It’s 5 PM on Friday. The bookkeeper is upstairs with a stack of twenty-five invoices someone dropped on her desk at 3, invoices from a week nobody entered as it happened. The chef is standing in the walk-in, counting the same shelf for the second time because the first count didn’t match anything. The GM is on the phone with a produce vendor arguing about a credit that may or may not exist. And the P&L conversation with the owner is Monday morning.
Sound familiar?
This is what the last two days of the week look like in most restaurants. Not the last two days of the month. The last two days of the week. Whatever cycle your operation runs on, this fire drill shows up at the end of it, and it looks the same every time. Chasing invoices that should have been entered when they came in. Counting things that should have been counted already. Reconciling numbers that shouldn’t need reconciling. And the longer you wait to look, the bigger the drill.
The Friday fire drill starts on Monday. Every operator I’ve watched who runs a boring Friday does the same thing: they know where they stand every day of the week, and they don’t let anything slip past them.
Boring is the goal.
What actually creates the fire drill
The chaos on Friday almost never comes from something Friday did. It comes from what didn’t happen on Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday.
Twenty-five invoices arrive on the bookkeeper’s desk in one dump because nobody was entering them as they came in. Nobody knows what the food cost is really running because a whole week of vendor activity hasn’t been posted yet. The chef ordered on Thursday for a weekend that has never actually happened in the history of the restaurant, because nobody looked at last week’s sales, or the four weeks before that, or the last three weekends in July. The par levels were set six months ago and nobody’s touched them since. Somebody flagged a credit on Monday but nobody knows if it ever came through. The price on this week’s tomato invoice is different from last week’s, and nobody’s sure whether that’s the market moving or the vendor moving.
None of those is a big deal on its own. Add them all up and by Thursday afternoon nobody can tell you what the week is going to look like. You can’t manage what you can’t see. And by Friday afternoon you’re not managing anymore. You’re trying to close the books on a week that already happened, with numbers you don’t fully trust.
That’s the fire drill. Everything that didn’t happen when it should have, all showing up at once at the end of the week.
What visibility actually means
Visibility means you can see what’s happening in seven areas, on any day of the week, without having to go dig for it.
Ordering. What went out today, at what quantity, to which vendor. Not what someone thinks was ordered. What actually was.
Pricing. What you’re paying for the items that moved this week, compared to what you should be paying, and whether anything has shifted since the last order.
Total spend. Where you are against this week’s budget. Not the month’s. Not the quarter’s. This week.
Sales forecasting. What the weekend actually looks like, based on last week, and the four weeks before that, and the same week last year. Not what you hope it will be. What the data says.
Budgets. The budget for this week built off that forecast, not a monthly number divided by four.
Inventory. What’s actually in the building. Not what should be in the building.
Par levels. Updated to reflect the current sales pattern, not the pattern from six months ago.
That’s the list. Seven areas. If you have visibility across all seven, on any given day, you can see the week coming at you before it arrives. If you have visibility across three or four, you’re guessing. If you have visibility across zero, you’re just receiving the report on Monday and hoping the number isn’t too bad.
Two habits that make the fire drill worse
Two things show up in almost every operation with a chaotic Friday.
The phantom weekend. Somebody in the kitchen orders for a weekend they believe is coming, not the weekend that actually shows up. If you put a pen to it and looked at the sales history, you’d discover the projected weekend has never happened in the life of the restaurant, or it happened once, on a specific holiday, three years ago. Ordering to a fantasy costs you twice. You pay for the extra product going in, and you pay again when it doesn’t sell and has to be counted, discounted, or thrown away. Every operator overshoots occasionally. But when it’s the default assumption, it’s a leak that runs every week.
The Friday invoice dump. Twenty or thirty invoices from earlier in the week that nobody entered, all handed to the bookkeeper on Friday afternoon. Now she is trying to catch up on a week of activity in a few hours, while you are trying to have a real conversation about what the food cost actually is. The numbers you get back that day are guesses at best. Worse, half the invoices have things on them that should have been flagged Monday, or Tuesday, or when the driver was still standing at the back door. By Friday, most of what could have been caught has already been paid.
Both of these are process failures, not people failures. Nobody in the building is trying to sabotage the week. They are just running without guardrails.
The point of a system is the guardrails
A system, done right, is guardrails. It holds you on the rails when the week gets busy and the temptation is to skip a step because nobody has the ten minutes.
The invoice gets entered when it comes in, not on Friday. The credit gets flagged at the door, not chased three weeks later. The par gets looked at on Monday, not once a quarter. The forecast for the weekend gets built off actual sales history, not gut. The order gets placed against that forecast, not against a hope.
Do those small things all week and Friday looks completely different. Come Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, nothing surprises you. You’re not staring at invoices or totals that don’t line up. Nobody is dumping twenty-five invoices into somebody’s lap they should have entered days ago. You’ve got a workflow everyone follows. And what you get out of it is clean data you can actually use to make decisions, instead of piecing together a week that already happened.
The stress comes from the surprises. Take the surprises out, and the stress goes with them.
The 5-minute Thursday check
If you do just one thing this week, do this.
Put five minutes on your Thursday afternoon calendar just after lunch, I’d say. The morning is too early because Thursday’s deliveries haven’t been made yet and those invoices will need to be added into your weekly spend so far.
Run through these five questions:
- Are all this week’s invoices entered, including today’s? If not, who is finishing it before end of day?
- Have any open credits been claimed, or are they still sitting?
- Does the current inventory count roughly match what we think we have?
- Is the weekend order built off actual recent sales, or off somebody’s gut?
- Is anything in the week’s spend that we cannot explain?
Five questions. Five minutes. If any of them come back “no” or “I don’t know,” you know what the rest of Thursday needs to be about, and you have hours to fix it before the weekend order goes out.
If you want to get one level sharper, add this. Take your week-to-date spend, add the projected total of your staged Friday order, and you’re looking at your projected total week spend before you commit to the order. If you use a PO system, those numbers are already there. If you don’t, ask each vendor for the order total as you finish placing it, or use whatever online ordering portal your suppliers offer. Most of them show a running total as you build the order. Either way, you now know what the week is going to cost before you commit to it, which means you can adjust if you’re heading somewhere you shouldn’t be going.
That is the whole trick. Same work, done a little earlier, on purpose, every week.
The last word
Every issue this season has named a place your margin is quietly leaking. The cents you lose one invoice at a time. The credits sitting on your statements. The number you think you are paying that you aren’t. The ten items worth re-quoting. All of them share one thing. They stay hidden until the end of the period, when the report comes out and the surprise has already cost you.
The fix is looking earlier.
If your Friday is dramatic, something’s slipping earlier in the week. If your Friday is boring, the system is working. Boring is the highest compliment you can pay an operation.
Stay tuned. Next week we start a new season, Vendor Season, and I’ll be back with the vendor you haven’t questioned in years.
John
Behind the Line is for multi-unit operators who’d rather see the leak than chase the symptom. If it’s useful, pass it along to someone who’d nod along.
Related issues
Behind the Line goes out every Tuesday for multi-unit operators who would rather hold the line than explain where the money went.
Want to know what your own numbers look like? ChefMod runs procurement for multi-unit independents: the agreements, the price checks, the receiving discipline, and the weekly numbers underneath all of it.