RESTAURANT BOOKKEEPING
1. Record Sales Through POS Daily
One of the first items will have to figure out is how to properly record sales. Using QuickBooks for restaurants is an effective recording system.
Record Sales Entries Per Day
Record a separate daily sales entry for each day (not monthly or weekly). With this method, you are mimicking how the cash and credit card deposits hit the restaurant's bank.
Most restaurants accept credit cards and settle the batch on a daily basis. This will result in a credit card deposit or deposits hitting your bank account separately for each batch.
analyze how funds are hitting your bank and set up your restaurant bookkeeping system to mirror that activity.
Generate a Sales Report
In order to record the daily sales you will need to generate a report that summarizes your sales. Most restaurant POS systems will have a daily sales summary built into them. If you need to customize the report to get more detailed information you will need to work through the customization with your POS system.
Create a Daily Sales Journal
Once you have a sales summary you should set up a daily sales journal entry and create a memorized transaction in QuickBooks.
Automate Your Restaurant POS with QuickBooks
Online
Rather than entering all this information manually, you can automate it.
2. Handling Accounts Payable
The next step of an effective restaurant bookkeeping process should be to set up accounts payable correctly. Keeping your vendors happy will be important if you want them to continue to do business with you.
cutting checks for your bills you want to make sure to print checks from QuickBooks. This will automatically feed the payment information into your QuickBooks file, thus reducing unnecessary data entry.
Another option is to pay your bills with online bill payment by linking your bank account to QuickBooks and signing up for online bill pay.
3. Payroll
Pro Tip: Look for a payroll company that is very reputable. Require the payroll data to have the capability to be imported into QuickBooks and all reports and paychecks to be sent digitally. Not only does this save time, but it will also reduce payroll liabilities.
4. Reconciliation
Reconciling QuickBooks accounts is the single most important piece of the entire bookkeeping process.
Reconciling your accounts is the only way to know that you have recorded all of your financial transactions. need to reconcile all of your accounts not just your bank accounts.
You should reconcile bank accounts, credit cards, loans, lines of credit, and payroll liabilities.
Any account that gets a statement with a beginning and ending balance can be reconciled. Account reconciliation ensures that you are looking at accurate financial reports.
5. Financial Reporting
If you are not using financial reporting for your restaurant, then you are running your business blind. With such tight profit margins in the restaurant industry, it is important to analyze your financial reports on a regular basis.
Restaurants should be looking at sales vs. cost of goods sold ratios as well as labor ratios.
Another ratio many restaurants should consider is the prime cost, which aims to keep the cost of food + beverage + labor at roughly 60% to 65% of your total sales.
Prime Cost Calculation in QuickBooks
The key to quickly calculating your prime cost in QuickBooks is having your chart of accounts set up properly. You need a parent account for both Costs of Goods sold as well as Payroll costs. Then you want subaccounts under each of those with the level of detail you desire.
When your chart of accounts is set up in this manner all you have to do is modify your profit and loss with the correct settings.
Calculating Costs
Cost of Goods Sold
“Cost of goods sold” refers to the products you buy that make up your product. And in the restaurant business, it’s no secret that, in order to make food, you’ll have to buy ingredients.