Pick one day and one time each week and never change it. Most restaurants count Sunday night after close because it falls between the weekend rush and Monday deliveries. Consistency matters more than the specific day. If you count Tuesday one week and Friday the next, your usage calculations cover different windows and the numbers become meaningless.

Count everything in house. Walk through each station and storage area in the same order every time. Dry storage, walk-in cooler, walk-in freezer, behind the bar, prep area. Use a printed sheet organized by location so the person counting follows the same path and doesn’t skip items. Weigh proteins and anything sold by the pound. Count cases and partial cases for things like produce and canned goods. Record units exactly as they appear on your invoices so the math stays clean.

Once you have physical counts, multiply each item by its standard cost. Standard cost is typically the most recent purchase price or a rolling average depending on how you manage it. This gives you the dollar value of inventory on hand. Your usage for the week is beginning inventory plus purchases minus ending inventory. That’s your actual food cost.

Now compare actual to theoretical. Theoretical food cost comes from your recipes and your POS data. If you sold 200 burgers and each burger calls for 6 ounces of ground beef, your theoretical usage is 75 pounds. Do this for every menu item sold during the week and you get a dollar figure representing what food cost should have been if every dish was made exactly to spec with zero waste.

The gap between actual and theoretical is your variance. Some variance is normal. A point or two of food cost is expected from trim waste, small mistakes, and shift meals. But if your theoretical says food cost should be 28% and your actual is 34%, six points of margin are going somewhere. That somewhere is typically one or more of four things: waste from over-prep or spoilage, theft, portion drift where cooks are heavy-handed, or receiving errors where you paid for product you didn’t actually get.

Weekly counting is what makes this useful. Monthly counts hide problems. If a cook has been over-portioning steaks for three weeks, a monthly count just shows you a bad food cost number with no way to pinpoint when it started. Weekly counts narrow the window. You see the spike the very next week and can investigate while memories are fresh and cameras still have footage.

The first few weeks will feel slow. Counts might take an hour or more. After a month of doing it consistently, most teams get it down to 30 or 40 minutes. The time investment pays for itself many times over when you catch a receiving shortfall or realize your new line cook is double-portioning avocado on every plate.

If you need help setting up inventory accounting in your books so these counts actually flow into accurate COGS reporting, that’s where a bookkeeper who understands food and beverage operations adds real value. The count itself is an operational task, but tying it to your financials correctly is what turns raw numbers into decisions about menu pricing, vendor negotiations, and staffing.

Getting this right is one of the highest-impact things a restaurant owner can do. Rock Steady Bookkeeping works with restaurant and bar owners throughout Wisconsin to build financial systems that support exactly this kind of cost control.