Sales per labour hour, by shift and by section

The monthly accounts show labour at thirty-two per cent of sales, a little higher than the owner would like. That figure says labour is a problem but not where. Is it the quiet weekday lunches, the bar on a Sunday, the kitchen on Saturdays, the hour before opening? Sales per labour hour answers that. Divide the sales of a shift, or a section, by the hours worked in it, and the places where labour outruns trade stand out at once.

It is the simplest labour efficiency number a restaurant has, and one of the most useful. It needs only two things the venue already has: sales and hours. Looked at by shift and by section, and hour by hour through the day, it shows which parts of the week earn their labour and which do not, and it points straight at the hours where a change to the rota would save money without harming service.

This guide covers how to calculate sales per labour hour, how to read it by shift and by section, the hours of the day when it always falls and what to do about them, and how it links to labour cost percentage and covers per labour hour. Every venue and figure in it is an example.

Sales per labour hour measures how much revenue each hour of labour produced. If a dinner service took 2,400 pounds and the team worked 60 hours, it produced 40 pounds of sales for each hour worked. If another service took the same with 80 hours, it produced 30.

It is a form of productivity, output per unit of input, with sales as the output and hours as the input. It does not say whether the venue was profitable, but it says clearly whether the hours worked matched the trade.

Most labour measures need extra data: wage rates, employer costs, covers, ticket times. This one needs only sales and hours. That makes it easy to calculate for any shift, any section and any hour, and easy to compare across weeks.

Its simplicity is also its limit. It ignores what each hour costs, which is why it is best read alongside labour cost percentage. But as a first look at where labour is going, nothing is quicker.

The sum is sales divided by labour hours, for the same period. Take a shift's sales from the till and its hours from the rota or timesheets, and divide. Do the same for each shift over a few weeks, and you will see the venue's normal pattern.

Use the hours actually worked, not the hours planned. A rota that planned 60 hours but ran to 68 because people stayed late gives a misleading figure if the planned hours are used.

Decide which sales figure to use and stick to it. Many venues use sales before tax, because tax is not the venue's money. Some exclude service charges, which go to the team. Whatever you choose, use the same definition every week, so the figure is comparable.

Note your definition beside the figures, so anyone reading them knows what they include. A figure that changes definition halfway through the year makes trends meaningless.

Count the hours of everyone whose labour you want to measure. For the venue as a whole, that is everyone working: kitchen, floor, bar and support staff. For sections, count each group separately. Include paid breaks if they are paid, and decide how to treat managers and salaried staff.

Salaried staff are the trickiest. Some venues count their scheduled hours; others leave them out and measure hourly staff only. Either can work, as long as it is consistent.

Look at the figure for each shift: lunch and dinner, each day of the week. Quieter shifts usually have lower figures, because a minimum team is needed whatever the trade; busier shifts usually have higher ones.

What matters is whether each shift sits within its usual range, and which shifts are consistently lowest. A weekday lunch that always produces far less per hour than other shifts is the first place to look for savings, or for ways to raise its trade.

Break the figure down by section where it helps: the kitchen, the floor and the bar. Each section has its own labour and, often, its own sales: food for the kitchen, drinks for the bar, everything for the floor. Looking at them separately shows which part of the venue is out of line.

A venue whose overall figure looks fine may have a bar that is overstaffed on quiet afternoons and a kitchen that is stretched on busy nights. Only section figures reveal that.

For the kitchen, divide food sales by kitchen hours. It shows how much food revenue each hour of kitchen labour produced. A kitchen with 1,800 pounds of food sales and 35 hours produced about 51 pounds per hour.

Read it alongside ticket times. A rising kitchen figure with steady ticket times is good news; a rising figure with slowing tickets suggests the kitchen is stretched. Covers per labour hour, covered below, often suits the kitchen better, because cooking effort follows guests more closely than prices.

For the floor, divide total sales by front-of-house hours: servers, runners, hosts. The floor handles every sale, food and drink, so total sales is the right measure of its output.

Floor figures vary with the style of service. A venue with table service and several courses needs more floor hours per pound than a counter-service café. Compare the floor with its own past, not with venues that serve differently.

