Restaurant bookkeeping: the numbers you need to track

What restaurant bookkeeping actually is

Restaurant bookkeeping is keeping track of what happens to your money, and turning that into a few numbers you can make a decision on. That is all it is. It is not a profession you have to go and learn, it is a habit you build.

What makes it different from a shop is the pace. You buy fresh product that is worth nothing in three days. Your labour costs run on while the room sits empty. And your revenue arrives through the till, your own ordering site and the delivery platforms, three streams that do not land at the same time.

• Cost of goods: what plate and glass cost you.
• Labour: wages, holiday pay, pension, payroll taxes.
• Budgeting: what you expect to sell and spend.
• Reporting: profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow.
• Tax: filed on time, money set aside first.

Bookkeeping is not accountancy

Bookkeeping is the work of today. Entering receipts, matching supplier invoices, closing the till. It produces no opinion.

Accountancy is what you do with that work. The annual figures, the tax return, the conversation about a second site. That is where the judgement sits.

Your bookkeeping tells you what happened. Your accountant helps you understand what it means. The first can largely be automated, the second cannot.

Why you need to read your own numbers

You can outsource the whole administration. What you cannot outsource is reading it. Your accountant sees your figures once a quarter. You see them every day, and you are the only one who knows Tuesday was down because the fryer was broken.

• You keep your margin and notice supplier prices creeping up.
• A third delivery channel becomes a calculation, not an argument.
• You see your cash position coming, not in January itself.
• You can plan. An oven is not paid from one week’s takings.
• The Belastingdienst stops being a surprise.

This is not about more numbers. It is about the same handful of numbers, looked at every week at the same moment, so you spot a drift while it is still small.

The numbers that actually steer the business

You could invent dozens of metrics. In practice you steer on a handful. These are the ones worth knowing by heart.

Prime cost

Prime cost is your cost of goods plus your total labour costs. Those are the two biggest lines in a restaurant, and the only two you can really influence. Your rent is fixed. Your purchasing and your rota are not.

1. Cost of goods = opening stock + purchases, minus closing stock.
2. Labour costs = wages + holiday pay + pension + payroll taxes.
3. Prime cost = cost of goods + labour costs.
4. Prime cost percentage = prime cost divided by revenue.

The percentage tells you more than the amount. If prime cost climbs two months running while revenue holds flat, something is leaking. You do not know where yet, but you know you have to look.

Cost of goods sold

This is what the product cost you that you actually sold. Not what you bought, but what went out of the door. The difference sits in your stock.

An example. You open the month with €4,500 of stock, buy €10,000 of product and close with €3,000. Your cost of goods is €4,500 + €10,000 minus €3,000, so €11,500. That is the figure sitting against your revenue for the month.

The value is in repeating it. Counting once tells you little. Counting twelve times shows whether portions are drifting or whether the menu is due a pricing round.

Gross profit and net profit

Gross profit is revenue minus cost of goods: that tells you whether your menu works. Net profit is what is left once everything is paid, from rent to depreciation: that tells you whether your business works.

A venue can post a healthy gross profit and still earn nothing by the end of the year. That is usually the answer to why a busy restaurant makes no money.

Chart of accounts

Your chart of accounts is the set of buckets every transaction falls into: food purchases, drink purchases, wages, rent, commission. The finer the split, the more questions you answer later. Give delivery platform commission an account of its own.

Invoice basis or cash basis

On the invoice basis you record revenue and costs as they arise, even if the money has not moved. On the cash basis you record them when the money moves. Many venues selling directly to consumers fall under the cash basis for btw, so have your accountant establish once which applies to you.

Depreciation

A five thousand euro dishwasher is not a five thousand euro cost in the month you buy it. You write it down over the years you use it, so your monthly figures show what trading really costs.

The work that comes back every day, week and month

Most bookkeeping misery comes not from difficult questions but from delay. A receipt from three weeks ago costs you ten times the time of the same receipt from this morning.

