Since our accountant requests an actual receipt for all food deductions taken for the B+B I just add up the totals for the receipts and use that. There is really no need to try to figure cost per guest since, as Maddie points out, no two guests use the same amount of food..
Silverspoon said:
Since our accountant requests an actual receipt for all food deductions taken for the B+B I just add up the totals for the receipts and use that. There is really no need to try to figure cost per guest since, as Maddie points out, no two guests use the same amount of food.
Even tho that's all we do...figure it out at the end of the year and divide by the number of room nights to get a per room number, it's a good idea to double check yourself every once in awhile to see where things are getting out of hand (fresh fruit) and where they are actually lower than we thought. We can tailor our meals to cut down on the cost of food while maybe even providing a better experience.
Right now a bowl of fresh fruit looks boring to me. It used to be all we served. Now I need something with a bit more zip. And, that also means less fruit!
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That is what I did - just take the overall food cost for the B&B and divide by room nights to see if I needed to raise rates. I never drilled it down to the details, but that would have been interesting, I guess.
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I am starting my ninth year, and have never done this. I would somewhat pay attention to food costs vs income, as I read somewhere that it should be around 7%. I'm always consistently low, but I work at that (coupons, buy on sale & stock up, etc) - it's not because people go hungry. So I just did what Samster suggested and divided my room nights by total food cost (which includes everything - even my own sometimes -shhhh), and I came up with $8.76. This seems pretty good, no? That's roughly $4.50 per person, per day for food.
I'm a little ashamed that I've never sat down and figured this out. It's interesting.
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