Running a restaurant means managing on razor-thin margins, where a few points of food cost or an under-tracked labor line can be the difference between a profitable month and a break-even one. Generic bookkeeping doesn’t cut it here. Restaurant financials need someone who understands the specific metrics that actually predict whether a restaurant is healthy.
With 30 years of bookkeeping experience and deep expertise in the restaurant industry, we build financial systems specifically for food and beverage businesses, not a generic small-business template stretched to fit.
Why Restaurants Need Industry-Specific Bookkeeping
Most bookkeeping services can reconcile a bank account. Far fewer can tell you whether your food cost percentage is trending in the wrong direction, or whether your labor cost is properly capturing benefits, payroll taxes, and workers’ comp, not just wages. Restaurants run on a small set of numbers that matter enormously, and getting them right (or wrong) has an outsized effect on profitability.
What We Track For You
Food and Beverage Cost Percentages
We calculate your food cost and beverage cost as a percentage of their respective income every month, and track the trend over time, month over month and year over year, so a small shift gets caught early, before it becomes a real problem.
Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) Against Industry Standard
Food and beverage cost together make up your COGS, and the widely accepted industry benchmark is to stay below 65% of revenue. We monitor this monthly and flag it the moment it drifts, so pricing, portioning, or supplier issues can be addressed before they erode your margin.
True Labor Cost, Done Correctly
Labor cost reporting only means something when it’s built correctly. We separate administrative and management labor into overhead, keeping only front- and back-of-house labor in your Cost of Goods Sold, and we build your true labor cost to include benefits, payroll taxes, and workers’ compensation insurance, not just wages. Without this, labor cost percentages are misleading and can hide real profitability problems.
Prime Cost
Once food cost, beverage cost, and true labor cost are all captured accurately, we track your prime cost (COGS plus labor) against the healthy industry range of roughly 60 to 65% of revenue. This single number is one of the most reliable indicators of a restaurant’s financial health.
Additional Restaurant-Specific Metrics
- Comps, voids, and discounts as a percentage of sales, often an early signal of training issues, POS errors, or theft
- Inventory variance, comparing theoretical food cost to actual usage to catch waste, over-portioning, or shrinkage
- Sales mix, showing which menu items are actually driving revenue and margin
- Overhead as a percentage of revenue, keeping fixed costs proportionate through seasonal swings
- Break-even sales volume, so you know the number you need to hit each month before you’re profitable
Full-Service Restaurant Bookkeeping
- QuickBooks setup built around restaurant-specific accounts and POS integration
- Daily and weekly transaction recording, invoicing, and bank reconciliation
- Payroll management, including tipped employee compliance
- Accounts payable for food, beverage, and vendor invoices
- Monthly P&L, prime cost, and benchmark reporting
- Catch-up bookkeeping if your books have fallen behind
- Cash flow planning around seasonal demand swings
- HR and compliance support, including subcontractor and vendor documentation
Why Work With Us
We don’t just hand you a P&L and wish you luck. We walk you through what your numbers are actually telling you: what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus. For restaurant owners, that means finally having a clear answer to questions like: Is my food cost actually a problem, or normal seasonal variation? Can I afford to add another line cook? Is my pricing keeping pace with rising food costs?
Thirty years of bookkeeping experience, focused specifically on service, construction, and restaurant businesses, means we’ve seen the patterns before, and we know what a healthy restaurant’s numbers should look like.
Ready to get a clearer picture of your restaurant’s numbers? Reach out to talk about what a monthly system built for your business could look like.