Free tools · margin
Your recipes say one gross profit. Your stocktake says another. The gap between them is the most useful number in the building, because unlike a GP percentage it points at something you can actually go and fix. Put a period's stock figures in below and it converts that gap into money.
The calculator
Nothing is sent anywhere — the maths runs in your browser and we never see what you type. Every field starts at a deliberately ordinary default rather than a flattering one.
Before you quote the figure at anyone
01
A miscounted closing figure moves the whole result, and counting at a different time of day or part-way through a delivery produces a variance that is entirely fictional. Count at the same point in the trading week, with deliveries settled, or the trend is meaningless even when each individual number looks plausible.
02
If the recipes are out of date, the supplier prices have moved, or the specs on the page are not what the kitchen actually does, the variance is measuring the gap between your paperwork and reality rather than anything happening on the floor. Re-cost the top sellers before reading much into a bad month.
03
Drink and food behave completely differently — free-pouring is the dominant cause on one side and portioning and waste on the other — and combining them averages away the signal. Calculate each separately, and split further if you have a coffee or retail operation inside the site.
Questions
Getting a number you don’t recognise from your own accounts is usually worth a conversation rather than another spreadsheet.
Work out cost of sales as opening stock plus purchases minus closing stock, subtract it from net sales to get the gross profit you actually made, and compare that percentage with the theoretical GP your recipes imply. The difference in percentage points multiplied by net sales is the cash the variance cost you over the period.
Most operators treat anything inside a point or two as normal measurement noise and investigate beyond that, though a high-volume wet operation will tolerate less than a kitchen with a lot of fresh produce. What matters more than the threshold is the direction of travel over several counts, because one bad period is usually a counting problem.
In wet sales it is free-pouring instead of measuring, followed by unrecorded staff drinks and wastage that never makes it into the book. In food it is over-portioning and prep waste. Till errors — items rung through at the wrong price or voided incorrectly — account for a surprising share on both sides and are the easiest to fix.
No, and starting there is the most expensive mistake a manager can make with this number. The ordinary explanations are portion control, waste, unrecorded staff consumption and till errors, and all four are training and process problems. Investigating a team before you have ruled those out damages trust you will need for everything else.
Weekly for wet stock in a busy site, monthly as a minimum for food, and always at the same point in the trading cycle. Frequency matters less than consistency: a monthly count taken properly every time tells you far more than a weekly one done in a rush by whoever is on shift.
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