The formula is Beginning Inventory + Purchases - Ending Inventory = Cost of Goods Sold. Then divide COGS by your food revenue for the same period. That gives you your food cost percentage. Most restaurants should fall between 28% and 35%, though your target depends on your concept and pricing. The important part is doing this every week, not once a month, because waiting 30 days to discover a problem means you’ve already bled margin for four weeks straight.

In QuickBooks, start by making sure your chart of accounts separates food purchases from other expenses. You want a dedicated Cost of Goods Sold account for food, and ideally separate ones for beverages and paper goods if those are significant. Your revenue accounts should also separate food sales from bar sales so you can calculate each percentage independently. Lumping everything together hides where the real issues are.

The weekly workflow starts with a physical count. Every week on the same day, someone counts what’s in the walk-in, the freezer, dry storage, and the line. You don’t need to count every last item to the ounce. Focus on the high-value categories that move the needle: proteins, seafood, dairy, and produce. Assign dollar values based on your most recent invoice prices and total it up. That’s your ending inventory for the week and your beginning inventory for next week.

Record your ending inventory value in QuickBooks using a journal entry. Debit the inventory asset account for the new count value and credit it for the old value, with the offset going to your food COGS account. Then make sure all food purchases for the week are entered and categorized correctly. Pull your food revenue from your POS system and confirm it matches what’s in QuickBooks. Now you can run the calculation.

Build a simple spreadsheet alongside QuickBooks if the reporting feels clunky. List each week with beginning inventory, purchases, ending inventory, COGS, food revenue, and the resulting percentage. Trends matter more than any single week. One week at 33% isn’t alarming. Three consecutive weeks creeping from 30% to 34% to 37% tells you something changed and you need to find out what.

Common causes of rising food costs include portion creep, waste that isn’t being tracked, vendor price increases that went unnoticed, and theft. Weekly tracking lets you investigate while the details are still fresh. If your food cost jumped this week, you can check receiving logs, look at what was 86’d, and talk to the kitchen while people still remember what happened.

If you need help getting QuickBooks configured for inventory accounting in a restaurant setting, the setup matters more than most people realize. A generic chart of accounts won’t give you the reporting you need. And if your books are already behind or messy, getting caught up first is essential before weekly tracking will mean anything. Zacosta Bookkeeping provides inventory accounting in Orlando with the kind of food and beverage finance background that understands how restaurants actually operate, not just how the software works.