Restaurants & Bars
Bookkeeping and tax work for restaurants and bars. Our founder served as CFO of a local restaurant chain.
Thin Margins, No Room for Guessing
A bar runs 18% pour cost on a Saturday night that should have been closer to 15%. Three percentage points sound small. On $8,000 in liquor sales that is $240 gone in one night. Multiply by 52 Saturdays and you have lost $12,000 to over-pouring, comps nobody tracked, or a bar back who has been generous with friends. Restaurants and bars live and die on small percentages.
Our founder, Gina Bertone, spent years as CFO of a local restaurant chain before opening GMJ. She knows what a daily sales report looks like, how an 86’d item affects the night, and why a liquor cost percentage can lie to you when the inventory count is loose. The work of accounting for food service is not theoretical here.
Who We Work With
Who We Work With
Restaurants, bars, cafes, food trucks, breweries, catering operations, and ghost kitchens across Jacksonville, Wilmington, Myrtle Beach, and the surrounding Carolinas. Different formats, same tight margins.
What Makes It Complex
What Makes It Complex
Daily cash, card tips, comp tickets, voids, sales tax across food and alcohol, prime cost tracking, tipped employee payroll, vendor invoices that arrive in piles, and inventory that has a habit of walking away.
Books That Match What Is Actually Happening
Restaurant accounting only works when the POS, the bank, and the books all tell the same story. Daily sales recorded against actual deposits. Card tips reconciled against payouts. Cash differences caught the day they happen instead of three months later when nobody remembers what went wrong on a Tuesday in March.
Sales tax is its own job in this industry. North Carolina taxes prepared food differently than groceries, and alcohol carries its own rate. We use TaxJar to keep the rates current and the filings on time, so nothing gets missed and nothing gets paid twice.
Daily Sales Reconciliation
Daily Sales Reconciliation
Your POS reports come in. Your bank deposits come in. We match them and catch the breaks. Discrepancies get handled while they are still small and the answer is still fresh in someone’s mind.
Sales Tax Done Properly
Sales Tax Done Properly
Food, alcohol, and merchandise tracked at the correct rate. Filings submitted on time across the states you operate in. No notices, no penalties, no scrambling at the end of the quarter to back into a number.
Where the Profit Quietly Disappears
Food cost is the slow leak. Your menu was priced when chicken thighs cost $1.89 a pound. They cost $2.65 now and the menu has not moved. The protein on a single plate went from 28% cost to 38% and nobody noticed, because the invoices got entered as one lump number called food.
Then there is everything else. Tips that get reported wrong on payroll. Comped meals that never get separated from real sales. Vendor credits that never made it back to your account. A bar manager who knows the count is loose. These things do not show up on a P&L that lumps everything together.
Vendor Categorization
Vendor Categorization
Proteins, produce, dairy, paper goods, beer, wine, and liquor tracked as separate buckets. You can see when one category spikes instead of staring at a single food line that tells you nothing useful about where the money went.
Tip Compliance
Tip Compliance
Cash tips, card tips, tip pools, tip credits. Tracked correctly for payroll and reported the way the IRS expects. Restaurants are an audit target for tip reporting, and the small details matter.
Spend Your Time on the Floor, Not the Spreadsheet
You did not open a restaurant to spend Sunday afternoons coding invoices and chasing a deposit that came up $42 short last week. You opened it because you wanted to feed people, build a place, and run something of your own. The back office should support that work, not consume it.
With clean monthly books, you walk into next week knowing exactly what last week cost you. Food cost trends are visible. Labor percentage is current. Sales tax is filed. Your tax return at year-end becomes a summary of work already done instead of a six-week project to reconstruct the year.
Monthly Reports You Can Use
Monthly Reports You Can Use
Food cost, labor cost, prime cost, and net margin for the period. Numbers you can use to price a new menu item, decide whether to add a Sunday brunch, or have a real conversation with a vendor about a contract.
Year-End Without the Scramble
Year-End Without the Scramble
Books closed monthly means tax season is not a project. We prepare the business return from records that are already organized, and we represent you before the IRS if a question ever comes up.
Trusted Accounting for Small Businesses
First Step:
Start With a Call
Tell us about your business and what you need help with. We'll ask a few questions, evaluate your current situation, and let you know how GMJ can support your books, taxes, and day-to-day operations.
