CalcMenuJuly 13, 2026 · 9 min

26 Finance Terms Every Hotel and Restaurant Manager Should Actually Know

GOP, EBITDA, RevPAR, DSO, CAPEX — the acronyms on a manager-level P&L pack, decoded in plain language with the formula behind each one. What they measure, how they're calculated, and which ones a kitchen or F&B team can actually influence day to day.

Walk into a monthly ownership meeting and the deck is wall-to-wall acronyms: GOP, EBITDA, RevPAR, DSO, CAPEX. Nobody stops to define them, because to the people running the meeting they’re second nature. To the department head who has to explain why food cost moved, or the F&B manager asked to defend a CAPEX request, they’re a wall. Here’s what the 26 most common ones actually mean, grouped the way they show up in real conversation — not alphabetically.

The two statements everything else is built from

Every other number on this list eventually rolls up into one of these two documents.

Term	Full form	What it is
P&L	Profit and Loss Statement	Revenue, expenses and profit over a period (a month, a quarter, a year). The document a department head is actually defending in a review.
BS	Balance Sheet	A snapshot of what the business owns (assets), owes (liabilities), and what’s left for the owners (equity) at one point in time — not over a period.

Profitability, from operations down to the bottom line

These sit in a hierarchy. Each one strips out a different layer of cost, and mixing them up is the single most common way a P&L conversation goes sideways.

Term	Full form	Formula	What it measures
GOP	Gross Operating Profit	Revenue − Operating Expenses	Profit from running the operation, before fixed charges like rent, insurance, management fees, interest and tax. The core number in hospitality’s own accounting standard, USALI.
EBITDA	Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization	Operating profit + D&A add-back	Profit before non-cash charges (depreciation) and financing costs. Used to compare operating performance across properties with different debt loads or asset ages — a lender’s favourite number, not always the operator’s.
NOI	Net Operating Income	Operating Income − Operating Expenses (before interest and tax)	Sits close to GOP in hotel real estate contexts; used heavily in property valuation.

A GOP number and an EBITDA number for the same month can legitimately differ — that’s not an error, it’s two different questions being asked of the same P&L.

Return metrics: whose money, and against what

ROI, ROE and ROA all answer “was this worth it,” but each divides profit by a different base — mixing them up changes the answer entirely.

Term	Full form	Formula	Answers
ROI	Return on Investment	(Net Profit / Investment) × 100	Did this specific investment pay off?
ROE	Return on Equity	(Net Profit / Shareholders’ Equity) × 100	How hard is the owners’ own capital working?
ROA	Return on Assets	(Net Profit / Total Assets) × 100	How efficiently does the whole asset base generate profit?

Rooms-division metrics — and why they need your PMS, not this article

ADR, RevPAR, GOPPAR and TRevPAR are the four numbers a general manager watches daily, and they all depend on room-revenue and occupancy data that lives in the property’s PMS (Property Management System) — not something anyone can look up generically. Treat the formulas below as what to pull from your PMS export, not numbers to guess at.

Term	Full form	Formula	What it measures
ADR	Average Daily Rate	Room Revenue / Rooms Sold	The average price actually paid per occupied room — ignores empty rooms entirely.
RevPAR	Revenue per Available Room	Room Revenue / Rooms Available	ADR adjusted for occupancy — the standard yardstick for room-revenue performance, because it can’t be inflated by simply discounting into a full house.
GOPPAR	Gross Operating Profit per Available Room	GOP / Rooms Available	RevPAR’s profit-side counterpart — revenue performance means little if it isn’t converting to profit per room.
TRevPAR	Total Revenue per Available Room	Total Revenue / Rooms Available	RevPAR expanded to every revenue stream — rooms, F&B, spa, events — per available room.

If you’re pulling these from a spreadsheet export rather than a live PMS dashboard, our Room Revenue Calculator does the ADR/RevPAR/GOPPAR/TRevPAR math for you — plug in the same numbers your PMS report already gives you.

Cost control on the kitchen and bar side

This is the territory a CalcMenu customer lives in every day — the layer directly underneath GOP.

