Where the sales line comes from

Everything else in the budget hangs off the sales line. Food cost is a percentage of it, labour follows it, and the profit at the bottom is what survives it — so if the sales line is fantasy, the other eleven lines are decoration. The good news is that this is the one figure you already have excellent information about, because you sold last year and your POS remembers every month of it.

📆 Start with the twelve months you already have

Not the annual total: the twelve monthly figures. A restaurant that sells $608,000 a year does not sell $50,667 a month, and the difference between those two views is most of what a budget is for. Here is the example restaurant's last year, with the plan we are about to justify beside it.

Read the left column before worrying about the right one. February sells half of what December sells. The gap between the best month and the worst is $22,000, which is more than four months of rent. That shape is not a problem to be solved — it is the business, and every restaurant has one — but a plan that ignores it will be wrong eleven months out of twelve and useless in the other one.

If you cannot get twelve clean months out of your system, use bank deposits, or the sales tax returns your accountant filed, or the platform statements. An approximate shape beats a precise average.

✍️ Then change only what you have a reason to change

The right-hand column is last year plus $1,000 a month, which is a total of $620,000 and about 2% of growth. That figure is not ambition; it is what this restaurant thinks it can defend. The discipline that makes a sales budget useful is simple and slightly boring: every peso of difference from last year needs a sentence explaining it, and if you cannot write the sentence, the number goes back to what it was.

Reasons that count are the ones you can point at.

• Something you are doing. Opening on Mondays, adding a lunch service, taking on catering, finishing the patio in March. These have both a sales effect and a cost effect, and the cost half must be budgeted too — this is the most common way a budget flatters itself.
• Something already happening. If the last six months ran consistently above the same months a year earlier, that trend is evidence. One good quarter is not.
• A price change. If you plan to raise menu prices, that is sales growth with no extra covers behind it: 4% on $620,000 is $24,800 without one additional person walking in. How to decide on a price change belongs to the pricing course; here you only need to know whether one is planned.
• Something outside you. A building site next door, a competitor closing, a hotel opening, a road works project. These cut both ways and the honest ones are usually negative.
• Days that exist or do not. Whether Easter falls in March or April genuinely moves those two months, and a leap year has an extra day of sales in February.

What does not count is a round number applied to everything because it feels optimistic. A blanket 10% typed across twelve months is the single most common budgeting mistake, and it fails twice: it inflates the sales line, and because the cost lines are percentages of that line, it inflates the budgeted profit as well. You end the year having missed a target you invented.

🔢 Covers or check average, because they are not the same

Any change in the sales line is one of two things underneath: more people, or the same people spending more. They are worth separating because they cost different amounts to achieve, and because one of them can hit a physical ceiling.

Take a 10% increase on an ordinary $50,000 month. That is $5,000, which at an average check of $25 is 200 extra covers a month, or about seven more people a day. Alternatively it is the same 2,000 covers with an average check of $27.50 — two and a half pesos more per person, which is a dessert on one table in three, or a coffee on most of them. Seven more people a day is a marketing problem; two and a half pesos is a menu and a floor problem. Both are achievable, both need someone to actually do them, and if neither is planned then the 10% is not going to appear.

The practical version is to write the sales line in money and then divide it once, so you know what you have committed to. If the number of covers implied by your budget is one you have never served, the budget has already told you something before the year has started.

🪑 Does the plan fit in the room?

The last check takes two minutes and saves whole afternoons. August in this budget is $61,000, which at $25 a head is 2,440 covers — about 79 people a day across the month. If Saturdays run at roughly double an average day, that implies Saturdays near 120 covers. Now the question is concrete: has this restaurant ever served 120 in a night, and if so, was it a good night or a disaster?

Every restaurant has a ceiling, and it is made of seats, turns, kitchen output at peak, and how many hours your best people can work. Growth that requires the ceiling to move needs the thing that moves it budgeted as well — more seats, a second seating, a bigger pass, extra staff — and all of those cost money that belongs in the same plan. A sales budget that quietly assumes a fifty-seat room will serve a hundred-and-twenty-seat night is not optimistic, it is arithmetic that has not been done.

And if the ceiling really is fixed, that is worth knowing too, because it changes where the year's improvement has to come from: not from more covers, but from the average check, from the mix of what those covers order, or from costs. The first two are the sales analytics course; the third is topic 3, which is where we start putting numbers under this line.