Daily sales reconciliation, tip accounting, FICA tip credit, prime cost reporting, and the operational metrics that actually decide whether your concept makes money — delivered by an accounting team that understands the brutal economics of hospitality. For restaurants, bars, hotels, catering companies, and multi-location hospitality groups.
Full-service restaurants, quick-service, fast-casual, bars, coffee shops, and bakeries — businesses where food cost, labor cost, and prime cost decide whether the concept makes money. Single-location independents and multi-unit groups both face the same daily reality: knowing your numbers is the only thing standing between success and failure.
Hotels, boutique inns, bed-and-breakfasts, and short-term rental operations. Hospitality accounting at this level adds occupancy tax, room revenue tracking, ancillary revenue (F&B, parking, events), and the operational metrics — RevPAR, ADR, occupancy — that hotel operators run their businesses on.
Catering companies running events, food trucks rolling routes, ghost kitchens, and event-based food operations. Project-based revenue recognition, deposits and deferred revenue, equipment-heavy fleet operations, and the multi-jurisdictional sales tax compliance unique to mobile food.
Your P&L shows food cost at 38%. Your menu pricing assumed 32%. Somewhere between purchasing, receiving, prep, plating, and waste, 6 points of margin vanish every month — and nobody can tell you where it goes.
Your CPA mentioned the FICA tip credit at tax time. You weren't sure what it was. You didn't claim it. Last year. The year before that. The year before that. For a full-service restaurant, that's been $10,000-$40,000 a year of credits you walked away from.
POS reports say one thing. Bank deposits say another. Credit card batches reconcile to neither. Comps, voids, manager discounts, and the occasional cash skim all hiding in the gap. You stopped looking because it stresses you out.
You can read every restaurant accounting textbook ever written and the conclusion is the same: three numbers control whether a restaurant makes money. Food cost percentage. Labor cost percentage. Prime cost (the sum of the first two). Get them right and the restaurant works. Get them wrong and no amount of marketing, ambiance, or great food will fix the business.
Most restaurants we take over don't know these numbers with any precision. They have a rough P&L produced monthly that tells them what happened six weeks ago. By the time the data is in their hands, the month is gone, the staffing decision is made, the menu is printed, and the next month's losses are already locked in.
The math isn't complicated — but very few restaurants have the operational discipline to track it weekly. Here's what a typical week looks like for a $1.5M-revenue full-service restaurant:
If your restaurant has tipped employees and you're not claiming the FICA tip credit, you're walking away from a federal tax credit that's almost certainly worth more than your bookkeeping costs. This isn't an exotic deduction. It isn't risky. It isn't aggressive. It's a credit Congress specifically created to offset the employer portion of FICA taxes restaurants pay on tip income — and it's been on the books since 1993.
When a tipped employee earns tips, the employer pays Social Security and Medicare taxes (FICA) on those tips just like regular wages. The FICA tip credit (under IRC Section 45B) allows restaurants to claim a tax credit equal to the employer's portion of FICA on tips that exceed what would have been needed to meet the federal minimum wage at the pre-1996 federal minimum wage rate ($5.15/hour, the rate the law is frozen to).
The math, simplified:
For a full-service restaurant with $1.5M in revenue and reasonable tip volume, the FICA tip credit is typically worth $8,000 to $25,000 annually. For a multi-unit group, it scales linearly — five locations of similar size means $40,000 to $125,000 in annual credits.
Many restaurants don't claim it for one of two reasons:
If you've been operating for years without claiming the FICA tip credit, you can typically amend prior-year returns to claim the credit retroactively — generally up to three years back. For a multi-year operating restaurant just discovering the credit, the catch-up claim can be substantial. We coordinate the calculation; your tax CPA handles the amended returns.
Anchor Point makes this calculation a standard year-end deliverable for every restaurant client with tipped employees. We track creditable tips throughout the year, produce the Form 8846 supporting workpaper, and hand it to your tax CPA at year-end with all the documentation they need to claim the credit cleanly.
Daily sales reconciliation is the operational foundation of restaurant accounting. Every day, your point-of-sale system generates a daily summary (Z-report) showing food sales, beverage sales, sales tax collected, tips, comps, voids, discounts, and payment methods. That data should reconcile cleanly to the cash and credit card deposits that hit your bank account a day or two later. When it doesn't reconcile — and it often doesn't — something is wrong, and the something is usually expensive.
Texas hospitality businesses face a stack of state-specific tax and compliance requirements that most general bookkeepers handle poorly or not at all. Sales tax on food vs. beverages. The Texas mixed beverage gross receipts tax. The Texas mixed beverage sales tax. Hotel occupancy tax. Local option taxes that vary by city. Each one has different rates, different filing schedules, and different consequences for getting it wrong.
The compliance challenge isn't just paying the right amount — it's classifying every sale into the right tax category on the POS so the right amount of tax gets charged to the customer in the first place. POS setup mistakes here cascade into months of incorrect filings and potential audit exposure.
The interplay between Texas mixed beverage gross receipts tax (paid by the business) and mixed beverage sales tax (paid by the customer but collected by the business) is one of the most-misunderstood areas of Texas hospitality tax. A common mistake: charging mixed beverage sales tax on items that should be regular sales tax, or vice versa. Most operations only discover the error during a state audit. We set up POS systems correctly from the start and file accurately every month.
