You know what sold last night. Do you know what it cost you?
Food cost, labor, and margin reporting for restaurants, breweries, and bars.
Restaurants, bars, and breweries run on thin margins, long hours, and instinct. You know which nights are busy and which are slow. You know your popular dishes. But do you know which busy nights were actually profitable after labor and waste? Do you know the real margin on each menu item when ingredient costs change month to month? Your tools have the answers. They’re just not talking to each other. And in the High Country there’s an extra layer: leaf-season crowds, App State weekends, and a slow stretch where the margin you banked in October has to carry you to spring.
Your data stack
We know the ecosystem:
- POS
- Toast, Square, Clover, or Aloha
- Books
- QuickBooks or Xero
- Reservations
- OpenTable or Resy
- Labor scheduling
- 7shifts or Homebase
- Inventory
- MarketMan or BlueCart
- Mailchimp or Constant Contact
- Online presence
- Google Business Profile, Yelp, TripAdvisor
Each of these tools does its job. None of them shows you how the jobs connect.
What we connect and what it reveals
POS + Accounting
Daily revenue next to actual cost of goods and labor. Real margin. Menu item performance ranked by profit contribution, not just popularity.
POS + Labor scheduling
Labor cost ratio by day and shift. Where staffing doesn't match volume.
Marketing + Revenue
Which marketing channels actually drive paying customers. The difference between a full dining room and a profitable one.
Reviews + Operations
Review sentiment tracked over time, connected to what was actually happening operationally.
External data
Weather patterns correlated with traffic. Local event schedules connected to demand forecasting.
The difference between a full dining room and a profitable one.
What the season does to the numbers
The High Country’s year is not flat, and the public record says so plainly. These are figures we check when we build a forecast for a Boone restaurant.
Food-service jobs
Watauga County food-service payrolls held 3,105 jobs in January 2025 and 3,673 that October, a swing of 568 jobs inside one calendar year. The count comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' quarterly census of employment and wages, which reports Watauga County separately under NAICS 722, food services and drinking places.
Payroll
Average weekly wages in that same county industry ran $390 in the first quarter of 2025 and $462 in the third, so the season moves the payroll as well as the headcount.
Storefronts
The county held 152 food-service establishments in the first quarter of 2025 and 159 by the fourth quarter, in the same BLS series.
Lodging demand
Watauga County collected $4,391,198 in occupancy tax in fiscal 2024 and $3,570,109 in fiscal 2025, a drop of 18.7% recorded in the county's audited financial statements for the year ended June 30, 2025.
The student calendar
Appalachian State enrolled 18,124 students on its Boone campus in fall 2025, 6,200 of them in campus residence halls, per the university's enrollment report of September 5, 2025.
Alcohol sales
The Boone ABC Board booked $8,940,591 in gross sales in fiscal 2023-24, reported in the North Carolina ABC Commission's performance audit of the board published August 27, 2025.
Every number above is a public figure any owner can pull. The work is joining them to your own POS and labor data, so October’s peak and January’s floor show up in your staffing plan before they show up in your bank balance. The seasonal planner runs that comparison against your own twelve months.