Give the daily and weekly work a fixed slot. In the venues where this runs smoothly it happens in the quiet twenty minutes after lunch, not at night after close.

Two things go wrong in hospitality most: hours and tips. Hours not approved before payroll runs get corrected a month later. And tips that arrive by card and are paid out by you can count as wages for payroll tax. Agree one method and have your accountant look at it once.

Btw, the KvK and the Belastingdienst

This is the part American articles cannot tell you anything about, and the part that costs money fastest when you let it slide.

Btw

In hospitality you run two rates side by side: 9% on food and non-alcoholic drinks, 21% on alcohol. So your till has to be able to split revenue by rate. If it cannot, your return becomes an estimate.

Set the btw aside the moment it arrives. A separate account you move money into weekly is the cheapest insurance there is. The btw sitting in your account was never yours.

Most venues file quarterly. Put those four dates in the diary with a week of margin. A late return earns a fine that has nothing to do with how good your restaurant is.

KvK and legal form

Your business is registered with the Kamer van Koophandel as an eenmanszaak, a vof or a bv. That is not a formality: your legal form sets how you are taxed and what you are personally liable for. With an eenmanszaak the profit runs through your income tax; with a bv you pay corporation tax and pay yourself a salary. Which is better depends on your profit and your risk, and an hour with an accountant pays for itself.

What to keep

The baseline rule is seven years: receipts, supplier invoices, till reports, payslips, bank statements. Records relating to property are kept longer. Digital storage is allowed and is better, because a shoebox of thermal till receipts is, two years on, a box of blank paper.

Do it yourself, a bookkeeper or software

There are three ways to organise this, and most venues end up on a combination of two.

In practice the combination works best: software that pulls in your bank and your till, and a bookkeeper who reviews it quarterly. You pay for judgement rather than typing.

What to track from day one

• Revenue per day by channel: dine in, collection, own site, each platform.
• Labour costs per week, including employer contributions.
• Stock, at the end of every month.
• Supplier invoices with date, including unpaid ones.

Connect your till

A till that passes its daily revenue into your bookkeeping saves you errors more than time. Retyping is where a rate ends up in the wrong column. Ask every system the same question: does this pass through my revenue by btw rate, by channel and by day?

For the bookkeeping itself, Dutch operators use packages such as Moneybird, e-Boekhouden.nl, Exact Online, Snelstart and Yuki. Which one fits depends on your size and on what your bookkeeper already uses, so ask them first. Prices change, so check the cost on the package’s own site.

What delivery platform commission does to your books

Orders through Thuisbezorgd or Uber Eats do not reach you the way the guest placed them. The platform withholds its commission and transfers the remainder. If you book only the remainder, both your revenue and your costs are understated.

Book the order at the full amount the guest paid, and book the commission separately in an account of its own. Use the platform’s statement rather than your bank statement, where the money has already gone.

Do that for a quarter and a line appears on your profit and loss you have never seen stated that way: what you pay each year to reach your own guests. Orders through your own site do not carry that line. That is the whole reason to have one.

Do not draw conclusions before you have done the sum. A platform that brings you new guests can be worth the commission.

The mistakes you see most often

None of these mistakes is stupid. They happen because the restaurant was busy and the admin could wait.

• Mixing personal and business spending.
• Never reconciling the till against the bank.
• Only looking at the month, once it is already gone.
• Treating btw as revenue.
• Forgetting employer contributions, which flatters your prime cost.
• Keeping receipts in a drawer instead of photographing them.

That they all come from being busy is exactly why a fixed slot beats good intentions. Twenty minutes that live in your week happen, twenty minutes you fit in do not.

Start Monday with one number

If this piece gives you one thing, let it be this: pick one number and look at it every week at the same moment.

Start with prime cost as a percentage of revenue. You need three things you already have: your revenue, your supplier invoices and your labour costs. Put it in the same spreadsheet, twelve weeks in a row.

After that you have something no benchmark report can give you: a line for your own restaurant. From then on every decision about your menu, your rota and your ordering channels gets easier, because you can see what it did to that line.