Accounting for restaurants and hospitality
Tight margins, heavy transaction volume, and tipped payroll — handled by people who know monthly reporting is too slow.
Restaurants run on thin margins and high volume, which is an unforgiving combination. A couple of points of food cost is the whole profit. Nobody notices it happening; they notice it three months later in the bank balance.
The other complication is payroll. Tipped wages, split shifts, minors, seasonal staff, high turnover — restaurant payroll has more edge cases than most businesses ever encounter, and the rules aren't forgiving about it.
We keep the books current enough to be useful, run payroll properly, and get owners looking at prime cost regularly instead of once a quarter.
The real issue
Monthly reporting is too slow for a restaurant
In most businesses, monthly financials are fine. In a restaurant, a month is long enough to lose real money before anything shows up in a report. By the time you see the number, six weeks of the problem have already happened.
Which is why the useful measures here are the ones you can watch weekly — food cost and labor as a share of sales, mainly. Our job is to make sure the underlying books are accurate enough that those weekly numbers can be trusted, and that somebody's explaining what they mean.
What we handle
- Bookkeeping built for high transaction volume and POS data
- Payroll for tipped, hourly, and seasonal staff, plus the filings
- Food cost, labor cost, and prime cost reporting
- Cash-flow planning through seasonal swings
- Sales tax and the recurring compliance calendar
- Business and owner tax planning in one place
FAQ
Questions we hear
Yes — it's one of the more common reasons restaurant owners call us. It's detail-heavy and it's exactly the kind of recurring work worth handing off.
It's normal on this coast. We plan cash flow and estimated taxes around a compressed season, and use the closed months for cleanup and planning while you have time.
Generally yes. Most systems export sales and labor data in a form we can use. We'll look at what you're running and set the bookkeeping up around it.
Protect the margin
Book a consultation and we'll talk about reporting you can actually run the restaurant on.