% of salary to sales

[Buzzi]

Our shop does not offer full restaurant table service. So our salaries are not waitress levels. With that said-

What is the avg salary to sales %% that one should expect?? Our percentage keeps hovering at the 50% range- and it's way higher than my regular retail business.

I've looked at the min. hours needed to run the shop and still service the customer- scaling back more is not an option.

Increasing sales is an obvious- but it still doesn't tell me what a reasonable %% is. I've checked with local restaurants- and unfortunately many are on waitress salaries- the only other shop is a lunch- sandwich/deli- and he's telling me 60%?!?!? Not much profit there!

I know that I need to consider other factors- overhead/prod etc- but I'm really curious what you all are experiencing- we've only been opened since early Spring- and I'm wondering if this is typical.

 

[morrisn]

Wages

We calculate 30 to 35% of the gross to salaries. You can not afford to run much higher.

 

[aeneas1]

the irs has an online archive available (but it requires a great deal of digging to find) which consists of all tax returns filed by businesses - these returns are broken down into types of businesses, types of type of businesses, the types of returns filed by each business segment (s-corp, c-corp, sole propritership, etc.) and what sales, costs, income (losses) and taxes were reported.

this info is a great resource for several reasons - for one, you can find out what the national average is for your type of operation (for example: food and beverage operation, limited service, sales under $1 million, etc.) in terms of reported sales and cost ratios, i.e., you can see what sort of labor ratios similar operations run nationally. even more importantly, it is a great tool for determining whether or not your business returns might send up any flags due to cost ratios varying substantially from the national average for your type of operation...

i wish i could find the saved link - if i come across it i will post it.

 

[H Man]

Went 'digging' for the irs info you described, think this is what you were referring to.

http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/bustaxstats/index.html

This one gets you to a page where you can narrow things down a bit:
http://soitablewizard.altaplana.com/Metainformation.jsp


Hope it helps someone....