Restaurant Finance Manager: Rational Number Operations
Restaurant Manager: Daily Cash Flow is a real-world math worksheet where 7th grade students apply their understanding of adding and subtracting rational numbers to manage a restaurant’s finances. Students act as the restaurant’s financial manager, recording daily income and expenses, maintaining a running balance, and analyzing how spending fluctuates across the week.
Aligned to Common Core Standard 7.NS.A.1 and 7.NS.A.3, this worksheet challenges students to use rational number operations in context—interpreting positive and negative values, calculating net cash flow, and visualizing trends through a daily spending graph.
By the end of the activity, students will have gained hands-on experience using math to make sense of business operations, all while reinforcing their computational fluency and financial reasoning skills.
🔑 Key Learning Highlights:
- Add and subtract positive and negative rational numbers
- Maintain and analyze a running balance
- Group and total daily expenses
- Use graphs to compare and interpret spending behavior
- Solve real-world problems aligned to 7th grade math standards
Learning Objective
Students will apply addition and subtraction of rational numbers to track daily income and expenses, maintain a running cash balance, and analyze spending patterns using data and graphs—developing real-world financial reasoning and fluency with rational number operations.
Randomization Available
If randomization is enabled, each student will receive a different set of transaction amounts. As a result, their running balances, daily expenses, and final analysis answers will vary—encouraging individualized work and preventing copying.
💡 Tip: When assigning this activity to your classroom, you can optionally enable randomization to give each student a unique version of the problems. When you re-assign the same worksheet, each student will get a new set of questions, helping them master the content through repeated practice.
