Playbook tool
Labor by Daypart
A weekly labor percentage is an average, and averages absolve. Break one day into blocks and the overstaffed dead hours stop hiding behind the understaffed peak.
Have these in front of you
- Hourly sales report from your POS (last 4 weeks)
- Timeclock hours for the same periods
- Average loaded hourly wage
One day, block by block
Use a four-week average for a single day of the week — your slowest weekday first. Leave blocks blank if you’re closed. Rename any block to match your own curve.
| Block | Sales ($) | Labor hours | Sales / labor hr | Labor % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11a–1p | — | — | ||
| 1p–3p | — | — | ||
| 3p–5p | — | — | ||
| 5p–6p | — | — | ||
| 6p–8p | — | — | ||
| 8p–close | — | — | ||
| Day total | — | — | — | — |
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The method
How to run this properly
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Pull four weeks of hourly sales
Every modern POS can slice sales by hour — the report is usually called sales by daypart, hourly sales, or sales summary by hour. Four weeks smooths out a single freak night.
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Break one day into 2–3 hour blocks
Open-to-lunch, lunch, afternoon, dinner build, peak, close. Your blocks should follow your curve, not the clock. Do one day first — not the whole week.
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Put labor hours next to sales for each block
Divide sales by labor hours in each block. That is sales per labor hour, and the first time most operators see it, one block is triple another.
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Move hours, do not add them
The goal is not a bigger schedule. It is shifting a body out of the flattest block and into the steepest one, and giving the dead stretch to one cross-trained person doing prep that shortens the peak.
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Run it two weeks, then remeasure
Rebuild one day, run it for two weeks, and measure again before touching a second day. Cleaner data, less staff whiplash, and a result you can defend before you go near Friday.
What this doesn’t do
Scheduling to the curve optimises for the demand you already have. It will happily tell you to cut a Tuesday afternoon that a future catering account could fill. This is defense — it protects margin, it does not grow the curve.
The reporting behind this tool
This calculator is the conclusion of an Oven Scars story, made executable. The article shows the worked example and links every figure to its primary source.
Your Labor Percentage Is Averaging a Dead Tuesday Against a Slammed Friday