Your cost pulse.
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A dashboard across the invoices you saved before we retired the live decoder. Spot drift in your historical data, see category-share moves, and find the worst-offender week without opening QuickBooks. (No new captures — read the no-OCR guide for the manual workflow.)
No saved invoices in this browser. Cost Pulse reads invoices saved through the Invoice Decoder before we retired it on 2026-05-08. If you don’t have any, the dashboard has nothing to show.
Drift this week
Categories whose latest spend deviates by more than 15% from the rolling 4-week median. Big swings worth attention.
Recipe ripple
Dishes whose plate cost shifted ≥5% on your latest invoice update. The driver is named when we know which vendor's price moved.
Contract drift on plate
Dishes whose plate cost has moved off your negotiated contract. The driver list names which ingredient's vendor is over.
Trend across saved invoices
Each row is one category's spend trajectory across the invoices you've saved (oldest → newest). The number on the right is the change from first to last.
Most recent save
What this dashboard isn't.
Not your books. Cost Pulse only reads invoices that were saved through the Invoice Decoder before its 2026-05-08 retirement. It won't catch a forgotten invoice, won't sync to QuickBooks or Restaurant365, and won't reconcile against your bank.
Not benchmarked. The trends you see here are your data only. We don't pool data across operators, don't sell aggregated cost benchmarks, and don't backfill historical invoices into a future opt-in even if one ships.
vs Restaurant365 / MarginEdge: their dashboards live in their cloud and read everything you upload. Cost Pulse reads only what you've actively saved here, all encrypted with a key derived from your sign-in. The math is local.
Operator sheets that use this tool — printable, fillable, exports to CSV.
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Weekly Prime Cost Worksheet
The single most important number a small operator can track. Plug in food, beverage, and labor costs against net sales. See your prime cost percent and where it sits versus the 60 percent ceiling.
Open the sheet -
Daily Sales & Cover Recap
End-of-night close-out, one page per shift. Net sales, covers, voids, comps, cash over and short, weather note, manager initials.
Open the sheet
Why this tool exists.
Every check this tool runs maps to a specific concept in the Library. Two starting points — one definition, one playbook.
Contribution margin
what one sale of an item adds to covering fixed costs and profit
For a single menu item: sale price minus the variable cost of producing one unit (plated food cost). Reported in dollars (CM \$) and as a pe…
Read the definition GlossaryLabor cost
wages + payroll taxes, as a % of sales
Wages, payroll taxes, and the tipped-employee contribution expressed as a percentage of sales. Target 28–32% for most formats, with quick-se…
Read the definition GlossaryFixed costs
costs that don't scale with sales
Costs that don't change with sales volume: rent, insurance, loan payments, base utilities, SaaS subscriptions (POS, reservations, payroll, m…
Read the definition