Budgeting is where many hospitality businesses stop. The books get done, the VAT gets filed, and the plan for next year stays in the owner's head. Growers do it differently. They write the plan down as numbers, check it every month, and change it when the world changes.
A budget you will actually use
- Start from this year's actuals, by site and by month, from the ledger. Not from memory.
- Set sales by month with the seasonality you have already seen, then adjust for known changes: a price rise, a refurbishment, a new opening.
- Set gross profit as a percentage by category, from recent history, with the planned menu changes layered on.
- Build labour from the rota, not as a percentage. Hours by role for the forecast sales, at the pay rates that will apply.
- List overheads by line with their actual dates: rent quarters, insurance renewals, licence fees.
- Write down the assumptions on one page. The budget is the assumptions. The numbers are just the arithmetic.
Forecasting: the budget, updated
A budget is set once. A forecast is the same model with the months that have happened replaced by actuals and the months ahead revised. Reforecast monthly. The gap between budget and forecast is the most honest measure of how the year is going.
The KPIs worth reporting
- Sales against last year and against budget, by site.
- Gross profit percentage, food and drink separately.
- Wage percentage and sales per labour hour.
- Average spend per head and covers, or transactions.
- Controllable costs as a percentage of sales.
- Site contribution, so head office cost is seen separately from site performance.
- Cash headroom: the lowest point in the next thirteen weeks.
Seven numbers, one page, every week or every month. Anything more and nobody reads it.
Where the financial control comes in
All of this depends on a ledger that is current, coded consistently by site, and built from real sales, real hours and real invoices. That is the financial control service. The budgeting and the KPI reporting are what good books are for. At HSG, Solutions 4 Caterers keeps the books and builds the monthly pack, and Opsyte supplies the weekly sales, labour and forecast numbers behind it.