AI assistant · N3 Analysis with a verdict
Prime Cost Analyzer for Restaurants
Joins product cost and payroll into one number, prime cost, and shows how much money out of every hundred sold remains for rent, utilities and profit.
N3Analysis with a verdict
Crosses YOUR numbers and takes a stand, with a table, units and currency. Not options: a recommendation you can defend.
◆ This assistant 24 of the 164 published assistants are at this levelIs this for you?
What it does and what you get
- You can have a food cost worth bragging about and a reasonable payroll and still lose money, because nobody watches both together.
- Prime cost joins product and team into one reading and reveals whether your cost structure leaves enough money for everything else.
What you end up with
Your monthly prime cost in money and percentage, its anatomy (how much comes from product and how much from payroll), the cash remainder to operate and a frank diagnosis of the imbalance.
EXAMPLE This is what you getAn example built with Sazón de Origen, the house's fictional restaurant.Not your data: your result is built with YOUR restaurant's.See the full example →Sample result
The owner asked this: «I am about to hire two more people for the new location. Before I sign, tell me whether my cost structure can carry it.»
| Month | Operating days | Sales excluding tax | Food and beverage | Full labor cost | Prime cost | Points | Remainder |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| June | 29 | 208,400,000 | 70,900,000 | 58,600,000 | 129,500,000 | 62.1 % | 78,900,000 |
| July | 31 | 221,600,000 | 75,300,000 | 61,900,000 | 137,200,000 | 61.9 % | 84,400,000 |
| August | 30 | 214,000,000 | 72,800,000 | 59,920,000 | 132,720,000 | 62.0 % | 81,280,000 |
July looked like the best month of the quarter: 13 million more in sales and 5.5 million more remainder than June. Normalized, it was not.
| Month | Sales per operating day | Remainder per operating day |
|---|---|---|
| June | 7,186,000 | 2,721,000 |
| July | 7,148,000 | 2,723,000 |
| August | 7,133,000 | 2,709,000 |
July was not a better month: it was a longer one. All three are flat, and a business that is flat three months running does not have a bad-month problem: it has a structure.
Sazón de Origen's prime cost is 62.0 %. Of every 100,000 pesos coming in, 62,000 leave before rent is paid. That leaves 81,280,000 COP a month for rent, utilities, admin and profit, and out of that comes the 8 % operating margin the house declares —17,120,000—; the other 64,160,000 are occupancy and overheads, 30.0 points of sales.
Anatomy of the number: product puts in 34.0 points (54.9 % of prime cost) and payroll 28.0 (45.1 %).
The declared goal is lifting operating margin from 8 % to 14 % in 12 months without touching menu prices. With occupancy and overheads pinned at 30.0 points, those 6 points can only come from one place: prime cost has to drop from 62.0 to 56.0.
| Half | Today | Where the points would come from | Points in sight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product (food and beverage) | 34.0 % | The gap between what the recipes say and what gets consumed | 2.7 |
| Payroll | 28.0 % | Over-staffed bands at the new location, without touching the peak | 1.3 |
| Subtotal | 4.0 | ||
| Missing | Sales mix, occupancy or short sales | 2.0 |
Diagnosis, and it takes a side: the imbalance is in product, not in payroll. Two reasons, both arguable. First: the original location holds 26.0 % payroll with the same menu and the same average ticket, so the house's 28.0 % is not a model problem, it is a two-year-old location that has not found its footing yet. Second: 2.7 of the 4.0 visible points sit on the product side, and that side costs nobody their job.
On the hire: not yet. Two more people at the new location run around 5,400,000 a month with charges, that is 2.5 points of total sales. If they bring no new sales —and reinforcing a slow band does not— prime cost goes from 62.0 to 64.5 and the goal moves 2.5 points in the wrong direction. The 30-day lever is exactly the opposite: freeze the hire until product delivers its 2.7 points, and look at this table again on the first working day of next month.
And a warning from the trade: this indicator does not replace break-even or contribution margin per dish. Nor is a low prime cost the same as a business that leaves money; the three get read together or none of them gets read.
SUPUESTO: no industry prime-cost band is used here, and that is deliberate. The 56.0 % ceiling comes from the house's own arithmetic: the 6 margin points the goal asks for, without touching menu prices, with occupancy and overheads at 30.0 points. Source: the sales, food cost, labor cost and goal declared by Sazón de Origen. If the house agreed to move menu prices, or renegotiated the new location's rent, the ceiling moves and this whole table gets recalculated.
Illustrative example generated with a fictional restaurant. Not a promise of results, not a client case.
This is 2 of 3 parts. Behind the wall is **the decision**: the quadrant the business falls into and what gets done in that quadrant, the three-month trend location by location, the 30-day lever plan with owner and success signal, and the prime cost read by channel, where the same 62.0 % says opposite things depending on where the sale came from.
See the full example — free accountWorks with these AIs
How to use it
Which of your data it uses
This assistant works with 10 of the 23 fields in «My Restaurant», among them Business type, Number of locations and Team size. It does not ask out of curiosity: these are what make the answer speak about YOUR scale instead of an industry average — the same calculation on a business of another size returns a number you cannot decide with. You fill them once and they apply across the library, so the second assistant you open already starts with them in place. Whatever you leave blank, the assistant asks for one thing at a time instead of inventing it, and says so before answering, so you know what it is working from.
Always up to date
Every assistant carries a visible version and date. When an AI changes how it works, the assistant's version goes up and you see what changed.
v1.2.02026-08-20Rooting: the card declared food cost, labor cost and monthly sales at the top and then computed prime cost for some generic restaurant. Now both of the house's own numbers are turned into money against its own sales inside the TASK, the ceiling is set by business type and, above it, the decision stops being split evenly: you attack the half that strays furthest. Sales channels, average check, number of locations, team size and the main goal now do work inside the four sections where decisions happen. Nine fields, seven of them in the TASK. Text was swapped, not added: the Spanish body drops from 799 to 795 words.v1.1.22026-08-14Spelling: Spanish accents restored in the prose. No field marker, link or meaning changed.v1.1.12026-08-14Spelling fix: año/años with ñ in the Spanish text (markers untouched).v1.1.02026-08-13Rewritten under the margin mandate: 6 numbered steps, 5 named output blocks, 8 business fields, named traps of the trade, verification checklist and figures with units. Duel 34.0 -> 100.v1.0.02026-08-11The assistant is born.Same method, another variant
Inside the app this is a single control: you press it and the assistant reframes itself, including the variants that don't appear here because they don't have their own page yet.
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