Appropriately accounting for gift cards is essential for restaurant groups because each store P&L needs to report its share of sales to measure performance accurately, and the balance sheet of each store needs to show the amounts it owes and is owed as a result of selling and redeeming other store gift cards respectively. This
Managing bill payments is a tedious and time-consuming process, but is integral to a restaurant’s day to day operations. You already understand why bill pay is an extremely important process but may not fully understand the benefits of having your accountant involved like the national chains do. This article explains why your accountant should be
Every restaurant has controllable and non-controllable expenses. Controllable profit measures the amount left over after deducting controllable expenses from your sales. A seasoned and effective general manager will maximize controllable profit by monitoring and managing the controllable expenses. In this article, you’ll learn how to calculate controllable profit and why it’s an important measure of
Just as different restaurants serve different cuisines, different restaurant owners and operators have different financial goals. You might be trying to go with the flow and only need a bookkeeper to help you with invoices, or you might be ready to rock the boat and drastically scale your operations with a CPA and CFO by
Labor cost as a percentage of sales indicates whether or not labor should be adjusted in a restaurant. However, actually controlling and managing labor cost requires more analysis. Labor cost can be controlled through effective scheduling and improving employee productivity, but only if you have access to actionable data and reliable reports and have the
The ideal labor cost in a restaurant differs for every concept because it depends on the overall prime costs as a percentage of sales. Prime costs, which is the cost of goods (COGS) plus labor, should never exceed 65% for full-service restaurants and 60% for quick-service restaurants. Therefore, the ideal labor cost is the amount
This is not another article telling you to order shredded carrots instead of shredding them in-house. Instead, we will show you how to use your financial data to achieve the ideal cost of goods sold (COGS) that will guarantee profitability in three steps if your other KPIs are in order. First, we’ll show you the
When interviewing prospective clients, I ask, “Are your financials on a full accrual basis?” This question allows me to quickly understand whether they have access to valuable and actionable financial information. Unfortunately, most restaurateurs cannot answer this question because they don’t know the difference between accrual basis and cash basis financials and the impact it
If your bill payment process involves tracking invoices by hand and lots of manual data entry, you would benefit by implementing electronic data interchange (EDI) between your inventory/POS system, your accounting system, and your vendor’s billing. This setup, such as EDI with Fintech, helps you optimize your invoice line-item data input, improve the accuracy of
Third-party delivery (such as UberEats, Grubhub, and Doordash) has gained a bad reputation due to the exorbitant fees charged by the platforms. However, changes in Americans’ eating habits are making these platforms vital for the survival of restaurants. About half of all restaurant sales in the US are consumed off-premises, and these off-premises options (catering,