Why This Glossary Exists
Restaurant operators juggle dozens of metrics across vendors, staff, and the floor — often across separate apps. This restaurant terms glossary cuts through the noise, defining the numbers that actually move margins, with worked examples you can use today.
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Core Financial Terms
Food Cost Percentage The ratio of ingredient cost to menu item revenue. Formula: `(Cost of Goods Sold ÷ Total Food Sales) × 100`. A burger with $3.20 in ingredients selling for $14 runs 22.9% food cost. Full-service targets typically range 28–35%, though your ideal depends on concept and labor mix. Every point matters: on $80,000 in monthly food sales, one percentage point is $800.
Prime Cost Food cost plus labor cost combined. This is the single most-watched number in full-service operations. Prime cost above 65% of total sales signals margin pressure. Tracking it weekly — not monthly — lets you course-correct before losses compound.
Theoretical vs. Actual Food Cost Theoretical cost is what you *should* spend based on recipes and sales mix. Actual cost is what invoices show you *did* spend. A gap between the two points to waste, portioning errors, or theft.
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Service & Floor Terms
Turn Time Minutes from table seated to table reset. Faster turns mean more covers per shift without adding seats. Per-server turn-time data reveals coaching opportunities — one slow server can quietly cost hundreds in nightly revenue.
Covers Total guests served in a period. Revenue per cover (total sales ÷ covers) benchmarks check averages and upsell effectiveness by server or shift.
Leakage / Shrinkage Inventory that disappears without a corresponding sale — spoilage, over-pouring, or theft. Most operators discover this only at month-end; by then, the loss is locked in.
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How Hubstaurant Tracks These Automatically
Hubstaurant reads vendor invoices automatically to update cost-per-ingredient in real time, so your food cost percentage reflects today's prices — not last month's. The platform compares theoretical versus actual food cost continuously and flags variance as a theft and leakage alert.
Per-server turn-time and covers analytics sit alongside POS data in one dashboard, removing the need to pull reports from multiple tools. AI forecasting projects sales so scheduling and purchasing stay aligned to demand — not gut feel.
Standalone inventory apps like MarketMan do invoice parsing well. Where Hubstaurant differs is that all of this — inventory, scheduling, vendor ordering, server analytics, and your SEO website — lives in one system, which typically costs less than maintaining four or five separate subscriptions.
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Start Closing the Gap
If any of these terms live in spreadsheets today, a single integrated system can surface them automatically. Start a free trial of Hubstaurant and see your real food cost, prime cost, and server performance in one place — no manual entry required.