Restaurant Bookkeeping and Accounting Explained

In the restaurant industry, managing payroll is multifaceted, involving complexities such as tip credits, minimum wage laws, and staff scheduling considerations. With numerous employees working varying shifts and earning different types of income, traditional manual payroll processes can become overwhelming and prone to errors. But with the right restaurant accounting tools, this process can be automated. The tools match your records against your accounts, identifying any discrepancies and errors quickly and accurately. It’s one of the best methods for dealing with accounts receivable and accounts payable.

Restaurant Accounting Tips

By carefully examining income statements, you can gain insights into your revenue and expenses, including the costs directly related to food sales. This analysis is pivotal in optimizing profitability and identifying areas for improvement. Accurate restaurant accounting has a multitude of benefits for the success and growth of your business.

What is restaurant bookkeeping?

• The chart of accounts records high-level transactions like revenue, expenses, assets, liabilities, cost of goods sold, and equity.
• In researching bookkeeping or bookkeeping accounting, you may come across information on accounting or find that bookkeeping and accounting are used interchangeably.
• Keeping these restaurant expenses in check is crucial for profitability.
• As mentioned earlier, restaurant pay types and rates can vary dramatically depending on the role and employment type.
• Using words like al dente or flambé comes naturally to you, but accounting terms?
• This can include overtime pay or rewards for high customer satisfaction.

The base salary, or minimum cash wage, for tipped employees varies by region. While the federal minimum wage is $ 2.13 per hour, states like California have https://www.bookstime.com/ higher minimum wages. Provide employees with detailed pay stubs that outline their gross pay, deductions, net pay, hours worked, and any tips received.

• Subtract that total from the gross profit to get your net profit or loss.
• It’s one of the best methods for dealing with accounts receivable and accounts payable.
• Payroll software can help calculate and manage these varying income sources accurately.
• QBO has worked very well for all of our restaurant clients, so we recommend it 100% of the time.
• Knowing the right forms and documents to claim each credit and deduction is daunting.

Gross profit

• Account reconciliation proves that you’ve accounted for all transactions – and that the amount of cash in your checking account is actually correct.
• Once you’ve picked a business name, the next step is to register your business and make things official.
• It helps assess the efficiency of food purchasing, inventory management, portion control, and pricing strategies.
• Restaurant accounting involves unique challenges that set it apart from accounting practices in other types of businesses.
• Your gross profit is the difference in value between the selling price of a dish and the cost of the ingredients and materials used to make a dish (your COGS).
• Restaurant owners and bookkeepers must be aware of these challenges and take proactive measures to mitigate their effects.
• You may be sensing a theme, but software is also helpful when it comes to restaurant reporting.

Not all industries have to deal with tips, weekly reporting periods, and hyper-sensitive labor and inventory metrics. Since accounting is complicated and the restaurant industry is unique, the professional you choose should be an expert in both. Restaurant accounting is also made up of essential bookkeeping processes that keep your business running. While you’ll most likely hire an accountant or bookkeeper to handle most of these processes, here’s what you need to know so you’re at least speaking the language.

NerdWallet’s accounting software ratings favor products that are easy to use, reasonably priced, have a robust feature set and can grow with your business. The best accounting software received top marks when evaluated across 10 categories and more than 30 subcategories. NerdWallet independently reviews accounting software products before determining our top picks. We collect the data for our software ratings from products’ public-facing websites and from company representatives. Information is gathered on a regular basis and reviewed by our editorial team for consistency and accuracy. Strong feature set includes thorough record-keeping, invoicing and advanced inventory management and pricing rules.

• Between increased costs, labor shortages, and socio-economic complexities – staying on top of labor costs is more important than ever for franchise owners.
• For example, in Oklahoma’s tipped minimum wage by state, servers rely heavily on tips to reach their overall earnings.
• As an owner, you know the challenges of running a restaurant, such as staffing, inventory management, and controlling the cost of goods sold.
• You will check bank deposits for fraud, fix balance sheet errors, and maintain accurate payroll records.
• Depending on the type of restaurant you run, though, costs may be higher or lower.

Calculating restaurant payroll can be a hassle with irregular work hours, multi-positions, and different types of pay, calculating restaurant payroll can be a hassle. It is best to outsource the payroll function or use payroll software to do the work for you. The next step is to set up your chart of accounts to categorize the money flowing in and out of your business. A standard chart of accounts includes assets, liabilities, expenses, revenue, and owner’s equity.

As a bookkeeper, you oversee the first steps of the accounting cycle, while an accountant typically handles the last two. Your job as a bookkeeper entails systematically keeping track of an organization’s financial transactions. For the information to be reported as a financial statement, it needs to be identified, accepted, classified, and recorded. Learn more about bookkeeping, how it differs from accounting, the required qualifications, and bookkeeping jobs and salaries. Accurate bookkeeping is vital for any business, but it is particularly essential for restaurants. Restaurants have to manage multiple locations, various payment methods, and a large number of transactions, making manual bookkeeping a daunting task.

Figures to track

Payroll costs typically range from 25% to 35% of a restaurant’s total sales, depending on the type of restaurant and its service model. Monitoring labor costs relative to revenue is crucial for maintaining profitability. When selecting a payroll software, make sure it’s integrated with other systems you need to run your business, like time-tracking and accounting systems. Because if everything’s how to do bookkeeping for a restaurant working together, you’re not only going to save time and effort, you’re also going to be able to reliably track and reconcile finances and working hours across all platforms. Whether you are starting a career or seeking a change, start building job-ready skills in bookkeeping and accounting with Intuit’s Bookkeeping Professional Certificate and Bookkeeping Basics on Coursera.