Restaurants & Bars
Restaurants run on razor-thin margins. We track food cost, reconcile POS deposits, and manage tip reporting so a busy week doesn't turn into a financial mess.
The Industry
Restaurants and bars produce more daily transactions than almost any other small business. Credit card batches from the POS, cash drawer counts, delivery app deposits, tip payouts, vendor invoices for food and supplies. By the end of a single week you can have hundreds of line items that need to be categorized and reconciled. Most business owners in other industries deal with a fraction of that volume.
And the margins are unforgiving. A well-run restaurant operates on somewhere between 3 and 7 percent net profit. That means a small shift in food cost, a few extra hours of labor, or a missed vendor price increase can erase your profit for the entire month. The difference between a restaurant that thrives and one that slowly bleeds out is often whether someone is watching the numbers week to week.
Who This Covers
Who This Covers
Restaurants, bars, cafes, bakeries, food trucks, and catering companies across Orlando and Central Florida. Full-service, quick-service, dine-in, takeout, and delivery. Whether you have two employees or forty.
Why It Gets Neglected
Why It Gets Neglected
You are working the floor or the kitchen during operating hours. When the restaurant closes, you are exhausted. Bookkeeping gets pushed to tomorrow and tomorrow never comes. The receipts pile up. The QuickBooks login collects dust. Tax season arrives and the scramble begins.
What We Handle
We reconcile your POS system reports to what actually hits your bank account. These numbers are almost never the same. Credit card processing fees, chargebacks, delivery platform commissions, and deposit timing all create gaps between what your register says you earned and what shows up in the bank. We track every dollar through that path so nothing falls through.
Beyond reconciliation, we track food cost and beverage cost as percentages of revenue. These are the metrics that tell you whether your pricing and portioning are holding up. We handle tip reporting and payroll for tipped employees, sales tax filings, vendor bill management, and 1099s for any contractors you use. If you need inventory accounting to tighten up your cost of goods sold, we do that too.
Food and Beverage Cost Tracking
Food and Beverage Cost Tracking
We calculate your cost of goods sold properly by matching purchases to the period they were consumed, not just when you paid the invoice. This requires working with inventory counts to produce an accurate food cost percentage you can actually use to make decisions about pricing and portioning.
Tip Reporting and Payroll
Tip Reporting and Payroll
Tipped employees in Florida have specific wage calculations and reporting requirements. Credit card tips, cash tips, tip pools, and tip credits all affect how payroll is calculated. We make sure it is done correctly so you stay compliant with the IRS and the Department of Labor.
What Goes Wrong
The most common problem is not knowing your true food cost until it is too late. A vendor raises prices by a few percent and nobody catches it. The kitchen starts over-portioning a popular dish. Waste increases because prep volume doesn’t match actual sales. Each of these seems small on its own. Together they can wipe out your entire profit margin over the course of a few months without any single event raising an alarm.
POS-to-bank reconciliation is another area where money quietly disappears. Delivery platforms like UberEats and DoorDash deposit money on their own schedule, after subtracting commissions, promotional discounts, and various adjustments. If nobody reconciles those deposits against the actual orders, you are trusting the platform’s math with no way to verify it. That trust is often misplaced.
Sales Tax Mistakes
Sales Tax Mistakes
Florida sales tax applies to prepared food, alcohol, and catering, each with its own considerations. Filing late or calculating incorrectly leads to penalties and interest that are completely avoidable with proper tracking and timely submissions. This is one of the most common issues we clean up for new clients.
Cash Handling Gaps
Cash Handling Gaps
Restaurants still handle significant cash. Without a daily counting and recording process, small discrepancies compound over weeks and months. By the time anyone notices the bank balance doesn’t line up with what it should be, the trail is cold and the money is gone.
What Changes
You start making decisions with real numbers behind them. You can look at food cost this week and compare it to last month. You can evaluate whether a menu item is priced correctly based on what it actually costs to produce. You can see if the labor spend on slow nights justifies keeping those shifts fully staffed. The guessing stops and the data takes over.
The end-of-year scramble disappears. Sales tax filings are current. Payroll is compliant. Your accountant receives organized financials and can focus on tax strategy instead of spending billable hours reconstructing twelve months of activity. The conversation moves from figuring out what happened to planning how to reduce your tax burden and grow the business.
Menu and Pricing Confidence
Menu and Pricing Confidence
When you know what each dish costs to put on the table, you price with confidence. You stop guessing on specials and new menu items. You understand which dishes drive profit and which ones just drive volume. That clarity changes how you build a menu.
Readiness for Growth
Readiness for Growth
Opening a second location, adding a catering arm, or expanding into a new concept requires financial data a lender or investor can trust. Clean books and organized reporting are the foundation of that conversation. Without them, the answer is always “come back when you have better records.”
Central Florida's Trusted Bookkeeping Firm
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A 30-Minute Consultation
Tell us about your business and what's going on with your books. We'll figure out exactly what you need, and give you a straightforward quote.
