Enter your weekly fixed costs, your variable cost per cover and your average spend per head. The tool calculates how many covers you need each week to cover all costs, and how many additional covers are needed to hit a profit target.
Weekly Fixed Costs
Revenue & Variable Costs
Your break-even point is the number of covers at which your total revenue exactly equals your total costs — you make neither a profit nor a loss. Every cover served above this number contributes directly to profit at the contribution margin rate.
Fixed costs stay the same regardless of how many covers you serve — rent, business rates, insurance, debt repayments and salaried staff. Variable costs rise with each cover — food and drink cost, disposables and consumables. Labour is often semi-variable: some staff are fixed (salaried) and some are variable (hourly, scheduled to demand).
The contribution margin per cover is what remains from each cover's revenue after variable costs are deducted. This amount contributes first to covering fixed costs, and then — once fixed costs are covered — to profit.
Once you know your break-even covers, you can set meaningful daily and weekly targets. If your break-even is 180 covers per week across 6 trading days, you need an average of 30 covers per day before you make any profit. This makes your daily cover count a directly actionable metric rather than an abstract revenue figure.
This calculator provides estimates based on the figures you enter. All figures are pre-VAT. JWBIZ Ltd accepts no liability for financial decisions made on the basis of this tool.