Free Restaurant Bookkeeping Template (Excel)

What's in the restaurant bookkeeping template

The template has three sheets. Daily Sales Log holds a full year of rows (366) for cash sales, card sales, tips, and comps or voids, with net sales calculated per day. Expense Log holds 300 rows for logging every expense against restaurant-specific categories - Food COGS, Beverage COGS, Labor FOH, Labor BOH, Occupancy, Utilities, Marketing, Supplies, and Other.

Prime Cost is a summary sheet where you copy your totals from the other two sheets - net sales, food COGS, beverage COGS, and labor FOH/BOH - and it turns those into COGS %, labor %, and prime cost %.

This is a general-restaurant-economics bookkeeping template, distinct from a live budget-vs-actual tool: it's for logging what happened and reading your cost percentages, not for forecasting or tracking variance against a plan.

What calculates automatically

In the Daily Sales Log, net sales adds cash and card sales, then subtracts comps and voids, the moment you fill in a day's numbers. The summary above the log totals net sales and total comps/voids for the whole period.

In the Expense Log, the summary breaks total expenses down by category automatically - Food COGS, Beverage COGS, Labor FOH, and Labor BOH each get their own SUMIF total alongside the grand total of all expenses, so you don't have to filter or pivot the 300-row log yourself.

In Prime Cost, once you copy in your net sales and category totals, COGS %, labor %, and prime cost % calculate instantly - prime cost is the sum of food COGS, beverage COGS, and both labor categories, divided by net sales.

Reading your prime cost percentage

Prime cost - the combined cost of goods sold and labor - is the single number most restaurant operators watch closest, because it's usually 60% or more of total costs. The conventional benchmark is keeping prime cost under 60-65% of sales; above that and there's typically not enough left over for rent, utilities, and profit.

The totals in Prime Cost aren't pulled automatically from the other two sheets - you copy them across by hand. That's a deliberate choice: it keeps the formula simple and transparent, and it means you can also plug in numbers from your POS or accounting system directly if you're not using the Sales or Expense logs in this file.

Who this restaurant bookkeeping template is for

Independent restaurant owners, cafes, and small food-service operators who want food-cost and labor-cost visibility without a full accounting platform are the core fit. If you're closing out sales and expenses daily or weekly and want your prime cost percentage without building the formulas yourself, this gets you there.

It's a companion to, not a replacement for, our Restaurant Budget Template: this one logs actual daily sales and expenses and reads your cost percentages; the budget template compares planned numbers against actuals across a whole operating year. Use this for day-to-day bookkeeping and the budget template for planning and variance.