Restaurant budget calculator
Next period's food and labour budget, scaled from what actually happened last period.
Enter last period's sales, food cost and labour cost, an expected sales change, and a prime cost target — see a suggested budget for both lines next period.
Last period, one location
Why start from last period, not zero
A budget built from actuals beats one built from a guess
Scaling last period's actual ratios toward a target is a more defensible starting point than building a budget from an industry average with no connection to how this specific location actually runs. From there, a manager adjusts based on what they know is changing — a new hire, a menu price move, a seasonal shift.
Questions
What operators ask about this
How do you build a restaurant budget from last period's numbers?
Start from what actually happened — last period's sales, food cost and labour cost — apply an expected sales change for the coming period, and decide whether food and labour should hold the same share of sales or move toward a specific prime cost target. This calculator does that scaling for one location and one period.
Should food cost and labour move by the same amount to hit a new prime cost target?
Not necessarily, but scaling both proportionally toward the target is a reasonable starting point when there's no store-specific reason to cut one harder than the other. From there, a manager can weight the change based on where the actual opportunity is.
Is this the same as Nexora's own budgeting?
This gives a single-period estimate from numbers you type in. Nexora tracks planned versus actual continuously, by store, reconciled from live POS, payroll and vendor data rather than a manual projection.
Ready when you are
Track your own budget live
Twenty minutes, screen shared. We connect one of your locations live and track its actual numbers against a plan, continuously.