The Private Chef Business Command Center

Two households each pay by the guest. One pays $110 a head for the occasional dinner party; the other pays $85 a head for dinner every other week. On paper they look alike. Count the shopping, the prep at home, the drive and the groceries, and the first pays the chef $118 an hour. The second pays $44.

The workbook compares visits using the hours and costs you enter. Its “Real hourly” calculation uses on-site, shopping/prep and driving hours and deducts groceries and mileage. Record other costs and any work outside those entries separately; the result is not net profit after all business expenses. The included Service planning and review companion helps make those missing inputs visible.

What it does

• Households. Who you cook for and how often; how they pay, by the visit, the guest, the hour or the day; whether groceries are billed at cost, billed with your markup or included in the fee; their allergies, what they will not eat, their favorites and the quirks of their kitchen. The dashboard shows who is due next.
• Visits. Each visit’s fee, the groceries billed and bought, the miles, and the hours on site, shopping and driving. Your real hourly rate appears on its own, against your target.
• The allergy check. Pick the visit’s menu and its row warns you, by name, when anything on it contains an allergen that household cannot have. The dashboard counts the conflicts on every menu still to come.
• Menu rotation. What each household had and when, so nobody gets the same risotto three weeks running.
• Lifetime value. What each household is worth over the years they typically stay, from what they have spent in the last twelve months.
• The Private Chef Dashboard. Revenue this year, your real hourly rate against target, who is due a visit and who to call, what is coming up, and revenue month by month.

It includes everything in The Culinary Cost Control Center: the price book, recipes costed through their real yield, menus, a shopping list in whole packs, menu engineering, food cost and the Waste Center.

You can check every number

The Method sheet explains each formula in words: the real hourly rate is what the visit brought in, less the groceries and the miles at the IRS rate, divided by every hour it took. The default target of $75 an hour and the watch line of $45 are ours, not yours; change them on Settings. The worked example, five fictional households over ten months, was recalculated independently of the workbook and matched to the cent before release.

What it is not

It is not accounting software, a booking app or a payment system, and it does not send anything to your clients. The allergy check knows only what you tell it about each household and each ingredient: it is a second pair of eyes, not a substitute for asking.

What you need

Microsoft Excel 2019 or later, or Microsoft 365. It was tested in Excel for Windows. No macros, no add-ins and no internet connection. It does not run in Google Sheets or Numbers yet.