MyFacitFree tool
What Does Your Cafe Need to Make Each Week to Break Even?
Enter your fixed costs, wage bill, and food cost target to get the minimum weekly revenue your cafe needs to cover everything. Then see how close you are.
Enter your weekly costs
Fixed costs
Monthly rent divided by 4.33. Example: $6,750/month is about $1,559/week.
Gas and electricity. Prorate bi-monthly bills as needed.
TapTouch, Lightspeed, Square, MYOB, etc. Divide the monthly cost by 4.33.
Insurance, cleaning, equipment lease, anything that doesn't vary with trade.
Wage cost
Your best estimate of a normal week's wages across all staff.
Food cost target
The % of revenue you plan to spend on ingredients and supplier invoices. Australian benchmark: 28 to 30% for a full-menu cafe.
Compare to last week
Enter to see how far above or below break-even you landed.
How it works
Enter your weekly fixed costs
Rent (monthly divided by 4.33), gas and electricity prorated weekly, and subscriptions like TapTouch or Lightspeed. These costs don't change week to week. They are the floor your cafe has to cover before you've paid a single staff member or bought a single ingredient.
Enter your average weekly wage bill
Your best estimate of a normal week's wages across all staff. This is the largest variable cost for most cafes, typically 28 to 35% of revenue. If your wages are higher on weekends due to Fair Work penalty rates, use a blended weekly average.
Enter your target food cost percentage
The percentage of revenue you plan to spend on ingredients and supplier invoices. The Australian benchmark for a full-menu cafe is 28 to 30%. If you're not sure, start with 30%.
Optionally: enter last week's actual revenue
If you enter your actual revenue for the week, the tool shows how far above or below break-even you finished, your margin of safety in dollar terms.
Why it matters
Most cafe owners have never calculated this number precisely.
Break-even is the most concrete financial concept in any business, yet most cafe owners have never calculated it precisely. They have a rough sense of what “a good week” looks like. They don't have the specific number that separates a good week from a loss-making one.
For a Melbourne cafe paying $6,750/month in rent, with a $6,500/week average wage bill and a 30% food cost target, the break-even weekly revenue is around $16,500. A week at $15,800 doesn't feel catastrophically different from a week at $17,000, but one is above the line and one is below it.
Knowing your break-even number changes how you respond to a slow week. Instead of “this week was a bit quiet,” you know: “this week we finished $700 below break-even, which means we need to recover that margin in the next two weeks, or adjust our cost structure.” That's not stress, that's clarity.
Start today
See your break-even number every week, updated from your real data.
MyFacit tracks your actual revenue, wages, and food cost against your targets so you know every Monday whether you're above or below break-even, without the manual calculation.
No credit card required.
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