Hospitality glossary · Money and margin
Sales per labour hour, or SPLH, is revenue divided by the total hours worked to produce it — a productivity measure that is unaffected by what you pay per hour.
In practice
Definitions are easy. What matters is how the thing behaves in a real operation, and where it tends to go wrong.
Because it ignores wage rates, SPLH does not move when the National Living Wage does, which makes it the cleaner way to compare productivity between sites or across years. Tracked by day part rather than by week, it usually reveals that the problem is one specific shift rather than the whole rota.
Optimising it upwards without a ceiling. Past a certain point, a high sales-per-hour figure is simply what a short-staffed team produces shortly before several of them resign.
Questions
Something here that doesn’t match what you’re seeing in your own business? That is usually worth a conversation rather than another article.
Sales per labour hour, or SPLH, is revenue divided by the total hours worked to produce it — a productivity measure that is unaffected by what you pay per hour. Because it ignores wage rates, SPLH does not move when the National Living Wage does, which makes it the cleaner way to compare productivity between sites or across years. Tracked by day part rather than by week, it usually reveals that the problem is one specific shift rather than the whole rota.
Optimising it upwards without a ceiling. Past a certain point, a high sales-per-hour figure is simply what a short-staffed team produces shortly before several of them resign.
WHY Hospitality