Cover

One cover is one seated guest. Cover count is how restaurants size shifts, prep, and reservations against capacity. A 60-seat venue doing two turns averages 120 covers a night.

What it means in operation

Owners track covers per shift, covers per server, and average spend per cover. A reservation for four counts as four covers, not one. A walk-in two-top counts as two covers, not one table. The metric is what makes labor planning tractable: knowing you do 80 lunch covers and 130 dinner covers on a Tuesday tells you exactly how many cooks and waiters to call. Cover counts also drive prep lists: 100 covers means roughly 100 portions of the most ordered side. On MobiTaste, every closed table session reports its cover count, which feeds the shift summary in the dashboard.

Why it matters

Cover count is the denominator for almost every restaurant metric worth tracking. Revenue per cover tells you whether your menu pricing is doing its job. Labor cost per cover flags overstaffing. Food cost per cover tells you whether your portions or your suppliers moved. Owners who do not count covers run the place on instinct, and instinct breaks at scale. The first metric a restaurant manager learns to read is covers, and the first one a buyer should ask their software to surface is also covers.

Related terms

• Turn time: the minutes a cover occupies a seat.
• Table session: the session that produces a cover count.
• BOH / FOH: the teams that staff against the cover count.