A Profit & Loss per restaurant, for the people running them
Works with Xero
Restaurant groups tend to have the numbers and not the reporting. Sales land daily, food and labour are the two costs that decide the week, and the person who can move them — the general manager or head chef on site — usually sees a figure days or weeks after they could have done anything about it.
The company Profit & Loss does not help them, because it answers a different question. What a site manager needs is their own site: their sales, their food cost, their labour, their controllables, and the profit left after the costs they actually influence.
Why the usual reporting does not reach the kitchen
Rent and head office drown the signal
Put rent, depreciation and a head-office recharge into a site's result and a good trading month can still show a loss. The manager stops reading the report, which is a rational response to being measured on things they cannot change.
Xero cannot give a manager their own site
You can tag every transaction with a Site tracking category, and Xero will report on it. What Xero cannot do is give that manager a login limited to their own site — every role covers the whole organisation.
So somebody rebuilds it every month
One spreadsheet per site, filtered by hand, checked, emailed. For a six-site group that is six documents a month that are wrong the moment a late invoice is coded.
Weekly matters more than perfect
A month-end pack that arrives on the fifteenth is a history lesson. A live report a manager can open on a Monday is worth more, even before the month is closed.
Setting it up for a group
- 1
Tag every site in Xero
One tracking category — Site, or Venue, or Restaurant — with an option per location. Bills, invoices and bank transactions coded to the site they belong to, and payroll journals tagged too, or your single biggest controllable lands nowhere.
- 2
Start from the hospitality layout
Vizii includes a hospitality preset, so if you already report in terms of Controllables and Profit after Controllables the sections are there to start from. Every label can be renamed, and you choose which account codes sit in each section.
- 3
Draw the line at controllables
Sales, food and beverage cost, labour, consumables, utilities, repairs, local marketing — in. Rent, insurance, depreciation, interest, head-office recharges, the owner's drawings — out. The bottom line a manager sees should be one they can move.
- 4
Reconcile, then preview as a manager
Run it unfiltered for last month and tie the totals back to Xero. Then use Preview as to see exactly what one general manager will open before they open it.
- 5
Invite each site
Scope each manager to their own site's tracking option and give them the Profit & Loss permission. They never get a Xero or QuickBooks login, and they do not use up a seat in either.
A controllables layout
An illustrative section order for a site report. Yours will differ; every label and every account code is yours to choose.
| Sales | Food, beverage, other |
|---|---|
| Cost of sales | Food and beverage purchases |
| Gross profit | And gross profit % |
| Controllables | Labour, consumables, utilities, repairs, local marketing |
| Profit after controllables | The line the site is accountable for |
The report shows the selected month and the year to date, with % of sales on every line — which for a restaurant is usually the number people argue about, because food cost and labour as a percentage of sales are how sites get compared.
The Profit & Loss by department report is built from Xero tracking categories, so it is Xero only today. QuickBooks support is planned.
Questions
Yes. A manager is scoped to their own tracking option, and every total and line on their report is calculated from records carrying it. They cannot see another site, head-office costs or the balance sheet.
Yes, and most groups should. You choose which account codes appear in the layout, so costs a manager cannot influence can be excluded from their report entirely while still sitting in the company accounts.
Yes, on every line, alongside the selected month and the year to date. Year to date follows the financial year end set in Xero.
Vizii reports what is in Xero. If your point-of-sale posts daily takings into Xero tagged with the site, it appears in that site's report like any other transaction; if it posts untagged, it lands in the Uncategorised option until the coding is fixed.
See it on your own numbers
Accounting firms are billed per client company with unlimited users. Running a single business? The standard plans start with a free trial.