An incredibly difficult aspect of running a restaurant is managing your finances. Restaurant bookkeeping presents unique difficulties as costs can drastically change and your profitability is frequently quite modest. Yet, you can make sure that your business stays profitable by keeping an eye on your finances.
Keeping up with your accounting and
restaurant bookkeeping services might be difficult with all that requires your attention during your daily operations. Fortunately, we have some useful advice that will help you stay organized, save a lot of time, and guarantee that your books are consistently up-to-date and accurate.
You are at the first step towards effective bookkeeping for small restaurants. Maintenance is crucial to staying competitive and making a profit, whether you manage the accounting services yourself or outsource your restaurant accounting.
How do you manage a restaurant's books? 5 Simple Master Steps!
Step 1: Daily Sales Recording Using Your POS!
- Monitor Your Everyday Sales.
Tracking your daily sales and entering them into your accounting system is one of the most basic aspects of bar and restaurant accounting and bookkeeping services. There are various ways to break down daily sales, but cash and credit sales are likely to be the most significant ones. You can also compare sales of food and drinks, among other measures.
You can automate some inventory management tasks with the use of your sales data, updating inventory counts as food and drink products are sold.
- Creating a Daily Sales Report.
Current POS systems may now automatically track daily sales and give you a report on those sales. Every day, check this report to make sure your figures are correct and, if not, to fix any problems.
- POS System Integration with Restaurant Management Software.
A daily sales summary is probably already included in your POS system. A POS system that is completely connected with your back office and accounting is the next stage. You can connect sales to your general ledger and accounts payable thanks to this connector.
Automating general ledger entries helps in:
Eliminating manual data entry
Cut down on time
Fixed Bookkeeping errors
Updated inventory
labor statistics for real-time financial information.
Step 2: Streamlining Accounts Payable!
Creating Accounts Payable.
Maintaining a good working relationship with vendors depends on accurately recording, approving, and paying your vendors—a process known as accounts payable.
Several tools provide AP automation, an all-inclusive AP solution, to speed up the accounts payable process. With AP automation:
- Digital invoices are shared through a specific procedure.
- Payments are done securely and directly with the same dashboard.
- Helps save time for managers and restaurant owners
- Helps in boosting productivity
AP automation is crucial for restaurants that are expanding since it enables you to scale volume and operations without significantly expanding your accounting personnel.
Step 3: Simplify the Payroll Processing Complexities!
Although it might appear straightforward, paying staff is a fairly complicated process.
Fixed Payment Procedure!
Regulations regarding tip reporting, state unemployment, payroll taxes, Social Security taxes, and Medicare taxes apply to employee payroll. So, submitting payroll taxes erroneously or late can result in severe penalties, and restaurant owners have to go through a significant level of obligation.
Thus the solutions here are:
A surprisingly reasonable way to guarantee that your accounting is trustworthy and consistent is to outsource your payroll. You may assure you are complying with regulations and save hours of your time every paid month by using a professional payroll provider.
It's a good idea to automate the payroll process if you decide to handle it internally. You can automate payroll data gathering and lower any errors caused by manual entry if your POS system and accounting system are completely integrated.
Step 4: Integrate Your Bank Accounts and Accounting Frequently!
Your bank statements, credit cards, and POS will all list the many financial transactions that your restaurant makes. To ensure that your bookkeeping records match all of your bank accounts, payroll liabilities, lines of credit, loans, and credit cards, you must analyze all of your documented financial activities.
Why reconciliation?
- Accurately record all of your transactions and financial data.
- Automatically compare your records with your accounts.
- Operable efficiently and precisely.
- Track erroneous deposits, missing invoices, or sales anomalies.
- Automatic data transfer with detection of accounting problems.
Step 5: Review Your Data to Maintain a Positive Balance!
Since the restaurant sector is recognized for having slim profit margins, operating without financial reporting is like operating in the dark. One of the keys to a healthy bottom line for your restaurant is a regular analysis of the financial and operational data. You can accurately track your restaurant by reviewing a few key data, such as your prime cost (food and labor costs) and your profit and loss (P&L) statements.
Every day, review your profit and loss statement.
Your P&L statement shows the revenue and expenses for your restaurant over a specific time frame. Sales, food and labor expenditures, operating costs, and profits are all reconciled in the P&L.
Doing a P&L report daily used to take a lot of time, but restaurant management software has made it simple. By reviewing your daily or weekly P&L statement, you may identify the daily strengths and weaknesses of your company and take the required action to successfully address any issues before they turn into recurring ones.
Cost-Calculating Food.
One of the major costs for a restaurant is its food prices, which make up a portion of its prime cost. To maintain control of your food cost figures and to precisely track the Cost of Goods Sold, use your restaurant bookkeeping (CoGS).
Your CoGS is determined by your inventory, and it has a direct impact on the revenue you generate from menu items. You may assist assure a healthy profit on every plate and make educated decisions about menu price and menu engineering by tracking and accounting for your food expenditures. Maintaining more precise inventory management can help you reduce waste and theft. This can be done by keeping track of your inventory and food expenses.
Determine the cost of labor.
Your labor costs, which make up the second component of your prime cost, can also be managed with the aid of bookkeeping solutions. With the help of integrated restaurant software, you may obtain real-time labor metrics and spot previous trends by pulling sales and labor information from your POS. You can use forecasting or intelligent schedule systems to optimize labor when you have reports in hand and future sales estimates. Analyzing your labor costs can also show you where adjustments, such as software for restaurant scheduling or extra staff training, may be necessary.
Should I Have My Restaurant Accounting Outsourced?
Playing to your strengths and offloading the rest to experienced professionals, saves both time and cost - it relieves you of the operational burden while helping you concentrate on the development and growth of your restaurant, and get a bigger share of the pie. Hiring an experienced professional like CJCPA ensures that the bookkeeping is done right the first time.
Read this to know why and how it's helpful.
To get things started, schedule a financial consultation for your business.
Get in touch with us to learn more about the restaurant bookkeeping Canada and how we can help you streamline your restaurant finances.
