Three sheets,
then everything else.
The Operator Sheets layer is thirty-one printable forms across five packs. If you are new to running the numbers in your own restaurant, three of them carry the trunk — everything else branches off them. Fill these three for two weeks, and the rest of the catalog stops feeling like homework.
Three sheets to fill before any of the others
A weekly number, a daily ledger, and a dish-level decision. The three together form the smallest closed loop a kitchen needs to know whether it is making money. Every other sheet in the catalog assumes you already have these three in motion.
-
The trunk number
Weekly Prime Cost Worksheet
Net sales, COGS, fully-loaded labor — the one number that decides whether the rest of your P&L can survive the month. Run it Tuesday morning, closing the prior week. The healthy band sits 55–65%; anything above 65% is a margin emergency.
Why this comes first: if prime cost is wrong, every other sheet is theater. The dish you priced doesn’t matter if labor is eating your margin elsewhere.
Open the sheet -
The daily rhythm
Daily Sales Recap
Net sales, voids, comps, drawer over/short. Five minutes at close, every shift. After two weeks the patterns become loud — the server who voids three times more than anyone else, the Tuesdays that always run light, the Saturday nights where the cash drawer drifts.
Why this comes second: the weekly prime cost is a verdict; the daily recap is the trail of evidence behind it. The two together are how you know what to do on Wednesday morning.
Open the sheet -
The dish-level decision
Recipe Cost Card
Ingredients, AP prices, yield, and a target food-cost percent — the sheet returns the price that holds your margin without you guessing. Run it on every dish you are about to reprice, every dish you are about to add to the menu, and every dish that just lost an ingredient to a vendor change.
Why this comes third: with prime cost as the verdict and the daily recap as the evidence, the recipe cost card is the lever. The slider on yield will tell you what winter chickens are about to do to your half-roast price.
Open the sheet
How the three fit a real week
- Mon–SunClose each shift with the daily sales recap. Five minutes per shift. Print or save to your Workshop — the data lives in your browser unless you save it.
- Tuesday AMRun the weekly prime cost worksheet on the prior week. Fifteen minutes. The verdict band tells you whether the next week needs intervention or just attention.
- As neededWhenever a vendor price moves, a dish gets added, or you are deciding whether to raise a price — run the recipe cost card on the affected SKUs. The yield slider is the most important control on the page.
After two weeks of this, the rest of the catalog opens up: the third-party channel P&L if you run delivery, the GBP monthly audit if Google traffic matters, the no-show log if reservations carry your Friday night. Each of those is a branch off the trunk you just established.
Once the trunk is in your rhythm
Branch into the packs. Each pack is built around a different question, not a different department.
Operations & Margin
Where money goes — food, labor, channel costs, monthly P&L. Nine sheets.
Local SEO & Discovery
Where customers find you — GBP, citations, geo-pages, posts. Five sheets.
Conversions & Reservations
What happens when they arrive — website checkpoints, no-shows, daypart traffic. Five sheets.
Brand & Design
What the room and the menu say — assets, voice, photo briefs. Six sheets.
Trust & Reviews
How you handle what people say — review log, complaint root-cause, incident report. Six sheets.
All thirty-one sheets →
The full catalog — live sheets carry the same kit: print, CSV, Workshop save.