Restaurant P&L Template

Once the structure is set, enter your monthly revenue and expense figures. Pull numbers from your POS system's monthly sales report and your accounting software or bank statements for expenses. The food cost analysis sheet is worth filling out separately: enter your purchases by category each month and it will calculate your food cost percentage automatically, broken down by protein, produce, dairy, dry goods, and beverage. This is where most operators find the most actionable insight in the first few months.

A restaurant P&L has a specific structure that generic templates don't reflect. Revenue needs to be broken out by channel — dine-in, takeout, delivery, catering, and alcohol behave differently and have different margin profiles. COGS should separate food from beverage, not lump them together as 'cost of goods.' Labor needs to distinguish front-of-house from back-of-house because they scale differently: FOH labor rises and falls with covers, while BOH labor is relatively fixed. When these categories are set up correctly, the P&L shows you not just whether the restaurant is profitable, but which parts of the business are pulling their weight.