For the bar, divide drinks sales by bar hours. Bars often show the widest swings: very high figures on busy evenings, very low ones on quiet afternoons when a bartender is on but few drinks are served.

Those quiet bar hours are often the easiest saving in the venue. Starting the bar shift later, or having a server cover the bar in quiet hours, can raise the figure without affecting guests.

Sales by hour, the shape of trade through the day, is the key to reading the figure. Most restaurants have sharp peaks at lunch and dinner and long quiet stretches in between and at either end. Labour that does not follow that shape produces low sales per hour in the quiet stretches.

Our guide to sales by hour: the shape of your trading day covers how to read the shape. Set the hours worked against it, hour by hour, and the mismatch becomes visible.

In almost every venue, the figure falls in the same places: the first and last hours of each shift. Staff are in, setting up or closing down, but guests are few or none. The first hour before service and the last hour after it are often the lowest of the day.

That is not a failure; set-up and close-down have to happen. But they are where the gap between labour and sales is widest, and where small changes to start and finish times make the biggest difference.

The first hour falls because the team arrives before the guests: to set up the room, prepare stations, count floats and brief. All of it is necessary, and none of it produces sales. If everyone starts at the same time, the first hour carries the whole team's hours with almost no sales.

Look at how many people really need to be in before service, and when. Often, the opening team can be smaller, with others arriving just before the first guests.

The last hour falls for the opposite reason: the last guests are lingering over coffee while the full team is still on, cleaning down, restocking and waiting to leave. Sales are small; hours are not.

As the room empties, let people finish in stages: the busiest stations first, the closing team last. A close-down done by a smaller team, with others leaving as their tables clear, raises the figure without leaving anything undone.

The answer to the shoulder hours, the quiet hours at the edges of each service, is usually staggered starts and finishes. Instead of the whole team starting at five and finishing at eleven, some start at five, some at six and some at half past six; some finish at ten, some at half ten and the closers at eleven.

Staggering matches labour to the shape of trade. It needs a little more planning in the rota, but it can raise sales per hour worked noticeably without cutting a single person from the busy part of the service.

Labour cost percentage, labour cost divided by sales, is closely linked to this figure. In fact, labour cost percentage equals the average hourly labour cost divided by sales per labour hour. If labour averages fifteen pounds an hour and sales per hour worked are fifty pounds, labour is thirty per cent of sales.

That makes the two easy to use together. The sales figure shows where hours outrun trade; the hourly cost turns it into the percentage the accounts show. Our guide to labour cost percentage, by service not by month covers the percentage view.

Covers per labour hour measures guests served per hour worked, rather than money. It suits the kitchen especially, because the effort of cooking depends on how many guests there are more than on what they spend.

Use both. Sales per hour can rise because prices went up, without the team doing anything differently; covers per labour hour cannot. Our guide to covers per labour hour: the kitchen's real metric covers it in detail.

Sales per labour hour measures staff productivity at the level of the shift and the section, not the individual. A low figure usually means the rota did not match the trade, not that anyone worked slowly. Use it to plan the rota, not to judge people.

Comparing individual servers by their sales can be useful in limited ways, such as spotting who needs help with recommending dishes, but it is easily distorted by which tables people were given. Keep the main use of the number at the shift and section level.

Set a target range for each shift from your own best services: the shifts where service was smooth, guests were happy and nobody stood idle. Their sales per hour worked are the level the rota should aim for.

A range is better than a single number, because trade varies. A target of forty to fifty pounds for weekday dinners, for example, allows for quiet and busy nights while still flagging shifts that fall well outside it.

Once you have target ranges, use them to plan hours. Divide the forecast sales for a shift by the target sales per labour hour, and you have the hours the shift needs. If Friday dinner is forecast at 3,000 pounds and the target is fifty, the shift needs about sixty hours across the team.

Then shape those hours to the trading curve, with staggered starts and finishes. Our guide to staff scheduling against the trading curve covers matching hours to the busy part of the service.

A rising figure is usually welcome, but not always. If the figure rises well above its usual range on busy shifts, the team may be too small for the trade: service slows, spend per head falls and the team is stretched.

