Record all of your sales on a day to day basis to make reporting easier for later. 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. As you look at all the facets of restaurant accounting, it’s important to know about two different accounting methods. If you hear someone talk about restaurant bookkeeping, that may only refer to recording transactions in the general ledger.

• Our focus is your convenience – order online from your laptop, desktop, or smartphone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• While long-term trend analysis is important, you should also pull revenue reports on a daily and weekly basis.
• Then you can upload those supplier invoices directly into your accounting system and skip the double entry.
• Instead of just seeing scary-high prime costs or deceiving sales numbers on their own.
• If you’re a business owner who is still doing your own books, it’s time to STOP Bookkeeping and start BookWerking™.

This can make the difference between closing your doors and being able to keep them open. Your time is best spent managing your coffee shop, bakery, deli, or gourmet grocery.

Restaurant Accounting Software

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 restaurant bookkeeping that should be equally as busy. To miskey numbers when you’re entering row upon row of data is also human. So is failing to recognize meal discounts or mis-logging sales as revenue.

With the many moving pieces involved in a restaurant, a seamless accounting process can be difficult. Add the unique features of the restaurant industry, from short-lived inventory to payroll including wages and tips, and bookkeeping becomes a fast-changing, time-consuming challenge. However, being able to easily access sales, inventory, and labor data allows you to quickly make informed decisions. To keep up with bookkeeping, many restaurant owners are turning torestaurant accounting softwaredesigned to organize and automate common bookkeeping tasks. Many people with as little as one bookkeeping course keep small company books, but professional booking service companies like BookWerksTM offer much more.

How do you do bookkeeping for a restaurant?

This helps you track any incorrect deposits, lost invoices, or sales discrepancies. It also helps you catch any accounting errors through automated data transfer. We chose TouchBistro as the best option for food truck owners because it’s an iPad system that’s portable and can be operated easily on a truck’s wifi. It’s also easy to set up, can be integrated with different systems, and offers robust features specific to food truck owners.

• These financial snapshots give you the opportunity to take action without crunching your own numbers, and give your accountant lots of data to work with.
• Knowing how a colleague approaches restaurant bookkeeping may provide insight as to how you should address your own books and records.
• As a restaurant owner, you spend your days dealing with inventory management, staffing, and controlling the cost of goods sold.
• A profit and loss (P&L) statement is a summary of the costs, revenues, and expenses over a specific period.
• The accrual method records transactions as soon as they happen, whether or not there’s a payment.

Good A/P automation should also reduce data entry and streamline the A/P process. Automating your restaurant’s bills allows you to monitor exactly when the next bill is due. By integrating A/P software, you’ll be able to link your business account with the application. You can add a vendor, input the payment date and amount, and enter the category for each transaction.