11 Expert-approved Restaurant Bookkeeping Tips

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A business strategy, organization, and the willpower to keep accurate accounting records are essential factors in determining whether or not your restaurant will get off the ground. Restaurant bookkeeping is one of the most important aspects of running a restaurant. Restaurant bookkeeping involves financial and accounting practices that track your detailed costs and revenue.

Armed with that information, you can calculate the most important indicators of your restaurant’s financial health. As “chief cook and bottle-washer,” you’ll keep the books yourself because there’s no one else to do it. Wagepoint – Helps you automate the process of issuing pay checks and comply with the required withholding and employer tax amounts. Your breakeven point shows how much revenue you need to earn to pay for your expenses. Knowing your net profit margin helps you make decisions about growth, expansion, investors, and even selling your business for what it’s really worth. Restaurateurs and investors use EBITDA when they’re looking to sell, buy, or invest in a restaurant to help guide their buying decisions.

Many of them offer tools to manage payroll taxes, track tips, and monitor attendance. Rather than trying to handle the books yourself or hiring someone to work internally, we recommend getting an outside bookkeeper. This wouldn’t be a full-time position, and they’re a separate person from your business accountant. Thus, they have no control over or connection to the daily ordering and sales in your restaurant.

What Are the Benefits of Using a Computerized Inventory System?

Our outsourced bookkeeping & virtual CFO services are available anywhere in or outside of Wisconsin. When dealing with different types of expenses, you need to budget for them properly. This means distributing the cost among the months, not expecting to pay it all in one month. Food, wine, beer, liquor and mixers are reported as a percent of their category sales for management oversight and control. You can place your orders to all your suppliers from anywhere in the world, and track all outstanding orders and products as they’re delivered.

TouchBistro is an iPad-https://bookkeeping-reviews.com/ POS system built by restaurant owners for restaurant owners. The company’s primary goals are to make managing your restaurant easier, make more money, and deliver a positive experience to your customers. New and experienced restaurant owners can use it, whether they’re beginners or experts at accounting and bookkeeping.

A strong understanding of the basic accounting practices allows you grow your profitability and run your restaurant in a financially sustainable manner. Depending on your sales volume and the tasks you need help with, your bookkeeper may only work on your records a couple of hours a day or week. Ideally, you’ll want a bookkeeper who is familiar with the restaurant industry. Typically, they’re happy to send their bookkeepers more work if they can accommodate it.

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Your FOH staff will be using your POS system, which means they need to process transactions correctly and report their tips. Although tips are not subject to withholding and not classified as restaurant income, they need to be reported and taxes paid on them. Make sure everyone is responsible for reporting the right information. We also evaluated the best restaurant payroll software and identified eight solutions that are easy to use and come with good client support.

Find an Expert Bookkeeper

A controllable costs report helps you determine your operating margin and calculate your prime cost – an essential KPI for every restaurateur. Working with a remote bookkeeping service will still provide you with all the value you could get from an in-office bookkeeper but at a fraction of the cost. “Cost of goods sold” refers to the products you buy that make up your product.

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This will also help you avoid food surpluses and shortages, and instead strike a more accurate balance. Since your POS logs revenue coming in and much of the money going out of your restaurant , you can use it to analyze sales and costs. Accounting software helps you and your accountant stay on the same page. By connecting seamlessly with your POS, accounting software automates the collection and organization of financial data and transactions. Four-week periods, on the other hand, are always 28 days with four Fridays and four Saturdays. When you’re comparing accounting periods, you want to accurately compare revenue based on times that should be equally as busy.

Find the right bookkeeper for your restaurant

Overhead rates are fixed costs of running your business such as rent and insurance. This will give you an insight into how much your business costs to run. Monitor your cash flow, which refers to the amount of cash coming in versus the amount of cash going out of your business on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Otherwise, consider the pros and cons of using a bookkeeper, either a part-time employee or an outside bookkeeping service. It’s a cost you might be reluctant to take on, but it frees up time you need to actually run your restaurant, and that has a definite value as well. Underestimating your weekly income could make it look like your business is losing money when it’s not.

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Cost of goods sold is a KPI that indicates how well you’re pricing your products and controlling your inventory. CoGS represents the actual cost of food and beverage used to produce your food and beverage sales. By keeping tabs on your CoGS ratio, you can take action to reduce and contain your inventory costs.

What You Need to Track

Each of the key players highlighted above are important to your how to add a payment link to a xero invoice’s financial success. None should be overlooks to ensure your restaurant financial records are accurate. Be sure to monitor each area and individual if you want you achieve success in your restaurant accounting process. Even in small businesses, restaurant accounting is a function that requires the contribution of several players. It requires the cooperation of several teams working on different areas of your restaurant. However, you need to retrieve information from the team to ensure accurate information is recorded and accounted for.

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If a restaurant is run well, prime costs should stay around 60% to 65% of sales. Keeping track of your revenue is equally important as knowing your expenses. Have accounting records on hand to show how much you earn from food sales, merchandise sales or catering jobs. Revenue reports display total expected revenue for a period and how the revenue is split between food and drink.

We recommend outsourcing the payroll job or use payroll software to do the hard work for you. It’s great that a customer raved about a dish, but what are the numbers telling you? Your POS can give you deep insights on best and worst sellers, menu sales trends over time, and your inventory status. With the ability to slice, dice, and drill into that historical data, you can identify underlying trends in different datasets.

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Financial software is designed to make restaurant bookkeeping simpler and more efficient for you as the business owner. The more you can monitor the financial health of your restaurant, the better. MarketMan can level up your operational workflow by seamlessly integrating your bookkeeping, POS and inventory management solutions. Every restaurant has overhead, or fixed costs of running your business, such as rent, insurance, and equipment rental.

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With these restaurant accounting tips, you can begin to organize your accounting records and have a better understanding of your financial picture. In the end, organization and accuracy are the keys to effective restaurant bookkeeping. Just as restaurants range from small spaces with one or two employees to large venues that employ hundreds, accounting software for restaurants varies, too. Costs typically range from $11 per month for basic accounting features up to $459 per month for more comprehensive, automated systems. Some software includes payroll services, while others offer it as an add-on with monthly and per-employee costs. We chose DAVO as our best accounting software for paying sales tax for restaurants.

If you’re new to bookkeeping for a small restaurant, this overview will help you understand common financial tasks such as handling payroll and paying quarterly taxes. It will also cover the importance ofrestaurant insuranceto your business’s bottom line. In addition, a daily sales report tells you how your business did that day, so you can compare with other days that week, month or year.