How to reduce restaurant labor cost without hurting service
Build the schedule from an hourly forecast, find the hours after the rush, and know the rules before you cut.
A daily labor percentage can look fine while a few hours a day cost too much. The fix is rarely a whole shift. It's usually the hours after the rush, carried by the rush's crew.
Build the schedule from a forecast
- Forecast sales by hour from the same weekday over the last four weeks, adjusted for anything known: a holiday, a local event, a promotion.
- Set a sales-per-labor-hour target from your own best weeks. Menus and formats differ too much for a published number to fit.
- Divide forecast sales by the target to get labor hours for each hour.
- Set a floor: the minimum people needed to open safely and run each station, whatever the forecast says.
- Stagger start and end times so people arrive for the rush and leave as it ends.
Find the overstaffed hours
Compare people on the clock with orders, per hour, over four weeks, split into weekdays and weekends. A run of hours carrying the peak hour's crew for under half its orders is the gap. In one illustration: about three people from 3 to 7 PM for nine orders an hour, against 2.9 people at noon for 27.
Leave out catering and scheduled orders placed on another day. They don't need someone at the counter that hour, and counting them hides the gap.
Check the rules first
Some states and cities have predictive-scheduling or fair-workweek laws that can require schedules to be posted in advance and extra pay for changes made at short notice. Rest-break, minor-labor and overtime rules also vary by location. Check what applies to your stores, and build changes into next week's schedule rather than today's.
Don't count understaffing as savings
Cutting too far costs sales that appear in no report — the car that left the drive-thru line. Try a change for two weeks and watch orders and ticket times in those hours before calling it a saving.
Where Franlever fits
Franlever compares crew on the clock with orders by hour at each store and flags runs of hours where the gap is large. It never prices a staffing change as a saving, because understaffing costs sales no report shows.
Common questions
- How do I lower labor cost in a restaurant?
- Schedule to an hourly sales forecast, find hours where crew outnumbers orders — usually just after a rush — and adjust next week's schedule. Check local scheduling laws before changing shifts at short notice.
- What is sales per labor hour?
- Net sales divided by total labor hours worked in the same period. It shows how much each hour of labor produced.
General information for restaurant and franchise operators, not legal, tax, accounting or financial advice. Figures in examples are illustrations, not predictions or promises of results. Laws and platform policies change and differ by location, so check the current rules and talk to a qualified advisor about your situation.