As a café manager, you’re probably already tracking sales figures, margins, and other core KPIs to understand how your business is performing. Comparing food usage versus total sales and monitoring average order value are essential — but on their own, they only tell part of the story.
To truly understand how your café is performing, you need a broader, more connected view of your operation. The smartest café managers track multiple KPIs at once, using them together to uncover trends, spot issues early, and identify opportunities for growth.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can reflect a café’s financial health, customer satisfaction, marketing effectiveness, staff performance, and operational efficiency. When tracked consistently, KPIs help managers quickly address issues, benchmark locations against each other, and make confident, data-driven decisions. As the saying goes: what gets measured, gets improved.
Drawing from real-world café management experience, here are five of the most important KPIs that high-performing café managers monitor closely. These five pillars can help you increase sales, improve profitability, and grow your business through small, manageable changes.
5 KPIs Every Clever Café Manager Should Track
1. Employee Retention Rate
Employee retention is one of the most important KPIs for any hospitality business. It measures the percentage of employees who stay with your café over a specific period of time. In an industry known for high staff turnover — particularly among hourly workers — retention has a direct impact on productivity, customer experience, and profitability.
High turnover often signals deeper issues such as poor hiring decisions, inadequate training, or low staff engagement. A single disengaged or poorly trained team member can negatively affect the entire customer experience. On top of that, constantly recruiting and training new staff costs time, money, and management energy.
Hiring the right people from the start and investing in their development, wellbeing, and work-life balance can significantly improve retention — and ultimately your bottom line.
How to calculate employee retention rate:
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Add the number of employees at the beginning and end of a set period.
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Divide by two to find the average number of employees.
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Divide the number of employees who stayed by the average number of employees.
Formula:
(Starting Employees + Ending Employees) / 2 = Average Employees
Retained Employees / Average Employees = Employee Retention Rate
Example:
If you start the year with 30 employees and end with 34:
(30 + 34) / 2 = 32
17 / 32 = 0.53
Employee Retention Rate = 53%
2. RevPASH (Revenue Per Available Seat Hour)
Revenue Per Available Seat Hour — or RevPASH — is a powerful KPI that incorporates both time and capacity into revenue analysis. Developed by Dr Sheryl Kimes of Cornell University, RevPASH adapts hotel-style revenue management thinking (RevPAR) to the café and restaurant industry.
RevPASH helps café operators understand how efficiently each seat generates revenue over time. Unlike average check size alone, it factors in seating capacity and how long customers occupy tables, offering a much clearer picture of operational performance.
How to calculate RevPASH:
RevPASH = Total Revenue / Seat Hours
Seat Hours = Number of Seats × Hours Open
Example:
A 30-seat café open for 12 hours has 360 seat hours per day. If daily revenue is £3,000:
£3,000 / 360 = £8.33 RevPASH
How to improve RevPASH:
Start by establishing a baseline and tracking RevPASH daily or hourly. This helps account for peak and off-peak fluctuations.
During busy periods, you can improve RevPASH by:
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Reducing table duration through faster service or simplified menus
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Improving seating efficiency (matching table size to party size)
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Delivering bills promptly and streamlining payment
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Sending orders to the kitchen quickly and accurately
During slower periods, focus on:
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Driving demand with promotions or events
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Increasing average spend through upselling and bundled menu items
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Encouraging off-peak visits with targeted offers
3. Labour Cost Percentage
Labour is one of the largest controllable costs in any café. Labour cost percentage measures how much of your revenue is spent on staffing during a specific period. Even small improvements here can have a major impact — a 1% change in labour cost can be the difference between healthy profit and operating at a loss.
This KPI is valuable because it highlights opportunities to improve efficiency without compromising service quality. Adjusting rotas, aligning staffing levels with demand, and improving productivity can all positively affect this metric.
How to calculate labour cost percentage:
Labour Cost Percentage = (Total Labour Cost / Total Sales) × 100
This metric is also commonly tracked as Sales per Labour Hour (SPLH). Many café managers use workforce management platforms like Tenzo to monitor labour costs in real time and identify trends.
4. Revenue per Employee (Sales per Head)
Revenue per employee — often referred to as sales per head — measures how much revenue each customer generates on average. Cafés typically track this KPI by time of day (such as breakfast, lunch, or dinner) as well as weekly or monthly to identify trends.
Sales per head may drop during promotions or discounts, while effective upselling, menu engineering, and staff training can drive it upward.
How to calculate revenue per employee:
Revenue per Employee = Total Sales / Number of Customers
This simple metric provides valuable insight into customer behaviour and staff effectiveness.
5. Table Turn Time
Table turn time measures how long customers occupy a table, from when they sit down to when they leave. For most cafés, faster table turns — without rushing guests — lead directly to increased revenue.
Once you know your average table turn time, you can identify bottlenecks and improve processes while maintaining a great customer experience. Factors that influence table turn time include service speed, kitchen efficiency, and how quickly bills are delivered and settled.
How to calculate table turn time:
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Choose a measurement period.
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Count the number of parties served.
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Divide by the number of tables used.
This KPI is closely linked to RevPASH and is especially important during peak trading hours.
How Bizimply Helps You Hit Your KPIs
Bizimply’s workforce management platform helps café operators track, understand, and improve their most important KPIs:
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Employee Retention Tracking: Monitor turnover trends and identify opportunities to improve staff engagement and retention.
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RevPASH Insights: Understand how effectively your seating generates revenue and uncover opportunities to improve table turnover.
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Labour Cost Control: Track labour cost as a percentage of sales and optimise staffing levels.
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Sales per Labour Hour (SPLH): Measure productivity and align labour with demand.
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Table Turn Monitoring: Identify service bottlenecks and improve guest flow without compromising experience.
With clear data and actionable insights, Bizimply empowers café managers to improve efficiency, boost profitability, and make smarter decisions every day.
