Indeed, restaurant bookkeeping is among the most important aspects of making your business successful. You must be thinking why? Hear us out, the profit margin in the restaurants are too tight – hence, keeping an eye on the accounting and bookkeeping process is important.
Think like that… Restaurateurs need to take numerous sensitive decisions including calculating prime cost, analyzing profit and loss statements, and choosing accounting software. Without the support of an expert, you can never take the right decision. Bookkeeping in a restaurant is a complex process with many moving parts that must be measured against industry standards.
To put it lightly, it's intimidating - not to mention time-consuming, time-sensitive, and accuracy-dependent. Remember, there cannot be any flukes in your bookkeeping – So, to help you manage your multi-location restaurant proficiently, we have put together a guide that would surely increase the chances of your success.
How To Manage Multi-Location Restaurant Bookkeeping
Even though restaurant bookkeeping is a daunting task – and for a layman, it is more complicated to comprehend the process. But hiring someone to do these tasks on your behalf can help you make wiser finance-driven decisions. Believe us, it is worth the initial headache!
Let’s go over the steps you need to take to set up your restaurant bookkeeping.
Monitor Your Daily Sales Report:
Reviewing the daily sales report helps you keep track of everything that has happened in your restaurant on a particular day. Here we’re talking about the finances only. As a multi-location restaurant owner, you must record daily sales for each location separately. Besides, you can record a daily sales journal entry as well.
Furthermore, in order to accurately reflect your bank activity, you must create a separate sales journal entry for each location, each day. Your accounting system must reflect the fact that your merchant credit card processing occurs daily. To be precise, you must keep separate journals for each location in order to monitor your bank activity.
Centralized Data Management System:
A central repository of all monetary operational data is required for a restaurateur to make decisions. Multiple-location restaurants can easily reap the maximum benefit of applications and tools that provide authorized access to critical metrics across geographical locations. That is not a big deal, we are living in an era where technological advancements take place every second. And utilizing these modern technologies for restaurant bookkeeping will only help in making sound decisions.
Set Up the Simple Chart Of Accounts:
Create a simple chart of accounts, which will be used to categorize the money that flows in and out of your business. Assets, liabilities, revenue, expenses, and owner's equity are all included in a standard chart of accounts – keep this in mind.
This is further subdivided into business-specific categories or sub-accounts like inventory, marketing, and sales. While setting up the charts of accounts, you may face difficulty in deciding which metrics you want to track. Hence, it is better to hire a restaurant bookkeeping services provider.
Use POS System As A Tool:
The POS system you choose for your restaurant should not be taken lightly. It takes a long time to configure the POS system properly. However, the time it takes to set up is completely worth it.
Knowing the system inside and out means that the reports produced outline all of the key metrics that the company has deemed important. Don’t forget, having the right information is more valuable than having a large amount of information. Moreover, restaurants usually experience theft – hence, it is important to have a restaurant bookkeeping system so that you can track the daily deposits.
Outsourcing To Professionals:
To streamline your bookkeeping tasks, a fair amount of money is required. Furthermore, there are costs associated with establishing and managing multiple-location premises. When it comes to restaurant businesses, infrastructure and resources must keep up with the demand.
Outsourcing to professionals with experience managing restaurant bookkeeping can be extremely beneficial. Furthermore, the most significant advantage of outsourcing to a qualified provider is the money saved while gaining expertise and contributing to the bottom line. All of this can be provided by outsourcing without the hassle and effort of building the infrastructure in-house.
Use Classes For Different Locations:
If you own a restaurant, you may be aware that management must determine how to precisely account for income and expenses for each location. However, if you use QuickBooks as your accounting and bookkeeping system, you can easily use the class tracking features to split up the income and expenses for different restaurant locations.
Besides, if you use class tracking properly, you can analyze the profitability of every restaurant. Moreover, you can determine the profit and loss as well with the help of classes. Just in case you want to access the summary – you can do that as well.
Sounds good? No?
Relevant Reporting Or Point Of Sale Systems:
Well, that’s obvious that decision-makers need relevant information to conclude. Only the restaurant service system or point of sales that is supported by reporting system provides credible information. But keep in mind that Point of sales information alone is not valid from the accounting perspective. However, it can boost your overall business-building efforts with deep insights.
Cash Flow Statement:
This one is a biggie…
For multi-location restaurant bookkeeping, it is necessary to review the report so that you can easily track the cash flow. What are you confused about? Don't be, we are explaining it.
Just keep on reading… when cash comes in, it is called inflow or cash in. However, when cash goes out, it is called outflow or cash out. Basically, the statement lists the state of debts, financing, operations, investments, and how much money you have in hand.
Final Word!!!
While having too much on the plate, managing the books of a multi-location restaurant can be complicated. You do not only have to manage the inventory and payroll, track A/R and A/P, choose the best POS system and accounting software, monitor financial reports, and audit your POS buttons. Consequently, the only way to tackle this task is to hire a restaurant bookkeeping services provider - who can assist you in streamlining the process while staying compliant.
If you are planning to do it on your own, then you should be a professional restaurant bookkeeper having decades of experience in implementing a restaurant-specific bookkeeping system. By the way, you can get your hands on customized restaurant bookkeeping services with comprehensive operations planning for restaurants only at Aberny - Get in touch with us to understand your bookkeeping better.
