Staff the hours that pay, not the hours you are open
The POS already knows your sales by the hour; the question is whether the schedule has ever met that curve. Our Fractional CFO engagement lays hourly labour, wages plus everything that rides on them, against hourly sales, and the week promptly splits into dayparts with very different economics. The licence lets you pour until 2 a.m.; whether the last hour covers its bartender, barback and door staff is a finance question, and on slow nights the honest answer is often no.
| Daypart | The number that decides it |
|---|---|
| Weekday afternoon | Contribution per open hour on a skeleton crew of regulars' trade |
| Friday and Saturday peak | Throughput at the taps; sales lost to the queue, not to the price list |
| Live-music nights | Door plus drink lift over a normal night, less the full cost of the stage |
| The last hour before close | Ring per hour against late-night labour, security included |
Sometimes the profitable move is unglamorous: midnight close on Tuesdays, one bartender until five, the second barback only on nights the taps actually queue. The daypart view turns those from arguments into arithmetic.
Make the stage prove it
Live music earns its slot the way any investment does, on a one-page profit test per night. Revenue is the door plus the drink lift, measured against a baseline of the same weekday without a band, because a Saturday act that merely entertains the crowd you already had bought you nothing. Against that sit the whole costs of the stage: the act's fee, the sound tech, the extra body on the door, and the SOCAN and Re:Sound music licences billed through Entandem that a live room carries all year. The slips and withholding that come with paying performers live on the tax side; here the question is only whether the night made money.
The decisions follow the numbers: which nights deserve a band, whether the cover goes up or the door stays free to protect the lift at the bar, which acts fill seats and which just fill the room with their friends drinking comps. Bars that run this test usually keep live music, but on fewer, better nights.
Wet, dry and whether the kitchen earns its hood
The taps carry a pub's margin with very little labour attached; the kitchen carries most of the labour with thinner margin attached, and blending the two into one food-and-beverage line hides what each is doing. We read the kitchen on its contribution after kitchen labour, not on food cost alone, because a menu can hit its cost target and still lose money every time the second cook clocks in.
What the number usually shows is a choice between three honest shapes: the full menu that genuinely drives dinner trade, the short menu one cook can run to hold the afternoon and soak the evening beer, or handing the kitchen to a resident pop-up that pays its way while your team pours. Any of the three can be right; running the full menu by default, without the contribution math, is the one that quietly is not.
Thirteen weeks of cash, patio in and patio out
A bar's year swings hard around its patio, and the cash squeeze arrives before the good weeks, not after: liquor suppliers effectively sell cash-and-carry, so stocking a long weekend drains the account days before the sales land. We keep a rolling 13-week cash view with the HST quarter, payroll remittances and the big stocking weeks on it, so the tight Thursday in April is visible in February.
The same view is where the patio build or the renovation gets financed on purpose rather than off the line of credit, with a lender package shaped through Business Financing Advisory on statements kept clean through End-to-End Accounting. The quarterly pricing pass belongs in this rhythm too: when a brewery moves its keg price, the pint either follows or the margin quietly absorbs it, and we put that choice in front of you the week the invoice changes rather than at year-end.
The full cadence is deliberately light: a weekly daypart flash, a monthly margin and event review, the quarterly pricing pass, and an annual budget built around the patio dates. It is the finance seat of a small hospitality group, sized for one room. For publicans across Mississauga and the GTA, scope and fee are quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
