Restaurants & Bars
Restaurant margins are thin. A few points of food cost slippage can turn profit into loss. We track your prime costs weekly so you know exactly where the money goes.
The Industry
A restaurant can do $40,000 in sales over a weekend and still lose money. The dining room was packed, the kitchen was slammed, and yet the bank account tells a different story. The margins in this business are brutal. Net profit of 5% is considered healthy. That means a $1 million restaurant keeps $50,000 after everything is paid. Small shifts in food cost or labor eat that up fast.
The cash flow timing makes it worse. You pay COD for the produce delivery Monday morning. Payroll hits Friday. But the credit card processor holds funds for two days, and the catering invoice you sent last week hasn’t been paid yet. You can be profitable on paper and still scramble to cover the weekend’s payroll.
Who This Covers
Who This Covers
Full-service restaurants, fast casual spots, bars, breweries, cafes, coffee shops, food trucks, ghost kitchens, and catering companies. Any Phoenix area food business managing food costs, labor, and the constant pressure of perishable inventory.
The Complexity
The Complexity
Multiple revenue streams with different margins. Dine-in, takeout, delivery apps, catering, private events. Tip reporting with IRS requirements. Inventory that spoils. High employee turnover. Sales tax on prepared food. It adds up to a bookkeeping challenge that generic solutions don’t solve.
What We Handle
We focus on prime cost. That’s your food cost plus your labor cost as a percentage of revenue. In most restaurants, prime cost should land between 55% and 65%. If you’re above that range, the business is bleeding. We track this weekly, not monthly. Monthly financials arrive too late to fix problems in a restaurant. By the time you see last month’s numbers, you’ve already repeated the same mistakes for four more weeks.
We also handle the delivery app reconciliation that drives restaurant owners crazy. DoorDash, UberEats, and Grubhub don’t deposit what you think they should. Commissions, marketing fees, refunds, and adjustments are all netted out. The deposit hitting your bank looks nothing like the orders you filled. We break down those statements so you see the true revenue and the actual cost of each platform.
Prime Cost Tracking
Prime Cost Tracking
Food cost and labor cost tracked weekly against revenue. We pull the data from your POS and payroll to calculate where you stand. When prime cost creeps up, you know immediately instead of discovering it at the end of the quarter.
Tip Reporting and Compliance
Tip Reporting and Compliance
Tip pooling, tip credits, and IRS reporting requirements get complicated. We make sure tips are recorded correctly, allocated properly, and reported so you stay compliant. No surprises from the IRS or the Department of Labor.
Common Problems
Food cost creep is silent. Portion sizes drift larger. A vendor raises prices by 3% and nobody notices. Waste increases because prep cooks are rushing. None of these show up as a single alarming event. They accumulate slowly until your food cost is 34% instead of 30% and you can’t figure out where the profit went. Without weekly tracking against actual inventory counts, the creep continues unchecked.
Delivery apps create a different kind of confusion. An owner sees $8,000 in orders for the week but only $5,600 hits the bank. The missing $2,400 is commissions, promotional discounts, refunds for customer complaints, and service fees. But the statement is a mess of line items that don’t tie out easily. Some owners just record the deposit as revenue, which means they’re understating sales and hiding the true cost of using these platforms.
Delivery App Blindness
Delivery App Blindness
You might be losing money on every delivery order and not know it. When commissions run 15-30% plus marketing fees, the margins on delivery can go negative. We break down profitability by channel so you can make real decisions about which platforms are worth keeping.
Labor Without Context
Labor Without Context
Total labor cost for the month is not useful information. You need to know labor as a percentage of revenue by day of week and by daypart. A slow Tuesday lunch with three people on the clock is a different problem than a packed Friday night that’s still unprofitable because of overtime.
What Changes
You start making menu decisions with real data. That signature burger might feel like a winner because it sells well, but if the food cost on it is 40% while the chicken dish runs 25%, you’re pushing the wrong item. We give you the numbers to price correctly and promote the dishes that actually contribute to profit.
The weekly rhythm creates control. When you see prime cost every week, you catch problems in days instead of months. You adjust pars, talk to the kitchen about portions, renegotiate with vendors. The business becomes manageable instead of a constant guessing game about where the money went.
Channel Profitability
Channel Profitability
You’ll know whether delivery apps are contributing to profit or just creating volume. You’ll see how catering margins compare to dine-in. Decisions about where to focus energy become obvious when the numbers are clear.
Expansion Readiness
Expansion Readiness
If a second location or investor conversation is in your future, you need clean financials that tell a real story. We build books that show exactly how the business performs, which gives you credibility when you need capital or want to grow.
Full-Service Bookkeeping for Greater Phoenix
The Next Step:
A Quick Conversation
Tell us about your situation. We'll listen, ask a few questions, and give you a clear price to handle the work.