Most restaurant financial templates forecast revenue off one blended "average check" and model labor as a flat percentage of sales. This model builds revenue bottom-up instead: seats multiplied by table turns multiplied by average check, split independently by lunch and dinner daypart, with a monthly seasonality index and a separate weekend-dinner day-of-week uplift applied to covers per day, never to a cumulative total.
Food and beverage/alcohol are then kept as two genuinely different cost lines all the way through the model, because a bar program's margin runs nothing like the kitchen's – blending them into one "COGS %" is the single most common shortcut that hides how much a bar program actually lifts margin. A three-system Staffing & Payroll build separates back-of-house hourly staff (no tip credit), front-of-house tipped staff (a real cash-wage-below-minimum structure), and salaried management, so labor cost reflects how a restaurant is actually staffed.
Year 1 DSCR clears the 1.25x SBA 7(a) minimum at 3.95x, backed by a revenue-cushion stress test, current ratio, debt-to-equity, and interest coverage on the DSCR & Lender Ratios tab. Every wage and cost benchmark is sourced to 2026 data – BLS median wages for chefs, servers, and bartenders, the federal $2.13/hr tipped-minimum cash wage alongside the $7.25/hr full minimum, and the 28%-32% food-cost and 18%-22% beverage-cost industry benchmark ranges.
Twenty-five tabs: Start Here, Disclaimer, Help & FAQ, Assumptions, Covers & Seat Turns, Revenue Build, Food & Beverage COGS, Debt Schedule, Staffing & Payroll, CapEx & Depreciation, Operating Expenses, the three financial statements, an Actual vs. Budget Tracker, Break-Even Analysis, DSCR & Lender Ratios, a 22-ratio Full Ratio Suite, a DuPont ROE Decomposition, Scenario Analysis, Sensitivity Analysis (covers by average check, on both Net Income and DSCR), a Business Valuation & Exit tab with a DCF and unlevered/levered IRR, an Executive Dashboard, Funding Requirement, and Settings.
Built as a native .xlsx, verified across Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice, WPS, and ONLYOFFICE. A planning tool built from sourced 2026 data – confirm your own concept, market, and state's tipped-wage law before relying on it for a real loan application.
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Source: Best Practices in Financial Modeling, Restaurant Industry Excel: Restaurant & Bar Financial Model Excel (XLSX) Spreadsheet, WebsiteGeek
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