#restaurant
Accounting solutions for restaurants and food businesses
Independent pizzerias survive only when prime cost — food plus labor — stays at or below 60% of sales. This guide covers booking DoorDash and Uber Eats revenue gross under ASC 606, claiming the FICA tip credit on Form 8846, capitalizing deck and conveyor ovens under Section 179, and building recipe cards that expose the gap between theoretical and actual food cost.
A bookkeeping guide for scratch bakeries covering standard recipe cards, ingredient yield, day-old shrink, retail vs. wholesale margin separation, ASC 606 deposit accounting for custom cakes, cottage food law revenue caps, and sales tax on prepared food.
Markup and margin share a numerator but not a denominator, and the gap can quietly cost a contractor $99,000 a year. A plain-language guide to the conversion math, a target-margin lookup table, and why retailers, contractors, and restaurants keep underpricing jobs.
Qualified Improvement Property (QIP) under Section 168(e)(6) lets nonresidential interior build-outs use a 15-year recovery period and qualify for 100% bonus depreciation after the OBBBA. Covers the statutory test, three exclusions, TCJA-to-OBBBA history, a worked $540,000 restaurant example, and Form 3115 catch-up deductions.
Section 119 lets employers exclude on-premises meals and required-residence lodging from employee wages, with no FICA and no income tax withholding. This guide walks through the convenience-of-the-employer test, the "more than half" safe harbor, qualified campus lodging, the Kowalski cash rule, and what the 2026 Section 274(o) deduction sunset does and does not change.
A working operator's guide to calculating restaurant prime cost every seven days, the 55–65% benchmark by service segment, the five leaks weekly tracking surfaces first, and the bookkeeping setup the cadence requires.
How restaurant, bar, and hospitality employers compute the Section 45B FICA tip credit on Form 8846, using the frozen $5.15 minimum wage floor and the 7.65 percent multiplier — including the 280C add-back, common audit pitfalls around service charges, and how to recover up to three years of unclaimed credit through amended returns.
Form 8027 requires large food and beverage establishments to reconcile gross receipts against employee-reported tips and allocate any shortfall below 8% to directly tipped employees on W-2 Box 8. This guide covers the 10-employee filing test, the three approved allocation methods, the tip-versus-service-charge distinction, and the reconciliation discipline that keeps Box 8 empty.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act creates an above-the-line deduction of up to $25,000 in qualified tips for tax years 2025 through 2028, available only to workers in IRS-listed tipped occupations and phased out above $150,000 MAGI ($300,000 joint).
Claim the Section 45B FICA tip credit with Form 8846 to recover 7.65% of employer payroll tax on tips above a $5.15/hour floor.
A working guide to the three numbers that decide whether a restaurant makes money — prime cost, food and beverage COGS, and tip pooling — with 2026 benchmarks, FLSA rules, and a weekly accounting cadence.
Learn how restaurant owners can leverage crowdfunding to turn loyal customers into investors, overcoming traditional financing challenges and fostering community support.
