Every metric on this page gets three things: what it actually means in plain English, the formula, and the honest note about when it lies to you. Written for the person who has to make the call at 6pm on a Friday, not for a finance seminar.
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You are selling a room for a number of hours. These are the measures that treat it that way, instead of only counting what rang through the register.
How much of the room you had open actually got used. Capacity hours are your capacity multiplied by the hours you were open. Utilization is the share of those capacity hours that had a person in them.
Formula
Capacity hours available = capacity × hours open
Capacity hours used = sum of people inside for each hour open
Capacity utilization % = capacity hours used ÷ capacity hours available × 100
What it is for
Telling apart two nights that both felt busy. A room that was jammed for one hour and empty for four is a completely different staffing and hours problem than a room that sat two thirds full all night, and headcount alone will not separate them.
Where it misleads
It is an average, so it flattens the peak. A night that reads low overall can still have had the room jammed at midnight, which is the moment you actually needed to know about. And the whole thing rests on the capacity number you put in: use a legal maximum you never reach in practice and utilization will look permanently bad, while a capacity set too low will read near full on an ordinary night.
What one hour of your room earns while you are open. Take net sales for the period and divide by the capacity hours you had open.
Formula
Capacity hours = capacity × hours open
Sales per capacity-hour = net sales ÷ capacity hours
What it is for
Comparing nights that are not otherwise comparable. A Saturday out-selling a Tuesday is not news. A Tuesday that earns more per capacity-hour than the Saturday is, and it usually means the Saturday was carrying costs the Tuesday was not.
Where it misleads
It moves when you change your hours, even if nothing about the night changed. Open an extra hour that does light trade and the number falls, although that hour may well have covered its own cost. Read it next to total sales, never instead of it. It also needs net sales excluding tax, or you are dividing somebody else's money by your room.
Revenue per available seat hour. The same idea as sales per capacity-hour, except the unit you are selling is a seat rather than a spot in the room. It comes out of restaurant revenue-management research published by Kimes and colleagues at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration.
Formula
Available seat hours = seats in service × hours open
RevPASH = revenue ÷ available seat hours
What it is for
Catching what average check and cover count each miss on their own. Average check rewards big spenders and ignores an empty room. Covers reward volume and ignore what people spent. RevPASH counts both against the space and the time you had available to sell.
Where it misleads
It was built for seated service. On a standing room Friday, an available seat is not the thing you are selling, and the number will read strangely no matter how good the night was. Count only the seats you genuinely had in service too: including a closed patio drags RevPASH down and hides what the open room actually did.
How many times you filled the same seat over a service period. Turn time is the whole cycle: seated, served, paid, cleared, reset. Run the same arithmetic forwards and it gives you the ceiling on the room.
Formula
Turns per seat = (service hours × 60) ÷ turn time in minutes
Maximum covers = seats × turns per seat
Capacity used % = actual covers ÷ maximum covers × 100
What it is for
Finding out whether the room can physically hold the guests you are about to spend money attracting. If the ceiling for the night is 180 covers, a promotion built to pull 300 is a plan to turn 120 people away.
Where it misleads
More turns is not automatically better. Push service faster and turn time falls, but so does the time a table has to order another round. And capacity used well below 100% is normal rather than a failure: party sizes never match table sizes exactly, so some seats go unsold every single night however well the floor is run.
In restaurant language a cover is one guest served, and cover count is how many guests you served in a period. In nightlife the same word means the charge to get in the door. Two different numbers, one word, so say which one you mean when you are talking to your team.
Formula
Covers = guests served in the period
Average check = net sales ÷ covers
Gross door = cover charge × paying guests
Net door = gross door − ticketing fees
What it is for
Covers is the denominator under half the other numbers on this page. Average check, RevPASH and sales per labor hour all inherit whatever error is in it, which is why it is worth settling the definition before you settle anything else.
Where it misleads
The definition drifts. Some kitchens count entrées, some POS setups count tickets, and a two-top sharing one plate is two covers or one depending on who configured the system. Comps count as covers as well: they take up capacity, staffing and product, they just do not pay at the door. In RollCall the word Cover means the entry charge you sell in the app, which is included with every plan and off by default.
These are the numbers that decide whether a busy night was also a good one. Every one of them is a ratio, and every ratio can be moved by the denominator, which is where most of the trouble comes from.
Your cost of goods sold plus your total labor, added together. It is the two biggest costs you can actually change in a week, in one number.
Formula
Cost of goods sold = food cost + beverage cost
Total labor = hourly wages + salaried wages + payroll taxes and benefits
Prime cost = cost of goods sold + total labor
Prime cost % = prime cost ÷ total sales × 100
What it is for
Giving you one figure you can act on. Rent does not care that you had a bad week. Product and labor do, and they are the two lines a schedule change or a menu change reaches inside seven days.
Where it misleads
It is a sum of two separate levers, so it can improve for a reason you did not intend. Raise prices and the percentage drops without a single cost being controlled. Use the same period for every figure, because a monthly P&L set against a weekly payroll run produces a number that means nothing at all. And use net sales excluding sales tax, or the denominator is inflated and the result flatters you.
What the liquid in the glass cost you, as a share of what you sold it for. Food does the same job under the name food cost, and both are versions of cost of goods sold.