30-minute discovery call. Bring us your last three months of P&Ls, your POS access, and a quick description of your concept. We'll tell you where the money is leaking and what it would take to plug the holes.
Book a Discovery Call →Whether you're running a single full-service restaurant or a multi-unit hospitality group, every Anchor Point engagement includes the same operational foundation — plus the hospitality-specific deliverables that decide whether your concept actually makes money.
POS daily summary reconciled to bank deposits monthly. Cash variance, comp tracking, void patterns, and credit card batch verification.
Food cost, beverage cost, labor cost, and prime cost calculated weekly — the operational dashboard that lets you adjust before the month is lost.
Creditable tips tracked throughout the year. Form 8846 supporting workpaper produced at year-end and handed to your tax CPA.
Monthly sales tax filings, Texas mixed beverage gross receipts and sales tax, hotel occupancy tax, and local option taxes — all filed on time, every month.
Per-location income statements with consolidated rollup. Compare locations side by side and see which concepts and units are pulling their weight.
Hospitality payroll with tipped/non-tipped wage tracking, FICA tip credit prep, tip pool allocation, and the year-end W-2s and 1099s done right.
Monthly inventory roll-forwards (or weekly for tighter operations), waste tracking, and the food cost calculations that drive menu pricing decisions.
Quarterly or monthly conversations about menu pricing, labor scheduling, expansion decisions, banking strategy, and the financial direction of the concept.
Hotel accounting layers a set of industry-specific metrics and revenue streams on top of standard hospitality accounting. Where restaurants live on prime cost, hotels live on RevPAR (revenue per available room), ADR (average daily rate), and occupancy. The accounting needs to support these metrics with operational data feeding from the property management system (PMS) into the accounting system.
For short-term rental operators (Airbnb, VRBO, Vacasa-managed properties), the accounting is structurally similar to hotels but operationally different. Per-property revenue tracking, cleaning fees, platform commissions, and local short-term rental tax compliance all need to be handled correctly. Houston-area STR operators in particular face evolving city-level regulation that affects both compliance and registration costs.
Catering companies and food trucks share core hospitality accounting principles with restaurants — food cost, labor cost, prime cost discipline — but operate on dramatically different rhythms that create their own accounting challenges.
The FICA tip credit (IRC Section 45B) is a federal tax credit that allows restaurants to claim a credit equal to the employer's portion of FICA taxes paid on tips reported by employees that exceed the federal minimum wage threshold. For most full-service restaurants, this credit can be worth $5,000 to $50,000+ annually depending on tip volume and employee count. Many restaurants don't claim it because the calculation requires careful tip tracking and proper documentation throughout the year. We handle this calculation and the supporting records as a standard part of our restaurant engagements.
Daily sales reconciliation is the foundation of restaurant accounting. Each day, the restaurant generates a Z-report (or POS daily summary) showing food sales, beverage sales, sales tax collected, tips, comps, voids, and payment methods. That data has to reconcile to the actual cash and credit card deposits. We work with the major restaurant POS systems (Toast, Square, Clover, Aloha, Micros, Lightspeed) and reconcile daily sales monthly, catching discrepancies, comp abuse, and the small leaks that add up to real money over a year.
Food cost percentage is the cost of food sold as a percentage of food revenue — typically targeted at 28-35% for full-service restaurants. Labor cost percentage is total labor (including taxes and benefits) as a percentage of total revenue, typically targeted at 28-35%. Prime cost is the sum of food cost and labor cost as a percentage of revenue — typically targeted under 60% for a profitable restaurant. These three metrics tell you more about whether your restaurant is operationally healthy than any other set of numbers on your P&L.
Yes. Multi-location restaurants and hospitality groups have specific accounting challenges: location-level P&Ls (so you know which restaurants are profitable and which aren't), inter-location transfers of inventory and labor, shared overhead allocation, multi-entity legal structures (a separate LLC per location is common), and consolidated reporting for ownership groups. We handle multi-location work as a standard engagement, with per-location reporting plus group consolidation.
Yes. Food trucks face mobile sales tax compliance across jurisdictions, route-level profitability tracking, and the equipment depreciation realities of a fleet of trucks. Catering companies have project-based revenue recognition (deposits, deferred revenue, event accounting), different labor patterns (event-based versus daily), and food cost dynamics that vary by event size and menu. We handle both — the accounting principles are similar to restaurants but the operational rhythm is different.
Yes — you can typically amend prior-year returns to claim the credit retroactively, generally up to three years back. For a restaurant that's been operating without claiming the credit, the catch-up can be substantial. We coordinate the calculation; your tax CPA handles the amended returns. For a $1.5M full-service restaurant that has missed the credit for three years, the retroactive claim is typically in the $30,000 to $75,000 range.
Monthly engagements for restaurants and hospitality businesses at Anchor Point typically range from $3,000 to $7,000 depending on number of locations, transaction volume, complexity of operations, and how much CFO-level guidance is involved. Single-location restaurants typically land at the lower end. Multi-location groups, hospitality companies with hotels, and concepts with high transaction volumes run higher. All engagements are fixed-fee with no hourly billing.
Whether you're running one full-service restaurant or a multi-unit hospitality group, 30 minutes with us will tell you what your numbers should be showing you and aren't. We'll calculate your real prime cost during the call if you bring three months of data.