Bookkeeping for Restaurant Groups
Restaurants run on margins so thin you can read a newspaper through them, on a POS system that spits out a different number every day. Miss the details and a busy month can quietly lose money. Let's make the numbers hold still.
Why restaurant books are their own animal
A restaurant generates hundreds of tiny transactions a day, split across cash, cards, delivery apps, gift cards, comps, voids, and tips — and your POS reports on all of it in a format your accounting software has never heard of. Reconciling daily sales to what actually hits the bank is where most restaurant books quietly go wrong, and it compounds fast when you've got more than one location.
Then there's tips, which are somehow both a payroll problem and a tax problem wearing a trench coat. Get the sales-to-deposit reconciliation and the tip handling right and everything downstream — food cost, labor cost, taxes — suddenly means something.
Prime cost is the number that keeps the lights on
Every restaurant operator lives and dies by prime cost — food plus labor as a percentage of sales. It's the single number that tells you whether a location is healthy or bleeding, and it only works if your books capture cost of goods and labor cleanly, by location, every period.
Averaged across the group, prime cost hides your problems. One location running hot gets masked by the two that are fine, and you don't find out until the lease renewal. Broken out by location, it's an early-warning system. We build it so you can see the sick unit while it's still curable.
How Kaizen runs it
We integrate your POS — Toast, Square, whatever you run — so daily sales, tips, and fees flow in and reconcile to the deposits automatically instead of getting re-keyed by someone at midnight. Payroll and food-distributor bills get coded by location, and we run a documented close that produces the same per-location P&L on the same date every period.
We're named after kaizen, continuous improvement, which in a restaurant means each close tightens the cost categories a little more — so the reports stop being a post-mortem and start being something you can actually act on before the month is over.
What's included
- Daily sales reconciliation — POS to bank, across cards, cash, delivery apps, and gift cards
- Food and labor cost tracked as prime cost, by location
- Per-location P&Ls on a documented, same-date close
- Tip handling reconciled between the POS and payroll
- Food-distributor and vendor bills coded by location and category
- Sales-tax tracking and filing across every location
- Inventory and COGS treated properly, not dumped in the month you paid
- 1099 tracking and a monthly data-quality scan before errors compound
Pricing
Straight answers
Do you integrate with Toast / Square / our POS?
Yes — the POS integration is the whole game in restaurant bookkeeping. We pull daily sales, tips, and fees and reconcile them to the deposits, so the books match reality instead of a hopeful guess.
We have five locations. Can you do per-location P&Ls?
That's exactly the point. Everything gets coded by location, so you see prime cost and profit per unit — not one averaged number that hides the location quietly sinking.
Our books are a year behind and the last bookkeeper ghosted us.
Depressingly common in this industry, and a normal starting point. Month 1 of the Reset is the catch-up: reconcile the POS history, fix the deposits, and land a first real close.
We're a single location doing fine. Do we need this?
Maybe not yet. One location with a tidy POS and a decent bookkeeper can be plenty. This earns its keep the moment you have a second location to compare — or a first one you can't trust the numbers on.
Related
Free 20-minute books assessment
We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.
Talk to SalesOr call us directly: +1 786 789 0969