Restaurants & Bars
3-5% margins leave no room for guessing. We track food cost, labor cost, and daily sales so you see where the money goes.
The Business
A good year in the restaurant business means keeping 5% of what you bring in. Plenty of operations run at 3% or less and don’t realize it until the bank account is empty. Large revenue numbers feel promising until food cost, labor, rent, and utilities take their share. What remains is thin.
The transaction volume makes tracking difficult. Hundreds of tickets daily. Cash, credit cards, third-party delivery apps. Tips that need allocation. Voids and comps. The POS captures the sales, but reconciling what should have hit the bank versus what actually did is a different problem entirely.
Who This Covers
Who This Covers
Restaurants, bars, cafes, food trucks, catering operations, bakeries. Any food service business in the Houston area dealing with inventory, tips, sales tax on food and alcohol, and high daily transaction volume.
The Friction
The Friction
Multiple revenue streams that need separate tracking. Cash that creates reconciliation challenges. Tips requiring proper payroll treatment. Texas sales tax with different rates on food versus alcohol. Vendors wanting payment while you wait for third-party delivery apps to settle.
The Work
We reconcile daily sales from the POS to bank deposits. Credit card processing fees get tracked separately so you see their actual cost. Vendor invoices get organized and entered. The goal is matching what the register says happened with what your bank account shows happened, every day.
Food cost gets calculated using actual purchases and actual sales. Not menu math, not what you hoped it would be when you priced the dish. Real numbers showing what percentage of revenue went to ingredients this month. Labor cost tracked the same way. Together these make up your prime cost, and prime cost tells you whether you made money or worked for free.
Prime Cost Tracking
Prime Cost Tracking
Food cost and labor cost calculated monthly as percentages of sales. You see your prime cost and know if it’s in the healthy range or eating your margin. This isn’t annual reporting. It’s monthly tracking that lets you adjust before small problems become large ones.
Tips and Sales Tax
Tips and Sales Tax
Tips get recorded properly for payroll and tax reporting. Texas sales tax on food, beer, wine, and liquor gets categorized correctly. Different rates for different categories means transactions need proper classification, not bulk entry that creates errors at filing time.
Where Problems Hide
The stack of invoices from your food distributors that gets dealt with “later.” The handwritten comps that never make it into the system. The cash drawer that comes up short and nobody investigates. Small gaps that seem insignificant but compound over months. By year end, the books don’t match reality and nobody can explain where the difference went.
Tip reporting catches a lot of restaurants. Cash tips that get underreported. Tip pools calculated incorrectly. Allocated tips that should appear on W-2s but don’t. The IRS audits restaurants more than most industries because they know tip income gets missed. Getting it right from the start costs less than fixing it after an audit notice arrives.
Cash Discrepancies
Cash Discrepancies
Daily deposits that don’t match POS totals. Could be theft. Could be counting errors. Could be voids that weren’t recorded properly. Without daily reconciliation catching these gaps early, small discrepancies accumulate into unexplained shortages that are impossible to trace back.
Comps and Voids
Comps and Voids
Free meals for regulars, manager comps, employee meals, voided orders. These need tracking because they affect food cost calculations. A restaurant running what looks like 28% food cost might actually be at 32% when untracked comps and waste get factored in.
What Changes
You know your actual food cost percentage every month. Not what the menu spreadsheet says it should be. What it actually is based on purchases and sales. You see labor cost as a percentage so you know when you’re scheduling too heavy or running shifts that don’t generate enough revenue to justify the staffing.
Tax preparation stops being a scramble. Sales tax gets filed with proper categorization. Tips are reported correctly on payroll. Your year-end records are organized because they’ve been maintained monthly, not reconstructed from bank statements in March. The compliance work is handled so you can focus on the restaurant.
Monthly Visibility
Monthly Visibility
Prime cost tracked every month showing where you actually stand. Vendor payments organized. Cash reconciled against POS reports. You see the real numbers regularly instead of discovering problems at year end when it’s too late to fix them.
Tax Time Handled
Tax Time Handled
Business tax returns prepared with proper expense categorization. Personal returns for owners who take draws or distributions. 1099s for any contractors. Sales tax filed correctly. The compliance work handled by someone who understands restaurant operations and the details that matter.
Greater Houston's Small Business Bookkeeping Partner
The Next Step:
A Quick Conversation
Tell us about your business and what you need help with. We'll listen, ask a few questions, and give you a straightforward quote.