Birchwood Kitchen: the 60-second read
Twelve months of one location's own reports, distilled to five patterns that repeat and one number.
Not one bad month. At healthy targets for Birchwood's market, this location nets about $8,750 a month; the last three months ran closer to $5,000. The difference traces to five operating patterns that show up nearly every month.
Vendor price creep Red flag
The same items from the same vendor are running $0.20–$0.25 per unit above last year, with no change in pack size or quality. Nothing was renegotiated, so it compounds every month.
Where to start Re-quote your three biggest leakage items, 80/20 ground beef, chicken thighs, and roma tomatoes, against two alternate vendors, then hold your vendor to last year's pricing or switch.
Discount drift Watch
The comp rate crept from a 4.1% target to 4.9%, with 35 manager-override comps last month and no approval step in the POS.
Where to start Require manager approval for comps in the POS, then review the override checks.
Weekday labor overage Watch
On soft weekdays, labor runs about 32% of sales against a 28% target, almost every week of the year.
Where to start On Monday through Wednesday, schedule one closer for a 5-hour shift instead of 8, starting at 6pm rather than 3pm, so the full crew isn't on the clock through a slow close.
Inventory shrinkage Watch
The gap between what the recipes say should be on hand and the physical count is widening month to month, concentrated in two proteins: chicken thighs and 80/20 ground beef both come up short every count, and the waste log has holes where they should be.
Where to start Count chicken thighs and 80/20 ground beef daily for two weeks against the receiving logs and waste sheets to find where they're walking.
After-hours voids Control risk
18 of 24 voids happened after close, tied to two employee IDs with no reason codes. The flag here is control, not just the dollars.
Where to start Pull the after-hours voids by employee, require reason codes, and treat it as a control review first.
Demo brief on sample data, prepared by ADC Operations (adc-ops.com)
You don't need all five report types. Three sources carry the read: your POS, your labor and scheduling, and your vendor invoices. Here is what each pattern needs, and what still stands when a source is partial or missing.
Built from your invoices, this year against last. The core of the read, no POS or inventory export required.
A sales summary shows the rate. The employee-level pattern needs the full POS export, not just the accounting rollup.
Period totals show the labor drift. The daypart detail, the slow-lunch and late-close pinpoint, needs hours and sales by hour.
The one many operators skip. A general true-vs-theoretical or category count flags the food-cost gap; item-level counts get you the SKU.
Read from the POS void log, not the accounting rollup.
Third-party delivery statements (DoorDash, UberEats) are an optional fifth source, only if you are on a platform. And a missing source does not sink the read: the pattern it feeds gets flagged "needs data," not guessed at.