What your day costs before you sell anything
September 20, 2026 · Kasenso · 6 min read
Ask most owners how they arrived at a price and the answer is the same shape: count what the ingredients cost, add a markup that feels about right, and that is the price. It is quick, it is what everyone does, and while you are the only one working, it mostly holds up.
Then you hire someone. Then you sign a lease. And the arithmetic quietly stops working, because a wage does not wait for a customer.
The costs that run whether anyone walks in or not
Ingredients are honest about themselves. Sell nothing today and you spend nothing on chicken. That is what makes them easy to price around.
Rent, wages, electricity, water, gas and your internet line behave in the opposite way. They accumulate on a dead Tuesday exactly as fast as they do on your busiest Saturday. Nobody sends you a smaller bill because the rain kept everyone home.
So "how much do the ingredients cost?" is not the question that decides whether your shop survives. The question is: how many do I have to sell today just to pay for today — before a single unit of profit is mine?
Most owners have never worked that number out. It takes about ten minutes.
Step one: what one open day costs
Add up everything you pay in a month that is not ingredients. Not an estimate from memory — the actual amounts.
| Monthly cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Rent | 15,000 |
| Wages, two staff | 24,000 |
| Electricity | 6,500 |
| Water | 800 |
| Gas | 3,200 |
| Internet and phone | 1,500 |
| Total | 51,000 |
Now divide by the number of days you are actually open. At 26 days, that is roughly 1,960 a day.
That is the cost of unlocking the door. You owe it before you have sold anything.
One line is missing from that table on purpose, because it is the one almost everybody leaves out: your own pay. If you are working the counter six days a week, the wage you would have to pay someone to replace you belongs in the list. Leave it out and the shop looks profitable while quietly running on unpaid labour — yours.
Step two: what one plate actually earns
Not the price. The gross profit: the price minus everything that went into that specific serving, including the box, the bag, the sauce sachet and the utensils. Packaging is the line people skip, and it is rarely small.
Say your best seller is 180, and the ingredients and packaging come to 100. Gross profit is 80.
If working that out for your own menu is unfamiliar ground, how to price your menu walks through the costing line by line.
Step three: divide
Daily fixed cost ÷ gross profit per unit = units you must sell to break even
1,960 ÷ 80 = 24.5. Call it 25 plates a day.
Twenty-five plates buys you nothing. It settles the rent, pays your staff, and covers the meter. Plate twenty-six is the first one that is yours. If you sell forty on a good day, fifteen plates are profit — which is a very different picture from "I sold forty plates today" on its own.
The first time people run this, the number usually lands harder than they expect. That reaction is the useful part. You were carrying that number the whole time; you just could not see it.
What to do once you know it
The break-even figure is a target, not a verdict. There are only four levers, and the arithmetic tells you which one is worth pulling.
- Sell more. The obvious one, and usually the slowest. Worth pursuing, but not the only move on the board.
- Raise gross profit per unit. A price rise is the fastest lever a small shop has. Going from 80 to 90 of gross profit drops break-even from 25 plates to 22 — the same day's work, three plates less pressure.
- Cut the ingredient cost, not the portion. Better buying, less waste, less spoilage. Shrinking portions is a price rise your regulars can taste.
- Cut the fixed cost. Hardest, but the highest leverage when it works. The rent is the rent, but overstaffing a dead afternoon is a choice you make every week.
One refinement worth knowing: running the whole shop off one dish's gross profit is a simplification. In real trading your mix moves, and your best seller is not always your most profitable item. Once the rough number stops surprising you, redo it with your average gross profit per order instead — the same division, a truer answer, and it often reveals that the dish you promote hardest is not the one carrying the shop.
Where the POS does the tedious part
None of this is difficult arithmetic. It is just tedious, and it goes stale the moment your supplier raises a price or you add a shift.
That is the part worth handing over.
- Expenses. Enter rent, wages and utilities once as recurring expenses and they keep counting themselves. This is also what turns the gross profit in your reports into a real net profit figure — the number that says whether the business works, rather than whether the dishes are priced well.
- Recipes. Enter each dish's ingredients and packaging once and every sale deducts them automatically, so unit cost and gross profit stay current instead of being something you recalculate by hand twice a year.
- Analytics. The profit breakdown names your biggest cost and your biggest drag on profit outright. When a month runs at a loss, it states what it would take to stop the operating loss and to break even overall — as a price rise, holding volume steady.
- Price Lab. Before you move a price, model it against your own sales history and see what the change is worth. Nothing changes until you decide it does.
The number is better known than guessed
Plenty of shops close without ever knowing how many orders a day they needed. They knew sales felt fine, and they knew money kept being tight, and they never had the one figure that connects the two.
Work it out this week. If it turns out you clear break-even by ten in the morning, that is worth knowing too — it means the constraint on your business is somewhere else entirely, and what to do when sales are slow is the better place to look next.
Kasenso is free — orders, inventory, expenses, recipes and reports, for any shop anywhere, with no paid tier waiting at the end.