Formula
Pour cost % = cost of product sold ÷ product sales × 100
Cost of product sold = opening inventory + purchases − closing inventory
Per drink: cost per ounce = bottle cost ÷ ounces per bottle
Per drink: cost per drink = cost per ounce × pour size
Per drink: pour cost % = cost per drink ÷ menu price × 100
What it is for
Two different jobs, and it helps to keep them apart. On a single drink it prices the menu. Across a period it tells you whether what left the store room matches what rang through the register.
Where it misleads
Without an opening and a closing count you are measuring purchases, not cost of product sold, so a big delivery on the last day of the month reads as a disaster that never happened. It also moves when your mix moves: sell more beer and fewer cocktails and the number changes without anyone pouring differently. Free pours, spills, comps and staff drinks all land in here too, which is why a bad pour cost is a question to go and answer, not an answer in itself.
What you spent on people, as a share of what you sold.
Formula
Labor cost % = labor cost ÷ sales × 100
Average labor cost per hour = labor cost ÷ labor hours worked
What it is for
A fast read on whether a shift was staffed for the business it actually did, rather than the business you hoped it would do when you wrote the schedule on Monday.
Where it misleads
It is a ratio, so a big night flatters it. You can be genuinely overstaffed on a packed Saturday and still post a comfortable percentage, because the denominator covered for you. It also lumps a salaried manager in with hourly floor staff, and those two move for completely different reasons. Decide once whether your labor cost includes payroll burden, then never change it mid-year, or you are comparing two different numbers and calling it a trend.
What each hour of staff time brought in. Sales for the shift divided by the labor hours worked in it.
Formula
Sales per labor hour = sales ÷ labor hours worked
What it is for
It is the check on labor cost percentage. The two move in opposite directions on a slow night, so read them together: the percentage tells you what the shift cost you, sales per labor hour tells you what the shift did.
Where it misleads
It depends entirely on which hours you counted. Front of house only, or prep and kitchen as well? Salaried managers in or out? Both choices are defensible and only one of them is comparable to last month, so pick one, write it down, and hand it to whoever runs the report next.
The sales you have to do before you start keeping money. Fixed costs divided by the share of each dollar that survives your variable costs.
Formula
Total variable cost % = cost of goods % + variable labor % + other variable %
Contribution margin ratio = 1 − total variable cost %
Break-even sales = fixed costs ÷ contribution margin ratio
Break-even covers = break-even sales ÷ average check
What it is for
Knowing the number the month has to clear, and the smaller version of the same question: how many extra people a promotion has to pull before it was worth running at all.
Where it misleads
Everything hangs on which costs you called fixed. Salaried management belongs in fixed; put it in variable labor and break-even moves a long way for no real reason. Fixed is also only fixed over a horizon, since rent is fixed for the month and very much not fixed over a lease. And it is one snapshot at today's prices and today's mix, so it needs redoing whenever either one changes.
Two of them, honestly. The rest are yours to run, which is why the calculators are free and sitting on a separate site with no account attached.
Scheduled capacity-hours, how much of it you actually used, and where the room you are paying for sat empty.
What an hour of your room earns while it is open, once you connect your POS read-only.
An estimated number of people inside and % full, room by room. This is the input the two metrics above are built on.
Judging a promotion is where those two meet. The arithmetic is written out in how to tell if a bar promotion actually worked →
The rest of the calculators
None of this is legal, tax or accounting advice. Employment and alcohol rules change by state and city, so check anything you are going to rely on with somebody who knows your jurisdiction.
The ones operators actually ask us.
We do not publish target ranges, here or anywhere else. A pour cost that is normal for a high volume beer bar is alarming for a cocktail room, and most of the ranges repeated online have no source behind them. Use the formula on this page, run it for your own venue for a few periods, and compare each period against your own history.
Both divide revenue by the space and time you actually had to sell. RevPASH counts seats, so it suits a seated dining room. Sales per capacity-hour counts your occupancy capacity, so it suits a bar or a club where most of the night nobody is sitting down.
Add cost of goods sold to total labor, then divide by total sales for the same period. Cost of goods sold is food cost plus beverage cost. Total labor is hourly wages plus salaried wages plus payroll taxes and benefits. Use net sales excluding sales tax, and pull every figure from the same period.
Two of them. Capacity and utilization is computed in your dashboard from your scans alone. Sales per capacity-hour additionally needs your POS connected read-only, because it needs your sales. Both are part of every RollCall plan, as is the estimated occupancy and headcount, room by room, that they are built on. The rest are free standalone calculators on tools.rollcall.bar that work on their own with no signup.
From a scan taken inside the room. Someone on shift posts a photo or a short clip and the reading is derived from that, so nobody is typing in a status. Occupancy is tracked room by room rather than as one venue level number, and a scan's reading expires: when it lapses the number falls back to check-in presence instead of showing a stale Packed all week. Check-in counts are written on our servers and are not writable by any client, including your own dashboard.
Prime cost. It bundles the two costs you can actually change inside a week, product and labor, into one figure you can watch. Once that is steady, add sales per capacity-hour, because it is the one that tells you whether a busy night was also a good one.
Capacity and utilization comes out of the scans your staff already take on their phones. Sales per capacity-hour adds a read-only POS connection on top. Start with Pro: one venue, no hardware.
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