What should my prime cost be — and why are you seeing it weeks late?

Target: at or under 60% of sales for most full-service concepts. Food plus labor is prime cost, and the practical bands are 55–60% healthy, 60–65% watch it, 65%+ you're working for your vendors and your payroll company. QSR runs lower; chef-led, ingredient-forward concepts run the top of the band on food and earn it back on ticket.

But the number matters less than the latency. Most independents see prime cost when the accountant closes the month — three to six weeks after the leak opened. Food cost drifts four points in a week (a vendor reprice, a portioning slip, a theft pattern) and the P&L tells you about it in five weeks, after it's cost you real money. A 4-point drift on $100K/month of sales is $4,000 a month, every month, until someone notices.

The fix isn't heroic bookkeeping — it's reading what your POS and invoices already know, daily. Yesterday's sales are in your POS by 6am. Your vendor prices are on this week's invoices. Daily prime cost is just those two sources reconciled every morning, with a flag when the trend breaks.

That's literally what we built Pulse for — daily food cost, the 30/60/90-day prime cost trend, cross-vendor price comparison, and one coach card per leak telling you the move, at $199/mo (never86.ai/pricing). But even if you never touch our product: get your prime cost read to daily. The gap between "monthly" and "daily" is where most of the recoverable money lives.