Texas mixed beverage permit holders face different tax rates on different products, so your bookkeeping needs to reflect those categories clearly. Mixed drinks and wine by the drink are subject to both the 8.25% mixed beverage sales tax and the 6.7% gross receipts tax. Beer follows standard sales tax rules. Food has its own treatment. Lumping everything into one “Sales” account makes it nearly impossible to file accurate monthly reports with the Texas Comptroller.

Set up separate income accounts in your chart of accounts. At minimum you need Food Sales, Beer Sales, Wine Sales, and Liquor Sales. If you sell sealed bottles or cans to go, that needs its own account too since restaurants and bars in Texas must report to-go alcohol separately from on-premises consumption. Some bars add more granularity depending on their menu, but those five categories cover what the state requires for tax reporting.

Your POS system does the heavy lifting here. Every menu item should be assigned to the correct category when you build it in the system. When a bartender rings up a margarita, it hits liquor sales. A draft beer hits beer sales. A glass of wine hits wine sales. Food items hit food sales. If your POS categories don’t match your accounting categories, you’ll spend hours manually sorting transactions each month.

Pull reports from your POS that break down sales by category. These numbers flow into your accounting software and should match what you report on Form 67-100, the Mixed Beverage Tax Report due to the Texas Comptroller by the 20th of each month. The form requires you to report gross receipts and calculate both the mixed beverage sales tax and gross receipts tax separately.

Accurate separation also gives you useful business information. You can see whether food or drinks drive more revenue, which categories have better margins, and how sales mix shifts throughout the week or season. Without category separation, you only see total sales with no visibility into what’s actually selling.

If your current books have everything in one income account, cleaning that up requires going back through POS reports and re-categorizing transactions. For small business bookkeeping and tax services in The Woodlands and the Greater Houston area, getting this structure right from the start saves significant time and prevents tax filing errors that could trigger Comptroller scrutiny.