Cash runway for restaurant owners: how many months do you really have?

Runway turns money stress into a plan. For restaurant owners there's one twist in the math.

Guide · FantasyLab ·

The worked example

Ember & Oak, a full-service restaurant, holds $22,800 in cash against a monthly burn of $6,000, with everything in it: rent, gear, software and the owner draw. That's 3.8 months of runway at the current burn. That's under the four-month line, so it stays on the watchlist.

The method, plainly

Runway = cash on hand ÷ monthly burn, using your heaviest recent burn month rather than your cheapest. The main runway guide has the full reasoning and what to do at each level, and the calculator runs it on your numbers in your browser.

The twist for restaurant owners

Restaurant burn is lumpy: rent and payroll are fixed but food cost rides revenue, so compute burn from your heaviest recent month. A slow January against December burn is how 3.8 months becomes 2 in practice.

Keep reading

  1. 01How many months of cash does your business actually have?
  2. 02Cash runway calculator with a thin-months warning
  3. 03How much should restaurant owners pay themselves?

Counsel

Counsel does this math on your real numbers.

Connect Stripe, Square, Shopify, Etsy, QuickBooks or a bank feed, or drop in a CSV. Every answer comes with a receipt that shows the method, the sample size and how confident it is. When the math isn't conclusive, the app says so.

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Every figure on this page is computed from Counsel's demo businesses or from the numbers you type in. None of them are made up. This is cash math, not tax or legal advice. Written and kept up to date by the founder.