7 Restaurant KPIs you should be tracking (with free templates)

2. Waste percentage 

UK hospitality generates around 920,000 tonnes of food waste every year, at a cost to the sector of £3.2bn, three quarters of which is avoidable. For an individual restaurant, avoidable waste is one of the most direct routes to better margins, because the cost has already been paid and the revenue never arrives. 

WRAP research breaks the sources of waste down as follows: around 45% comes from preparation: over-trimming, mis-en-place that does not get used, and around 21% from spoilage. The remaining third is plate waste. Each of these has a different cause and a different fix. 

Prep waste usually points to demand forecasting: are you prepping the right quantities for the covers you are actually expecting? Spoilage often comes from ordering patterns and storage rotation. Plate waste is menu and portion design. 

The challenge with all three is that none of them are visible unless you are capturing them. An unrecorded spoilage event looks identical to normal usage in your stock figures. That is why waste capture at source matters. 

3. GP by dish and by site 

Gross profit at dish level tells you which menu items are contributing to your margin, and which are selling well but earning little. GP at site level tells you how individual venues are performing against each other. Together, they give you a much more granular view of where profit is coming from than a single COS figure can provide. 

The practical problem most operators face is that recipe costs go stale quickly. You set a dish margin when you build the menu, but every time a supplier price moves, that calculation is out of date, and if no one is recalculating it, you may be several percentage points behind where you think you are by the end of a quarter. 

Across a multi-site estate, the same dish can perform very differently at different locations, depending on local buying patterns, supplier arrangements and how closely teams follow the standard recipe. Site-level GP comparison makes those differences visible. 

4. Price variance 

Price variance is the difference between what you agreed to pay a supplier and what you were charged. In operations that process hundreds or thousands of invoices a month, small per-unit discrepancies can add up to significant overpayments, and without an automated check, most go unnoticed until someone spots an anomaly manually. 

The typical causes are supplier invoicing errors, prices that have been updated in the supplier's system but not reflected in your agreed rate, and off-contract buying, where a team member places an order outside the approved supplier list, often because an item is out of stock and they need a quick fix. 

Off-contract buying is particularly expensive because it is often invisible. The purchase is made, the invoice is processed, and the higher cost flows into COS without any flag being raised. 

5. Credit rate 

Your credit rate measures the proportion of purchases where a credit claim is raised: short deliveries, damaged goods, incorrect items, price overcharges. A healthy credit process means claims are logged quickly, submitted promptly and tracked through to confirmation. An unhealthy one means credits are raised late, not followed up, and sometimes never recovered.  

The gap between credits raised and credits received is money that was owed to you and never came back. In busy kitchens where delivery checks happen at speed, that gap can be substantial and with no central log of what has been raised and what has been confirmed, it is very easy to lose track of where individual claims have landed. 

A low credit rate is not always a good sign. If your team is receiving deliveries too quickly to check them properly, or if there is no clear process for logging discrepancies, you may simply be missing claims rather than receiving perfect orders. 

6. Time to resolve issues 

Every unresolved issue in your purchase-to-pay process has a cost. A disputed invoice that sits in a queue for ten days ties up cash and adds to the admin burden, a delivery discrepancy that is not logged promptly may fall outside the supplier's credit window or a supplier query that bounces between inbox and inbox is costing someone time that could be spent elsewhere – these are examples that, when cumulated, turn into time lost on resolving rather than preventing them in the first place. 

In operations that manage delivery and invoice queries manually - via email, paper delivery notes, shared spreadsheets, average resolution times of five to ten days are common. Digitised operations using automated workflows typically cut that to a few days, with many resolving exceptions in under 48 hours once issues are logged and routed automatically. 

The limitations of a manual approach become clear as the operation grows. With multiple sites, multiple suppliers and hundreds of invoices a week, a spreadsheet requires someone to gather and input the data, which introduces both lag and the risk of error. By the time the numbers are ready, the moment to act on them may have passed. 

That is when a connected system starts to pay for itself. The value is not just in having the data, but in having it current: COS that reflects today's prices, not last month's; waste figures that are captured at the point of activity, not reconstructed from memory at the end of a shift; credits that are logged and chased automatically rather than sitting on a to-do list.

There is no single right moment to move from manual tracking to software. But there are a few clear signals that the manual approach is starting to cost more than it saves: