Bookkeeping for Cafés, Restaurants and Bars
Hospitality runs on two numbers that move every week: wages as a percentage of sales, and cost of goods. Monthly reporting that arrives in November cannot help a venue that needed to change the roster in September.
The Four Things a Venue Needs From Its Books
Everything else is ordinary bookkeeping. These four are what make the difference between records and management information.
The single most useful number in hospitality, and almost nobody sees it weekly. A venue at 32% one week and 41% the next has a rostering problem it can still fix, if it finds out on Tuesday rather than at month end.
Card settlements arrive net of fees and a day or two late, cash banking rarely matches the till exactly, and split tenders complicate both. We reconcile the takings to the deposits properly rather than coding the deposit and hoping.
Food, beverage and liquor tracked separately, because they carry very different margins and a blended gross profit figure hides which one is slipping.
Evening, weekend and public holiday rates configured to apply from the hours worked. Tips and service charges treated correctly for tax and super, which depends on how they are collected and distributed.
Where hospitality books usually break. The POS reports say one thing, the bank says another, and the difference gets absorbed into a sales figure nobody questions. Over a year that difference is often larger than the annual bookkeeping fee, and it is not theft. It is unreconciled card fees, unbanked cash and refunds netted off silently.
Hospitality Cannot Wait for Month-End
Every other industry we work with is fine on a monthly cycle. Venues are not, because the two costs that decide whether the week worked are both controllable within days.
- A weekly one-pager. Sales, wages, wages as a percentage, and cost of goods against the previous week and the same week last year.
- Before you build the next roster. Which is the point of it, because the number is useful precisely because it arrives while the decision is still open.
- Full close still happens monthly. The weekly view is management information; the monthly close is the reconciled truth. You get both.
Before You Ask
All the mainstream ones connect to Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks, and we work with whatever you have. What matters more than the brand is whether the integration is set up to reconcile rather than just to push a daily sales total across. We check that during onboarding, and it is frequently the first real problem we find.
Not at all, it just needs a simple daily process: till reconciliation recorded, cash banked on a routine, and variances noted rather than absorbed. We set that up with your managers so it takes two minutes at close. Cash businesses need this more than card-only ones, not less.
It depends on how they reach staff. Tips collected by the business and then distributed through payroll are treated differently from tips passed directly between customer and staff member, and the difference affects tax and potentially super. We will set up whichever arrangement you use correctly, and where your setup sits in a grey area we will suggest you confirm the treatment with your accountant.
Yes, and you should. Tracking by venue within one file gives you a per-site profit and loss plus a consolidated view, which is almost always more useful than separate files. If the venues are separate legal entities we handle them as separate files and still give you the comparison.
Weekly Numbers for Your Venue
Wages percentage and gross profit on your phone every Tuesday, not six weeks later. Bookkeeping for venues starts at $25 a week on a fixed monthly fee.