What is prime cost and why does it matter more than food cost?

Prime cost is food plus labour together, usually 55 to 65 percent of sales. It matters more than either number alone because the two trade against each other: prepared food cuts labour and raises food cost, scratch cooking does the reverse. Watching only one lets you fix it while making the business worse.

How much should compliance cost me a year?

For a typical full-service NYC kitchen it lands around one to two percent of sales. Our published prices put the recurring work near $6,000 a year: quarterly hood and duct cleaning from $650, semi-annual suppression inspection from $580, annual extinguisher service from $400, emergency lighting, and grease trap service. The gas piping inspection is every four years and sits with the building owner.

Which POS should I use?

Toast if you are full service and want the better labour reporting, Square if you are counter service and want cheaper and simpler. Either way, choose on the weekly reports rather than the hardware, get the all-in processing rate in writing including pass-through interchange, and avoid three-year hardware leases while the concept is still unproven.

Do you sell any of these systems?

No. We take no affiliate commission on POS, payroll, banking or bookkeeping and we resell none of them. We name what we run ourselves: Zoho Books for invoicing, QuickBooks for vendor records, Stripe for card payments, Mercury for banking. Where we have not used something we say so.

What is the most common expensive mistake?

Treating compliance as something to call about when it expires. Every interval runs on its own clock, nothing reminds you, and the first time they line up is usually an inspection you are failing. The cost is not the service, it is the violation and the closure.

← NYC compliance

The numbers that matter, and the systems that produce them

Most advice about running a restaurant is published by companies selling restaurants software. This is not that. We do compliance work for NYC kitchens and we run an operation ourselves, so what follows is what we actually watch, what we would tell a friend opening a room, and where we would send them.

We sell none of this

No affiliate links, no commission, no reseller agreements. We name what we actually run, say why, and say plainly where we have not used something ourselves. Nothing below pays us a referral fee.

The five numbers

Ranges rather than targets. Your concept moves all of these, so the useful comparison is against your own last month, not against an article.

Metric	Range	Why
Prime cost	55-65% of sales	Food plus labour together. The single number worth watching weekly. Above 70 and something is structurally wrong, not seasonally wrong.
Labour	25-35% of sales	Full service sits higher than counter service. Track it weekly against sales, not monthly against budget.
Food cost	28-35% of sales	Varies enormously by concept. A steakhouse and a pizzeria are not comparable, so compare yourself to last month rather than to an article.
Occupancy	6-10% of sales	Rent, utilities, insurance. Fixed, which is why a slow month hurts more than the sales drop suggests.
Compliance and maintenance	1-2% of sales	Hood cleaning, suppression, extinguishers, grease traps, gas piping. Small, predictable, and the one people forget to budget until it arrives as a violation.

Compliance and maintenance is the row people leave out of the model. It is the smallest of the five and the only one that closes the room when you skip it.

Choosing the systems

Point of sale

Toast or Square for most independents

Pick for the weekly reports, not the hardware demo. You will read sales-by-hour and labour-against-sales every week for years and use the rest twice. Toast is built for full service and its labour reporting is genuinely better; Square is cheaper and simpler and fine for counter service. Get the all-in processing rate in writing including pass-through interchange, because the headline rate is never what you pay.

Watch for: Three-year hardware leases. Paying more monthly on a shorter term is worth it while you are still unsure of the concept.

Books

Zoho Books, or QuickBooks if your accountant insists

We run Zoho Books. It is materially cheaper than QuickBooks, the invoicing is better, and the API is open enough that we sync invoices into our own system automatically. The honest counterpoint: most NYC bookkeepers know QuickBooks and some will charge you more to learn Zoho, so ask before you commit. We keep QuickBooks vendor records alongside for exactly that reason.

Watch for: Choosing on features. Choose on whether your bookkeeper will actually reconcile it weekly.

Banking and payments

Mercury for banking, Stripe for cards

Mercury for business banking: no branch, no fees, and an API if you ever want one. Stripe for anything you invoice rather than ring through the POS. Keep deposits, card settlement and payroll in separate accounts from day one, because untangling them at tax time costs more than the discipline does.

Watch for: Running personal and business money through one account. It is the single most common reason a set of restaurant books cannot be reconciled.

Payroll and hiring

Gusto for most, a payroll bureau if you run tips at scale

Gusto handles the mechanics well. The risk in New York is not the software, it is spread-of-hours pay, call-in pay and the tip credit, which are easy to get wrong at volume and expensive to unwind. Whatever you use, have someone who knows those rules check the first three runs.

Watch for: Classifying anyone as a contractor to dodge workers compensation. DOHMH will not issue your permit without a certificate naming the Health Department as certificate holder.

Marketing

Google Business Profile first, everything else second

For a neighbourhood restaurant the profile and its reviews outperform everything else by a distance. Verify it, get the photos and hours right, and ask every regular. We know this the hard way: we cannot get a profile ourselves because we have no public premises, and it costs us the map pack every day.

Watch for: Paying for a website before the profile is verified. The profile is what people actually see.

If you want an introduction to a bookkeeper, a payroll provider or a POS rep we have worked with, ask. We do not take a fee for it, and we will tell you when we do not know someone good in that category.

Quarterly reporting, and the trap in it

New York sales tax quarters are not calendar quarters. They run March to May, June to August, September to November, and December to February, each due on the 20th of the following month. Every first-year operator we have met assumed otherwise, and a return filed on the calendar is a return filed late.

Quarter	Period	Return due
Q1	March – May	due 20 June
Q2	June – August	due 20 September
Q3	September – November	due 20 December
Q4	December – February	due 20 March

Alongside those: workers compensation and disability renewals, the annual DOHMH permit renewal one year from the end of the month you applied, and the compliance intervals. We run our own sales tax reminders off this calendar because remembering it manually did not work.

Common questions

What is prime cost and why does it matter more than food cost?: Prime cost is food plus labour together, usually 55 to 65 percent of sales. It matters more than either number alone because the two trade against each other: prepared food cuts labour and raises food cost, scratch cooking does the reverse. Watching only one lets you fix it while making the business worse.
How much should compliance cost me a year?: For a typical full-service NYC kitchen it lands around one to two percent of sales. Our published prices put the recurring work near $6,000 a year: quarterly hood and duct cleaning from $650, semi-annual suppression inspection from $580, annual extinguisher service from $400, emergency lighting, and grease trap service. The gas piping inspection is every four years and sits with the building owner.
Which POS should I use?: Toast if you are full service and want the better labour reporting, Square if you are counter service and want cheaper and simpler. Either way, choose on the weekly reports rather than the hardware, get the all-in processing rate in writing including pass-through interchange, and avoid three-year hardware leases while the concept is still unproven.
Do you sell any of these systems?: No. We take no affiliate commission on POS, payroll, banking or bookkeeping and we resell none of them. We name what we run ourselves: Zoho Books for invoicing, QuickBooks for vendor records, Stripe for card payments, Mercury for banking. Where we have not used something we say so.
What is the most common expensive mistake?: Treating compliance as something to call about when it expires. Every interval runs on its own clock, nothing reminds you, and the first time they line up is usually an inspection you are failing. The cost is not the service, it is the violation and the closure.

The row we can take off your desk

Compliance is one to two percent of sales and about six separate intervals. We run all of it on one calendar, keep the certificates where an inspector can see them, and tell you before a date passes.

Get a plan for your kitchen

Benchmark ranges are industry conventions and our own operating experience, not agency figures, and are stated as ranges because that is how they behave. Compliance pricing is our published rate, verified 2026-09-02. Nothing here is accounting, tax or legal advice.