Restaurant Accounting & Bookkeeping Solutions

You’re checking to see if your transactions made it from the customer’s hand to the bank. The chart of accounts gives you a sense of your restaurant’s financial health, so you know how you make and spend money. Don’t forget to save receipts for any business expenses that you plan to claim on your tax return.

This means distributing the cost among the months, not expecting to pay it all in one month. Restaurants need to take inventory regularly to see what they’re selling and to make sure nothing is going bad, or even worse, that nothing is being stolen. Knowing what items are selling can also help restaurants budget restaurant bookkeeping better. As you can probably tell on reading this, we’re a bit anxious for you to get your restaurant payroll right. So, you might want to allow us to take this particular responsibility off your hands. Believe us when we say that dealing with your restaurant’s payroll on your own is a matter of some peril.

Food Cost Accounting

Tim worked as a tax professional for BKD, LLP before returning to school and receiving his Ph.D. from Penn State. He then taught tax and accounting to undergraduate and graduate students as an assistant professor at both the University of Nebraska-Omaha and Mississippi State University. Tim is a Certified QuickBooks Time Pro, QuickBooks ProAdvisor for both the Online and Desktop products, as well as a CPA with 25 years of experience. He most recently spent two years as the accountant at a commercial roofing company utilizing QuickBooks Desktop to compile financials, job cost, and run payroll. You’ll also want to triple-check that taxable items reflect the correct state and local sales tax so that you collect the correct amount from customers. It’s surprisingly easy to overlook the tax settings when you enter new menu items.

The vast majority of the business world use calendar months—or some derivation like quarters—for accounting periods. Bars and restaurants typically use four-week accounting periods, though.

Profit & Loss Statements

Within these reports, there are certain numbers that will be especially important. Overhead rates, Cost of Goods Sold , Prime Costs, Food Costs, and Gross Profits, to name a few. Your time is best spent managing your coffee shop, bakery, deli, or gourmet grocery. BookKeeping Express will manage your finances so you can focus on what you do best. It can overstate the health of a business that has a lot of cash on-hand but a lot of debt. TouchBistro offers multiple monthly plans, with pricing that starts at $50 per month and goes up to $229 per month.

Plate IQ will help you spend less time processing invoices, do bill pay easier, and gain more insight from invoices. So automate your restaurant AP to reduce the time, paper, and money spent involved in manually managing invoices. Hiring a CPA will help your restaurant business solvency and reduce your risk of tax issues down the line. A bookkeeper’s https://www.bookstime.com/ job is to make your books shine like the top of the Chrysler building. And if you happen to get audited, those clean, shiny books will be worth their weight in gold. Counting inventory should be done at least monthly, but weekly is even better. When dealing with different types of expenses, you need to budget for them properly.