The holiday season is one of the most important — and most challenging — times of year for hospitality operators. Sales often surge, but costs surge too, and what looks like a profitable December can quickly unravel if you don’t have visibility into the right numbers.
Whether you’re running a restaurant, hotel, or multi-unit operation, tracking a few key analytics metrics can mean the difference between a strong finish and a stressful one.
These metrics can often be found in your POS or accounting system, though pulling them together into a clear picture can be difficult. In this article, we’ll show you how to calculate them and understand their impact—and for operators who want these insights unified in real time, platforms like Craftable Analytics make it far easier.
Forecasting sales and costs is always important, but during uncertain times it becomes essential. A solid forecast helps you prepare labor schedules, order accurately, and anticipate revenue. But a forecast is only half the story—the real insight comes from comparing it against actual performance.
The holiday season is too volatile to rely on assumptions alone. Traffic spikes, unexpected weather, vendor shortages, or tariff-driven price changes can all throw off plans. By monitoring forecast vs. actual daily or weekly, you create a feedback loop—learning what works, what doesn’t, and how to adapt faster than your competitors.
Labor is amounts to almost 50% of your prime cost—and often the most manageable. That’s why Sales per Labor Hour (SPLH) is such an important metric. It reveals how effectively your team is converting labor hours into revenue. During peak times, it can help you quickly identify over- or under-staffing, as well as highlight your highest-performing shifts or days.
On the surface, SPLH may seem straightforward. Its true value comes from analyzing it over time. Are you consistently generating more sales with fewer labor hours, or are you carrying excess staff during periods when sales cannot support their cost?
For a deeper analysis, SPLH should be paired with complementary metrics such as comps, average ticket size, or guest turnover rate. Labor efficiency means little if it’s offset by higher comps or diminished guest experience. Monitoring traffic patterns alongside SPLH can further clarify whether efficiency gains are producing meaningful improvements to the bottom line.
Your servers are the face of the guest experience, and their performance directly impacts sales and profitability. A server performance scorecard highlights how each team member contributes, not just in sales, but in efficiency, discounting, and consistency, so you can focus coaching and recognition where it drives the greatest impact on guest experience and margins.
For operators, this scorecard is more than a leaderboard—it’s a management tool. It reveals where individual coaching can lift the entire team, and where recognition can reinforce the behaviors that protect margins and improve the guest experience.
Prime cost—your combined cost of goods sold (food and beverage) plus labor—is the most critical measure of profitability in hospitality. For many operators, it can represent as much as 60 - 70% of total expenses, creating significant risk to profitability. At these thin margins even small fluctuations have an outsized impact.
Reviewed only after month-end, prime cost becomes historical. By then, margins may have slipped, and the chance to act has passed.
Managing prime cost in the moment turns it into a steering wheel instead of a rearview mirror. Real-time visibility lets you:
Operators who use daily or shift-level data consistently outperform those who wait for the close.
Live prime costs can be tricky to calculate, especially when they require pulling data from your POS, inventory system, invoices, and labor platform. A solution like Craftable Analytics brings those sources together into a single view—one you can act on during the shift to protect margins and improve profitability.
Seasonal menus and specialty dishes are powerful tools. They capture guest attention, create buzz, and differentiate your concept during the holidays. But they also carry risk. Ingredient costs fluctuate rapidly, tariffs and import fees can add sudden pressure, and what looks like a top seller can sometimes hide as a margin drain.
That’s where menu profitability analysis comes in. By mapping each item’s popularity against its profitability, you can quickly see where your menu delivers strong returns and where it may be dragging you down.
Advice for operators:
Pair creativity with discipline. Feature seasonal or specialty items, but review profitability weekly during the holidays.
Factor in volatility. Ingredients affected by tariffs, imports, or seasonal availability need closer monitoring.
Link recipes to vendor pricing. Real-time data ensures you aren’t surprised when an ingredient cost spike erodes your margins.
When menu profitability is measured consistently, you avoid the trap of chasing sales volume at the expense of profit. After all, it’s not just about selling more dishes—it’s about ensuring every dish strengthens your bottom line.
Finally, it is important we remind you of the most critical metric of all. You can manage labor costs, prime cost, menu profitability, and even server performance—but if traffic is in decline, profitability will always be under pressure. Guest counts are the leading indicator of operational health: falling traffic often signals deeper issues with pricing, promotions, competition, or guest experience.
That’s why it’s critical to compare this year’s traffic to prior years. Year-over-year trends reveal whether sales gains are truly driven by increased demand or simply by higher prices. They also highlight whether efficiency improvements are sustainable, or if they’re masking a shrinking guest base.
Monitoring traffic alongside your other metrics ensures you’re not just running a leaner operation, but a growing one. In other words, traffic is the canary in the coal mine—ignore it, and you risk missing the earliest signs of trouble.
The holiday season is too important to rely on gut instinct alone. By focusing on these five metrics, operators gain the clarity to make smarter, faster decisions that protect profitability while delivering a great guest experience.
Hospitality leaders who want to simplify this process often turn to platforms like Craftable, which centralize prime cost reporting, labor insights, forecasting, and compliance monitoring in one place.