Two costs decide it, and both move daily.

Not every hospitality and food service is the same business

• Independent and small-group restaurantsPrime cost managed as a single percentage, so a drift in one outlet's food cost is offset in the group total by a good month somewhere else.
• Multi-site and franchised quick serviceRoyalty and advertising fund on gross sales, plus brand-mandated refurbishment on the franchisor's calendar rather than the site's cash position.
• Hotels and rooms-led operationsRooms carry the margin and food and beverage is run as an amenity, with banqueting and breakfast costed as though they were the restaurant.
• Contract catering and food service managementCost-plus and fixed-price client contracts side by side, where supplier rebates belong to one and not the other and the accounting rarely separates them.
• Bars, pubs and late-nightWet-led gross profit against pour cost, cellar loss and till voids, measured by stocktake at an interval long enough to hide the cause.
• Events, banqueting and weddingsPriced from a banqueting event order and delivered against the version the client changed last week, with the difference absorbed on the night.

Where this data actually lives

• Toast or Lightspeed in independents and small groups; Oracle Micros Simphony or NCR Aloha where the estate is older than the current operator
• Restaurant365, MarginEdge or Crunchtime for back-of-house cost — usually live in some outlets and not others, which is itself the finding
• Mews, Cloudbeds or StayNTouch as the PMS in independent hotels; Opera Cloud where a brand standard dictates it, with a channel manager between you and the OTAs
• 7shifts, HotSchedules or Deputy for rotas — the schedule, not the clock-in, is what most labor reports are built from
• Delivery aggregator portals, each with its own remittance file, reconciled to the till by hand if at all
• A supplier ordering platform whose price file is updated less often than the supplier's prices

Named because it changes what the intake asks for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them rather than surprised by them.

Reported in your numbers, not ours

• prime cost
• theoretical vs actual food cost
• labor cost by daypart
• covers per labor hour
• RevPAR
• ADR
• GOP per available room
• channel contribution
• four-wall margin

The obligations that set the deadlines

• Alcohol license renewals, and the conditions on them that a change of manager can breach
• Health and food safety inspections, and what a re-inspection costs in closed hours
• Tip, gratuity and service-charge distribution records — the payroll and tax treatment follows the distribution rule rather than the intention
• Applicable large employer reporting across a workforce whose hours vary week to week, and the measurement period that decides who is offered cover
• Sales, occupancy and tourist taxes per jurisdiction, on revenue arriving through channels that each report it differently
• Franchise agreement audit rights, and whether reported sales for royalty would survive one
• PCI DSS scope across tills, handheld terminals and the booking engine

When this stops being interesting and becomes urgent

• A franchise renewal or a property improvement plan landing with a capital number attached to it
• A minimum or tipped wage step, or a predictive scheduling ordinance
• A site that lost money for a full year while the group percentage looked normal
• A refinancing or a sale-leaseback, where four-wall margin per site is the first request
• An aggregator commission change, or a menu re-price nobody modeled through to contribution
• A general manager leaving, and the supplier relationships leaving with them

Who this involves

• Signs it: Owner, managing director or group CFO
• Resists it: General managers and head chefs, whose site and outlet numbers become comparable
• Has been asking for it: The operations director, who can already name the two sites