By industry
Unit economics by location, daily, not monthly.
Food cost, labor percentage and same-store movement per site, with the driver behind each one, rather than a monthly consolidation that arrives after the decisions were made.
Last reviewed 3 August 2026
The short answer
In this business the margin is thin and it moves daily.
A point of food cost or a point of labor is the difference between a good month and a bad one, and both move day to day with mix, waste, scheduling and price. Monthly reporting cannot see it, and a weekly spreadsheet is a person's job.
SQOR reads the point-of-sale, the labor system, the purchasing system and the ledger as one, computes the drivers behind each measure, and reports the exceptions nightly.
What it answers
Four things it answers.
01
Which locations are losing food cost, and to what
Mix, waste, portioning or purchase price. The four look identical in a monthly number and need completely different responses.
02
Where labor is misaligned with demand
Scheduled hours against actual traffic by daypart, by site, rather than against a template.
03
What is actually driving same-store movement
Traffic, ticket size or mix, separated, so the response matches the cause.
04
Which menu items carry the margin
Contribution by item including true cost, which is where menu decisions are usually made on instinct.
The questions that matter here
Questions we hear from operators in dining.
Illustrative of the shape, not of any specific customer.
Why did food cost move at these four sites and nowhere else
Almost always purchasing or portioning, and the two are distinguishable in the data.
Is my new menu actually more profitable
Contribution per item before and after, controlling for mix, rather than revenue per item.
Where is overtime coming from
By site, by daypart, against traffic, so the fix is a schedule change rather than a memo.
Which sites are ready for a price move
Price sensitivity by site rather than a chain-wide increase applied uniformly.
Questions
Asked plainly.
What analytics do restaurant and dining chains use?
Most run a point-of-sale reporting suite, a labor system with its own reports, and a spreadsheet that reconciles them monthly. That combination cannot answer why food cost moved at four sites and nowhere else, because the answer needs the point-of-sale, the labor data, purchasing and the ledger read together. SQOR.ai reads all of them read-only and computes the drivers, which is why the answer arrives nightly rather than at month end.
Can it read our point-of-sale system?
Read-only, yes, and reading many point-of-sale endpoints as one view is a pattern we run today, including in a venue with more than 180 of them. Where a connector does not exist yet we ingest the data directly in the meantime so you are not waiting on engineering.
How does it help with food cost?
By separating the four causes that look identical in a monthly number: mix, waste, portioning and purchase price. Each needs a different response and only one of them is a purchasing conversation. Separating them is arithmetic across systems rather than judgment, which is why it can be done every night.
Will it work across franchised and company-operated sites?
Yes, and the mixed case is common. Different ownership often means different systems and different chart-of-accounts detail, and conforming them to one model rather than asking either side to change is the core of what the platform does.
What does it cost for a chain?
Pricing is on query volume rather than per site or per seat, so the license does not multiply as you add locations. It is $48,960 a year for 25 users all-in with the warehouse included, plus a nominal set-up fee that covers the proof of concept.
Bring one week of point-of-sale data.
We will show you the drivers behind your food cost and labor by site, inside two weeks.