If you’ve ever heard someone mention a restaurant cover, you may have thought they were talking about a cover charge. While a cover in a restaurant is related to cost, it can be so much more than a single price. A restaurant cover is an invaluable metric that can help you forecast sales, improve staffing levels, and create a delightful customer experience.
What Are Restaurant Covers?
A restaurant cover is a way to measure your business. It’s one meal or one customer who eats a meal during a specific time (like dinner service or a banquet). As an example, if your restaurant serves 90 people during dinner, you have 90 covers for that service. As a rule, cover does not include drinks, appetizers, or desserts.
This is different from a cover charge in a bar or club, which is essentially an admission fee.
How Do Restaurant Owners and Managers Use Covers?
Restaurant covers are a simple way to determine how many diners you’ve served in a given period. However, you can build on the basic calculation — one customer ordered one meal — to predict sales, improve scheduling, and measure server effectiveness.
Inventory Management
Tracking covers helps you identify which menu items are selling, which ones aren’t, and when these items are popular, so you know what to order and when. For example, if your steak special is most popular on Friday night, you’ll know to adjust your inventory management to have extra steak delivered on Thursday.
Sales Projections
Your restaurant’s covers can also forecast potential sales and revenue. Using the steak example, if you know the cover of a steak dinner and the general number of guests who order steak on Friday, you can forecast the average number of steak dinners you’ll sell and your sales and revenue at the end of Friday service.
Improve Staffing
You can also use covers to optimize your scheduling and staffing. The data can help you identify peak hours and when you’ll need more servers on duty.
Measure Individual Performance
In addition to more efficient staffing and scheduling, you can measure server performance by identifying which staff are effective upsellers and who need more coaching.
How to Calculate a Cover
While cover means one person and one meal, you can build on this formula to measure cost, revenue, and performance to improve the dining experience and ensure you’re running an efficient and profitable operation.
Average Cover
Average cover is the average price of one meal for one customer throughout the day, no matter what was ordered. Divide the total number of sales by the total number of customers served:
Total sales ÷ total number of customers served = average cover
Labor Cost
Labor cost per cover tells you how much it costs to serve a customer so you can determine optimal staffing levels for the entire day. If staffing levels are on target, labor costs should remain the same for each cover throughout the day.
For example, if your labor cost per cover is $10, that figure should be the same (or similar) whether you have three servers and 10 customers or six servers and 20 customers.
Labor cost is total labor cost divided by total covers:
Total labor cost ÷ total covers = labor cost per cover
Average Cover By Server
Average cover by server is an individual score that helps you identify which servers are working efficiently and upselling and which servers need additional training. It’s the average cost of a cover for each server or what it costs you to have a meal served by a particular server. It’s calculated by dividing the total sales per service by the number of customers served:
Total sales per service ÷ number of customers served = average cover per server
Cover Your Costs
Restaurant covers are an excellent measure of the number of guests or meals you serve in a given time. But you can also use covers to find valuable insights into staff performance, sales, and inventory management.
If you want assistance calculating your covers, maximizing sales performance, or improving the customer experience, Kezner Consulting can help. Contact us today for a free consultation.
