Restaurant Standard Weekly 4-4-5 Profit and Loss Template - Google Sheets & Excel

What is 4-4-5 in the restaurant or retail industries?

4-4-5 is a commonly used accounting period in the restaurant industry. It refers to a fiscal year comprising 4 quarters of 13 weeks each. Each quarter is divided into 3 periods, the first two of which have 4 weeks each, and the last one has 5 weeks. This method of accounting is used to simplify financial reporting and budgeting, as it aligns with the typical business cycles of the industry.

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Why do you use 4-4-5  in the restaurant or retail industries?

Using a 4-4-5 fiscal year can make it easier for restaurant owners and managers to compare financial performance for the same period for different fiscal years or the different periods in the same fiscal year, as each quarter is the same length and contains the same number of weekends. This can help with forecasting sales and expenses and managing inventory and staffing levels. 

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What is the Restaurant Standard Weekly 4-4-5 Profit and Loss Template?

LiveFlow’s Restaurant Standard Weekly 4-4-5 Profit and Loss Template helps you compare your financial performance in the current fiscal year against the previous fiscal year or actual performance with the budget every week. With LiveFlow, you can keep all data refreshed and updated according to your preferences.

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Why is the Restaurant Standard Weekly 4-4-5 Profit and Loss Template beneficial?

There are some reasons you should use the Restaurant Standard Weekly 4-4-5 Profit and Loss Template:

1. No support from QuickBooks for 4-4-5 format: Unfortunately, QuickBooks doesn’t support 4-4-5 format, which means that some retail and restaurant owners can’t track their financial performance weekly and accurately. With LiveFlow’s template, you can analyze your or your client’s financial performance weekly in 4-4-5 format on Google Sheets, relying on your data in QuickBooks.
2. Flexible starting and ending days of the week: We understand that you or your clients use different starting and ending days in the week (e.g., A restaurant owner starts a week from Monday to Sunday, whereas another restaurant owner kicks off a week from Wednesday). With LiveFlow’s template, you can easily adjust the starting day of the week and solve the pain point.
3. Budget vs. Actual: Once you input your weekly budget in the template, you can compare your budget with your actual performance every week without additional manual work, such as downloading data from QuickBooks and inserting new columns and rows for the comparison of the actual figures and budget numbers.
4. Weekly monitoring: This template allows you to track your actual performance on a weekly basis, which is helpful when you need to manage your cash flow tightly or monitor your cash on hands closely

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How does each sheet in the template work?

Weekly P&L CY vs. PY Actuals

On this sheet, you can see the comparison of weekly income statement data for the current fiscal year against the one in the same week for the previous fiscal year. Also, you can see the financial performance for the specific thirteen weeks (and its comparison with the same period for the last fiscal year). You can change the starting week for the thirteen-week comparison.

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Weekly P&L Budget vs. Actuals

Like the Weekly P&L CY vs. PY Actuals, you can see profit and loss for a certain thirteen-week period weekly on Weekly P&L Budget vs. Actuals. The difference is that you can observe a variance between the actual performance and the budget for P&L items. This template also allows you to change the starting week of the thirteen weeks on this tab.

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Weekly P&L Budget

The data input on this sheet is reflected in Weekly P&L Budget vs. Actuals. Although you need to input, import or paste (from somewhere else) all budget numbers on this sheet, once you enter the necessary figures, you don’t need to update this sheet anymore unless you want to revise the forecast numbers due to the changes in the business plan or environment.