, I manually pull daily category sales reports to upload to ClickBacon. For labor, I look at the daily Labor & Tips report and manually add up BOH & FOH labor and input those numbers into Bacon so we can see the breakdown by team.
- Ideally, I think there could be a component that combines the offerings of ClickBacon and Square. Since Square already has the labor & sales reports, it would be nice to be able to just input our purchases (based on vendor invoices) and then run reports evaluating prime cost & profitability.
- It's quite possible this exists and I just haven't found it yet, but is there actually a way to compare weeks to each other, showing the difference in sales? For example, we're open Tuesday-Sunday, so can I pull a report that shows me (either in graph or number form) a comparison of every Tuesday-Sunday time period for the whole year? This would be very helpful instead of having to manually record those numbers (by going week by week in sales reports) and creating our own graph/comparison.
- Additionally, it would be helpful to be able to compare (in the Square dashboard) two specific dates to each other. For example, how did Father's Day this year compare to Father's Day last year in terms of items sold, total sales, etc.
I hope this all makes sense! Thanks so much for your work on it!
