Prime cost for restaurant groups
Which of your locations made money last week?
Not last month. Last week. Nexora computes prime cost for every store from your point of sale and ranks them on one set of definitions — so the location that is losing money is the first thing on the page, not something you go looking for.
Reads your existing POS · No payroll change · Built for 3–3,000 locations
The average hides the store that is losing money
A twelve-store group running a respectable 50.2% group prime cost. Underneath the average, on the same brand, the same menu and the same suppliers:
Nobody was hiding anything. The two locations had simply never been measured the same way at the same time, so the gap did not exist as a number anyone could point at.
Why prime cost and not revenue
Prime cost is cost of goods plus labour, over net sales. It is the one ratio that most reliably predicts whether a location is profitable, and — unlike rent, insurance or the lease — both components are controllable this week.
It is also where operators are most often misled. A store with strong sales and a 72% prime cost looks healthy on a revenue report and is quietly consuming the group's profit. Sales tell you how busy you were. Prime cost tells you whether it was worth it.
| Band | What it usually means | First move |
|---|---|---|
| Under 55% | Strong — or some labour is not being counted | Check labour cost coverage before celebrating |
| 55–65% | Healthy for most formats. The target band | Compare store to store; the average hides the outlier |
| 65–72% | Thin. Rent and utilities consume what is left | Attack whichever of food or labour is furthest from your best store |
| Over 72% | Structurally unprofitable at this volume | Menu pricing, portioning or the site itself — not scheduling |
Where the number comes from
Nexora does not ask anyone to key in the figures it reports on. Every input arrives from a system you already run.
Point of sale
Sales, orders, item mix and clocked hours, per store, per day.
Purchase ledger
Supplier order history — items, units, spend, by category.
Expense feed
Rent, utilities, insurance, payroll and fees, coded to a chart of accounts.
Your plan
The rota you build and the labour budget you set — what actuals are measured against.
If some of your worked hours have no cost attached — because those staff were never mapped from the POS — Nexora leaves them out and tells you the coverage percentage rather than pricing them at an assumed rate. A tidy number built on an assumption is worse than an untidy one you can trust.
What you get in the first week
Every store, ranked
Orders, net sales, COGS, labour, gross profit, prime cost %, sales per labour hour and average order value — one table, one set of definitions.
The attention list
The five locations that most need you, lowest health first, each with a plain-language reason and a button that goes to the screen that fixes it.
A real P&L
Gross sales through to net income, per store, per month, exportable to Excel or PDF — with the chart of accounts behind it.
Questions operators ask here
Do we have to replace our POS?
No. Nexora reads the POS you already have. Changing POS is one of the most disruptive projects a restaurant group can undertake and it is not required to get value here.
How is this different from what our accountant gives us?
Timing and granularity. Your accountant closes the month — accurately, and about three weeks after it ended. Nexora gives you the operating picture weekly so the monthly close becomes a confirmation rather than a revelation. Most customers keep their accountant.
Our stores are different formats. Can they be compared?
They can be measured identically, which is the prerequisite. Whether they should be compared directly depends on the formats — which is why the table also carries sales per labour hour and average order value, so a high-volume site with a low check is not judged on labour percentage alone.
How long until the numbers are trustworthy?
As soon as your POS employees are mapped — an afternoon for most groups. Until then the product will show you a coverage percentage below 100% and tell you not to trust the labour figures yet.
What if our prime cost turns out to be fine?
Then you will have paid for a month and learned that, which is worth knowing. But check the spread between your best and worst location before deciding — the group average is almost never the interesting number.
See it against your own estate
Twenty minutes. We open your numbers, rank your stores, and you decide whether there is anything in it. No deck.
Book a 20-minute demo