Why Restaurants Should Consider Outsourcing Their Bookkeeping

Few businesses are as hectic as a restaurant. The dining area is chaotic enough, with servers taking orders, managing various tables, bringing food, and clearing tables. Meanwhile, the office staff is busy planning menus and specials in addition to all the regular headaches of business management, like payroll, restocking, and bookkeeping.

Fortunately, while restaurants will always have extra work to shoulder, bookkeeping services can provide restaurants with desperately needed relief from day to day financial frustrations. This makes the complexities of running a restaurant more manageable and your business more productive.

Starting on the Right Foot

While it seems logical to assume a larger, more established business would have greater need for bookkeeping services than a new restaurant, a fresh start-up actually has just as much, if not more, need for professional bookkeepers. While a large restaurant chain might have more complex finances, such a business would also have more staff. On the other hand, a new restaurant typically uses minimal staff and is particularly vulnerable financially. The balance between necessary labor and the costs of hiring employees can be daunting, and it’s easy for new business owners to overestimate the amount of hours in the day. No matter how skilled and determined you are, you cannot do everything by yourself. If you are running a new business, your talents are likely needed for something other than bookkeeping.

Using a bookkeeping service as you launch a new restaurant can help save labor costs in the short term and stabilize your business’s finances in the long term. Hiring an employee specifically for bookkeeping tasks is very costly, and it’s difficult to know what income will be like during the first few months. Bookkeeping services are typically cheaper than hiring even a part time employee, due in large part to the cost of employee benefits such as paid vacation and healthcare.

You may not have the finances to hire a bookkeeping service. Don’t worry, there are many excellent bookkeeping programs and software for a new businesses and restaurants. These including Quickbooks Pro, Quickbooks Enterprise, and Quickbooks Premier. You may not consider yourself tech savvy, but again, don’t fret; simply get QuickBooks training, it is time well spent and will save you more in the long run.

Restaurants Already Have Extra Work

In addition to the work of cooking, serving, and cleaning up food, a restaurant has to deal with extra paperwork. After all, restaurant owners have to keep up with government-set standards and laws regarding food preparation and storage. It’s easy to bury a desk under the number of documents and files a restaurant owner must prepare simply to open a new restaurant, let alone run one. This is one of many issues that make the dream of opening a restaurant so difficult to achieve.

Hiring a professional bookkeeping service gives staff more time to handle the details of the menu and ongoing marketing. Because of the extra work involved with managing a restaurant, this is especially important for those who own restaurants. Since a restaurant owner already suffers from an unusually large workload, there’s no reason to bear the additional stress of bookkeeping. Get your business off to a strong start. Starting a restaurant is hard work, and it will need every moment of attention you can spare.

Keep Your Cooks in the Kitchen

Simply assigning the bookkeeping to an employee who fulfills other functions is impractical, even if you are considering yourself for the role. There is a reason businesses that can afford bookkeeping staff hire employees dedicated to performing this task. It is time consuming and often stressful for those with little or no experience. A restaurant’s staff members are hired for specific jobs, and those jobs all have to do with food and customer service, not numbers and accounting. Adding extra work to a full schedule is an invitation for errors. You can confuse inbound and outbound funds just as easily as you can confuse salt and sugar at the end of a long week.

Just as your kitchen and wait staff are trained for their specific roles, bookkeeping services are staffed by experts in the field. They may not have a clue how to braise a steak or measure ingredients by hand, but bookkeepers can prevent, spot, and solve financial discrepancies with the same efficiency a chef uses to prepare five different dishes for the same table. If you hire professionals to staff your kitchen, why not have professionals handle your bookkeeping?

Running a restaurant is hard. Starting one is even more difficult. Hiring a professional bookkeeping service can save you not only time, but money. Restaurants of any size can benefit. A new business often needs a bit of help to get going, and handing off the responsibility of bookkeeping will allow new business owners to give their restaurants the time and attention they require. A larger establishment is typically focused on growth and ratings, making for busy management. This can quickly turn bookkeeping from a chore into a nightmare. Regardless of whether your restaurant is old or new, big or small, outsourcing your bookkeeping can help your business grow.