Term	Full form	Formula	What it measures
COGS	Cost of Goods Sold	Opening Stock + Purchases − Closing Stock	The direct cost of the food and beverage actually sold in the period — not what was bought, what was consumed.
GP%	Gross Profit Percentage	(Gross Profit / Sales) × 100	Profitability of sales after direct cost — the flip side of food or beverage cost percentage.
FP%	Food Cost Percentage	(Cost of Food Sold / Food Sales) × 100	Food cost as a share of food revenue. Note: you’ll more commonly see this abbreviated FC% — “FP%” is the label used on the original chart this post is based on, but food cost percentage is the standard industry term.
BEP	Break-Even Point	Fixed Costs / Contribution Margin	The revenue level where total costs equal total revenue — no profit, no loss. Below it, every extra cover or room sold is pure loss reduction; above it, it’s profit.

Our Food Cost Calculator and Pour Cost Calculator turn COGS, GP% and FP% into a live number per recipe or per drink instead of a month-end surprise. For GOP, EBITDA and break-even at the outlet or property level, use the GOP & EBITDA Calculator.

Planning and control

Term	Full form	What it is
B/C	Budgetary Control	The discipline of setting a budget, then comparing actuals against it monthly to catch drift early rather than at year-end.
CAPEX	Capital Expenditure	Money spent acquiring long-term assets — a new combi oven, a renovation, a POS rollout. Depreciated over years, not expensed in the month it’s paid.
OPEX	Operating Expenditure	The recurring cost of running day-to-day operations — payroll, utilities, consumables. Expensed as incurred.
Forecasting & Budgeting¹	Estimating future revenue and expenses and building next period’s budget from those estimates.
MIS	Management Information System	The system — software or process — that gets timely financial and operational reports in front of managers so decisions aren’t made on stale numbers.

¹ The original chart abbreviates this as “FOH.” Worth flagging: in almost every kitchen and restaurant, FOH already means Front of House (the dining-room and service side, as opposed to Back of House). We’ve kept the term itself but dropped the ambiguous acronym here to avoid the two meanings colliding in the same glossary.

Working capital: who owes whom, and how fast it moves

Three related metrics, all measured in days, that together describe how long cash is tied up between paying suppliers and collecting from guests.

Term	Full form	Formula	What it measures
AR	Accounts Receivable	—	Money owed to the hotel by guests or corporate clients (banquet invoices, corporate accounts).
AP	Accounts Payable	—	Money the hotel owes to suppliers or vendors.
DSO	Days Sales Outstanding	(AR / Total Credit Sales) × Number of Days	Average days to collect what’s owed — lower is better for cash flow.
DPO	Days Payable Outstanding	(AP / COGS) × Number of Days	Average days taken to pay suppliers — higher keeps cash in the business longer, up to the point it damages supplier relationships.
DIO	Days Inventory Outstanding	(Average Inventory / COGS) × Number of Days	Average days inventory sits before it’s used — high DIO in an F&B operation usually means overstocked, slow-moving, or close-to-spoilage stock.

DSO, DPO and DIO together make up what’s often called the cash conversion cycle: how many days pass between paying a supplier and collecting cash from a guest. For a food-and-beverage operation specifically, DIO is the one most exposed to a kitchen team’s actual purchasing and prep discipline — it moves with over-ordering and slow-moving stock long before it shows up in a finance report.

Why the vocabulary is worth learning even if you never touch the P&L directly

None of this is trivia. A kitchen or F&B team doesn’t set the ADR, and doesn’t decide CAPEX. But COGS, GP%, FP%, DIO and — through them — GOP are directly downstream of decisions made at the pass and in the storeroom every day. Knowing which acronym you’re actually being asked to move, and which formula sits behind it, is the difference between a defensible answer in a review meeting and a guess.

Trying to reconcile a GOP or EBITDA number that doesn’t match what the kitchen’s own food cost tracking says? Book a free 15-minute call with our team — no commitment: Schedule a call.

Sources

Explore CalcMenu's recipe management software for restaurants, hotels & catering to see how it applies to your kitchen.