How a Restaurant Bookkeeper Can Save You Money

If you’re a restaurant owner, you’re no stranger to long hours and hard work – those are the things that have gotten you where you are, especially when you were just starting out and probably having to do nearly everything yourself. But now your business has grown, you’ve been able to hire chefs, waiters, hosts, and more. You have the freedom to think less about keeping the lights on day-to-day, and more about the future.

One additional hire that you should be thinking about – if you aren’t already – is finding a professional to do your restaurant bookkeeping. Whether your own full-time staff or an outsourced third party, a restaurant bookkeeper can directly save your business money. Let’s look at some of the many benefits bookkeeping services for small businesses can provide.

Managing Payroll – and Payroll Taxes

If you’re like most restaurant owners, payroll is one of your biggest expenses – and one of your biggest headaches. There’s a lot of employee turnover in the restaurant world, and payroll tax law can sometimes change on local, state, or even federal levels. Making sure that you have a complete record of who has worked for you, how much they were paid, how much was withheld, and more can feel like a full-time job on its own right.

When you work with a professional skilled in restaurant bookkeeping, these headaches will be greatly reduced. The bookkeeper will know how to properly track and report salaries, withholdings, and more, and will always be able to keep up with the latest shifts in tax law.

Reconciling Your Accounts

Even if you don’t know the term “reconciliation” in an accounting context, as a small business owner, you’ve almost certainly done it before. Reconciliation is the process of making sure that two or more accounts tell the same financial story – for instance, ensuring that your payroll expenses in a given period line up with the correct hours worked, or that the nightly till results correctly add up to your listed revenue.

This is critical work, ensuring that your financial statements are accurate and that your revenue and expenses are being correctly tracked. It’s also painstaking, difficult work. Bringing on a skilled bookkeeping specialist means that you can always know that your accounts are accurate.

Furthermore, the bookkeeper will be able to use these accurate accounts to identify points where you may be spending more than you want to be. Minimizing unnecessary expenses is one of the best ways to improve your margins and boost your bottom line, and a restaurant bookkeeping expert will set you on this path.

Minimizing Errors

Odds are, you aren’t an accountant yourself. Perhaps you started your restaurant business as a chef or some other entrepreneur. Doing your accounting yourself can be difficult and painstaking, as we’ve already discussed, especially if you aren’t specifically trained in it.

Few things are more frustrating than spending hours of your work sifting through receipts only to realize that at some point you’ve made a mistake and much of that work has to be redone. It isn’t work you can just put off or neglect; you’ve got to get this done, which means that all your other important work must be deprioritized.

When you work with an experienced provider of bookkeeping services for small businesses, these errors will be greatly reduced. They may still happen, of course – people are human and make mistakes, even highly trained experts – but they’ll be significantly less likely, and fixing them doesn’t require your own time or energy.

Furthermore, dedicated restaurant bookkeeping staff will only have financial tasks to focus on, making it much less likely that they’ll be late or neglect important timelines. In fact, a good bookkeeper can remind you or your staff about approaching deadlines to gather or submit data, meaning that you can eliminate one not-uncommon expense entirely: late fees.

Making the Most of Your Taxes

When the taxman cometh, that can be a stressful time in the life of any restaurant or small business owner. Most of us aren’t trained in – or even aware of – all the various deductions we can make or exemptions we can claim on our personal taxes, let alone taxes for a business we own.

A dedicated restaurant bookkeeper will keep your tax information – expenses, salaries, write-offs, and more – accurate and close at hand, and will know what you can and can’t deduct from the final bill. They may be able to help you find tax savings you didn’t know you could claim.

Helping You Worry Less

Perhaps this isn’t a direct way that bookkeeping services for small businesses can save you real, tangible money, but it still bears a mention. Running a restaurant, or any other type of small business, is stressful. Your margins are probably thin, you may not be seeing the immediate growth you’d hoped for, and there are a hundred different things keeping you up at night.

When you work with good restaurant bookkeeping, your accounting doesn’t have to be one of those things you worry about. You can rest easy knowing that your books are being tended to by professionals who know exactly what they’re doing and who want to help improve your business’ bottom line.

Less stress in your life isn’t just nice for you, it’s good for your business. You’ll be free to think about the future and how best to improve your restaurant – new dishes, happy hour, online advertising? – rather than spending time crunching numbers.

How Do You Find a Restaurant Bookkeeper?

Unless your restaurant is fairly large, it’s probable that you can’t afford a full-time on-staff bookkeeper, nor would they have enough work every day to justify hiring one. Fortunately, you don’t have to hire a full-time bookkeeper to have excellent restaurant bookkeeping.

When you partner with a company like BackOffice Solutions, you get the restaurant bookkeeping services your business needs, when it needs them. We can handle taxes, pay vendors, reconcile your accounts, and more, at very reasonable rates.

Contact BackOffice Solutions today for a free quote, and see how we can start helping your restaurant succeed.