Watch for that pattern alongside ticket times, comps and complaints. Our guide to understaffing costs more than the shift you saved covers why a figure that looks efficient can be costing money.

The figure moves with the seasons. In busy seasons, it usually rises, because trade grows faster than the minimum team. In quiet seasons, it falls, because the minimum team is still needed for fewer guests.

Compare each season with the same season last year rather than with the month before. A fall in January is expected; a January that is lower than last January deserves a look.

In a group, the figure lets you compare venues, with care. Venues with similar styles of service, menus and prices can be compared directly. Venues that differ, such as a café and a fine-dining room, cannot.

Use comparisons to share ideas rather than to rank managers. If one venue's weekday lunches produce far more per hour than a similar venue's, its rota or its trade may hold a lesson for the other.

Once a week, look at sales per hour worked for each shift and section, and at the hour-by-hour pattern for the busiest days. Note any shift outside its range and ask why: a quiet night with a full rota, a busy night with a short one, a long close-down, an early start.

Adjust the next rota where the pattern repeats. Over a few months, the shoulder hours tighten, the quiet shifts carry fewer spare hours and labour cost percentage falls without the busy services losing any of the people they need.

Special nights, such as a festive party evening or a one-off event, often produce unusual figures: very high if the venue is full with a set menu, or low if extra staff were brought in for an event that did not fill. Look at them separately from ordinary services.

Note what happened on each special night, and use it to plan the next one. A party night that needed fewer people than expected, or more, is the best guide to staffing the same kind of night again.

Explain the figure to the team in plain terms: it shows when the rota had more people than the trade needed, and when it had too few. Make clear that it is about the rota, not about anyone's effort.

Teams often understand quickly, and many have ideas for the quiet hours, such as which tasks could be done earlier or later, or which roles could cover each other at the edges of the shift.

An invented bistro's labour is thirty-two per cent of sales, and the owner wants to know why. Working out sales per hour worked by shift, she finds weekday dinners at about forty-five pounds, weekend dinners at about fifty-five and weekday lunches at only about twenty-five. Hour by hour, the lowest figures come in the hour before dinner opens, when the whole team of eight starts at five, and the last hour, when everyone stays until close.

She staggers dinner starts between five and half past six and lets people finish in stages from ten, and she trims one person from weekday lunch. Weekday dinner rises towards fifty pounds per labour hour, lunch towards thirty-two and labour falls to around twenty-nine per cent of sales, with ticket times unchanged.

servearound does not record hours worked, so the labour hours in this guide come from your rota or payroll; rotas are coming. What it gives the sales side is detailed: payment analytics show revenue by hour, what was collected by day and how it was tendered, and who collected it, server by server, so sales can be set against hours hour by hour and service by service.

The menu report shows units sold and revenue for every dish and category over any dates, which splits sales between the kitchen's food and the bar's drinks where the menu separates them, and reservation analytics show covers by meal period and by day and hour, for covers per labour hour alongside. See Analytics.

Sales divided by the hours worked, for a shift, a section or an hour.

Either, as long as you use the same definition every week. Many venues use sales before tax.

Everyone for the whole venue, or each section's staff for section figures.

In the first and last hours of each shift, when staff are in but guests are few.

Stagger start and finish times so labour follows the shape of trade.

Labour cost percentage equals the average hourly cost divided by sales per labour hour.

Divide forecast sales by your target sales per labour hour to get the hours each shift needs.

No. Very high figures on busy shifts can mean the team is stretched.

Sales per labour hour is the simplest labour efficiency number: sales divided by hours worked. Calculate it by shift and by section, kitchen, floor and bar, with a fixed definition of sales and the hours actually worked, and set it against sales by hour to see where labour outruns trade. It almost always falls in the first and last hours of each shift.

Stagger starts and finishes to fit the shoulder hours, set target ranges from your own best services and use them to plan the rota from forecast sales. Read it alongside labour cost percentage and covers per labour hour, watch for figures that rise too far on busy shifts and review it weekly, so labour falls on quiet hours without the busy services losing the people they need.