Ventura Bookkeeping Nav
Call us805-225-4959 Book a free 20-min call

Restaurants

Restaurant bookkeeping in Ventura County

Daily sales that never quite match the deposit, tips moving through payroll, and a food and labor cost you can feel in your gut but cannot prove on paper. That is most restaurant books.

We reconcile sales against your POS rather than your bank, handle tips and service charges properly, and give you a prime cost number every month that you can act on.

Book a free 20-minute call 805-225-4959

Every restaurant client gets

The numbers a kitchen actually runs on.

  • Daily sales reconciled to your POS, not to the deposit
  • Tips and service charges handled correctly in payroll
  • Food cost and labor cost as a percentage of sales
  • Prime cost every month, with a call to talk it through

Three things that break restaurant books

These are the ones we find in almost every file we take over.

The deposit

Sales are booked from the bank

The deposit is what survived processing fees and delivery commissions. Recording it as revenue understates sales and makes those fees invisible, so nobody notices when a delivery app quietly takes a bigger share.

Result: your real cost of a delivery order is unknown.

The tips

Tips run through income

Tips are money you hold and pass on, not money you earned. Booked as revenue they inflate your sales, distort every percentage calculated from sales, and make labor cost look worse than it is.

Result: every ratio on the P&L is quietly wrong.

The count

Food cost is a year-end surprise

Without an inventory count, purchases stand in for cost of goods sold. A big delivery on the 30th ruins the month and flatters the next one, and food cost only becomes real when the CPA works it out in March.

Result: you cannot price or portion with confidence.

What's included

The monthly cycle, built for restaurants

  • Daily sales from the POS: gross sales, comps, voids, discounts and sales tax recorded as their own figures rather than one net number
  • Deposits reconciled: every deposit tied back to the days it covers, with processing fees and holdbacks accounted for
  • Delivery platforms: gross order value recorded as sales and the commission recorded as a cost, so you can see what those orders really earn
  • Tips and payroll: tips carried as a liability until paid out, and payroll run through Gusto and reconciled into the books
  • Food and beverage cost: calculated from opening stock, purchases and closing count rather than from what you bought that month
  • Gift cards: held as a liability until redeemed, because a sold gift card is not revenue yet
  • Monthly reporting: food cost, labor cost and prime cost as a percentage of sales, with a call to go through what moved

What we connect

  • Point of sale Toast, Square, Clover and most others
  • Delivery DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub
  • Payroll Gusto
  • Accounting QuickBooks Online or Xero

If your POS exports a daily sales summary, we can work from it. If it does not, we will tell you before you sign anything.

Typical fit

Independent restaurants, bars, cafes and food service businesses with one to four locations, doing roughly $500K to $10M a year.

The two numbers that run the business

Food and beverage cost, plus total labor including taxes and benefits, gives you prime cost. It is the largest controllable number in a restaurant and the one most owners see once a year, long after they could have done anything about it.

Reported monthly, prime cost tells you something you can act on. A two-point move on $1.2M of sales is $24,000. That is a supplier conversation, a portion size, a schedule change, or a menu item that needs repricing, and all of those are decisions you can only make while the year is still running.

We report it every month against the prior month and the same month last year, because in a seasonal town the comparison to last month on its own tells you very little.

What we report each month

  • Food cost as a percentage of food sales
  • Beverage cost as a percentage of beverage sales
  • Labor cost as a percentage of total sales
  • Prime cost, the two combined
  • Delivery commission as a share of delivery sales
  • Sales per day and average check, where the POS supports it

Targets vary by concept. We will set yours with you rather than hand you an industry average and leave you to interpret it.

How it starts

Three steps, and the first two cost you nothing.

1. A 20-minute call

What you run, which POS you use, how many locations, and what you cannot currently answer about your costs.

2. A quote in 24 hours

A flat monthly price in writing, plus a separate one-time cleanup fee if the books need rebuilding first.

3. Setup and first close

POS and payroll connected, the chart of accounts rebuilt for a restaurant, then your first close with prime cost in it.

What we do not do

Said up front, so nobody finds out in month three.

  • We do not count your inventory. We reconcile to the counts your team takes, and we will tell you how often to take them.
  • We do not do menu engineering or recipe costing. We give you the cost data those decisions need, and we will happily work alongside a consultant who does.
  • We do not advise on wage and hour law, scheduling rules or tip pooling arrangements. Those are employment law questions and they need an attorney.
  • We do not file your sales tax returns. We keep the numbers right and hand them to whoever files.
  • We do not manage your vendors or place your orders. We account for what you buy and show you what it costs you.

Restaurant bookkeeping FAQ

How do you handle tips?

Tips are recorded as a liability, meaning money you are holding for your staff, and cleared when they are paid out. They never run through revenue, because doing that inflates your sales and throws off every percentage calculated from it.

California does not allow a tip credit, so tips never offset wages. Your labor cost is the full wage plus taxes regardless of how well your team is tipped, and we report it that way.

What about DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub?

We record the gross order value as sales and the platform commission as a cost, rather than booking the net payout and losing the commission entirely.

That is the only way to see what delivery actually earns you. Plenty of restaurants find a channel they assumed was profitable is running at a much thinner margin than the dining room once the commission is visible.

Do I need to count inventory every week?

Monthly is the minimum if you want a real food cost. Weekly gives you a much faster signal on waste, theft and portioning, and most operators who move to weekly counts do not go back.

Either way, your team takes the count and we reconcile to it. We will help you build a count sheet that follows your walk-in rather than the alphabet, which is usually why counts get skipped.

Can you work with my POS?

Almost certainly. Toast, Square and Clover are the ones we see most often, and anything that produces a daily sales summary will work.

Some systems connect directly to QuickBooks or Xero and some need the summary imported. We will tell you which yours is on the first call, along with whether it is worth changing.

I have more than one location. Can you separate them?

Yes, and you should. Each location gets its own reporting so you can see food cost, labor and prime cost per site, along with a combined view for the business as a whole.

Averages across locations hide the one that is struggling, which is usually the reason people ask for this in the first place.

My books are a mess. Where do we start?

With a free review of the file. We tell you what is actually wrong and quote the cleanup as a separate one-time engagement, so you can see what fixing the history costs against what the monthly service costs.

With restaurants it is usually worth doing, because a year of sales booked from deposits means your prior year food and labor percentages were never real.

Find out what your prime cost really is

Twenty minutes on the phone and you'll have a flat quote within a day.

Book a free 20-minute call 805-225-4959