Daily sales that match your deposits, food costs you can actually see, and tips that land in the right place on the books. We handle the bookkeeping for restaurants, cafes, and bars in Kalispell, the Flathead Valley, and across Montana — so you can run the floor instead of the ledger.
A restaurant generates more transactions in a week than most small businesses see in a month — hundreds of tickets a day, a dozen vendor deliveries, tips moving through payroll, and merchant deposits that never quite match the register. Generic bookkeeping isn't built for that. Ours is.
The core of restaurant bookkeeping is daily sales and POS reconciliation. Your point-of-sale system says you did one number; your bank account shows another. The gap is card processing fees, batch timing, third-party delivery payouts, and the occasional error — and if nobody reconciles the two, your books quietly drift away from reality. We tie your POS totals to your actual merchant deposits, break the card fees out as their own expense line instead of letting them hide inside "lower revenue," and keep cash sales honest. When a deposit doesn't match, we chase down why.
Tips deserve the same discipline. Tips aren't revenue — they're money you're holding on behalf of your staff — and books that treat them as sales overstate income and understate liabilities. We don't run payroll, and we won't pretend to; instead, we coordinate with your payroll provider so that wages, tips, and payroll taxes flow into the books exactly as they were processed. Your payroll reports and your financial statements tell the same story, which matters a great deal when your tax preparer sits down with both.
Then there's the number every operator should know cold: prime cost. Prime cost is simply your food and beverage cost plus your labor cost, expressed as a percentage of sales. It's the most useful number in the building because it covers the two expenses you can actually control from week to week. Rent is fixed; insurance is fixed; but food and labor respond to decisions — portioning, waste, prep schedules, vendor pricing, who's on the floor Tuesday night. We track food and beverage costs by category, keep inventory basics in order so cost of goods reflects what you actually used rather than just what you bought, and report prime cost in plain language. When it moves, you'll know — and you'll know where to look.
Vendor bills round out the weekly rhythm. Food distributors, beverage reps, linen services, and repair invoices arrive constantly, and paying them well is a timing game: early enough to keep good terms with the reps who take care of you, late enough that the checking account can breathe. We keep bills entered, categorized, and scheduled so you can see what's due, what's coming, and what the account will look like after it clears.
POS totals tied to actual merchant deposits, card fees broken out, and cash, card, and delivery channels kept straight.
Books kept aligned with your payroll provider — tips tracked as liabilities, wages and payroll taxes categorized right.
Cost of goods tracked by category with inventory basics in order, so you see real margins, not guesses.
Food plus labor as a percentage of sales, reported on a rhythm and explained plainly — the number that runs the business.
Distributor and supplier bills entered, categorized, and scheduled so cash flow and vendor relationships both stay healthy.
QuickBooks Online with a restaurant-friendly chart of accounts — set up right from day one, or cleaned up if it's drifted.
Most restaurant owners come to us mid-mess, not day one — a season's worth of unreconciled deposits, a chart of accounts that lumps everything into "supplies," tips booked as income. That's fine. We start with a catch-up cleanup: reconcile the backlog, rebuild the categories around how a restaurant actually spends, and get you to a clean starting point. Then a simple weekly and monthly rhythm keeps it that way — sales reconciled weekly, everything closed and reported monthly, so the numbers you see are current enough to act on.
Restaurants in the Flathead Valley don't have twelve normal months — they have a sprint and a wait. Glacier National Park traffic floods the valley from June through September, patios fill, and the same kitchen that coasted in April is slammed by July. Then the shoulder seasons arrive and the question changes from "can we keep up?" to "will the summer's cash carry us to Memorial Day?" We build your books around that curve: watching margins closely during the peak when small leaks cost the most, and keeping cash-flow visibility sharp through the quiet months so vendor payments, payroll, and the slow-season bills never catch you off guard.
Montana's tax picture is its own thing, too. There's no general statewide sales tax, which simplifies life compared with most states — but certain resort communities levy their own local taxes on lodging, prepared food, and alcohol. Whitefish, for example, charges a 3% resort tax that applies to restaurant and prepared-food sales. If your restaurant operates in a resort-tax community, we keep those collections tracked as the liability they are — not revenue — so remittance is clean and nothing owed to the city ever looks like money you can spend. And underneath it all sits QuickBooks Online with a restaurant-friendly chart of accounts: food, beverage, and labor separated properly, comps and discounts visible, and reports your tax preparer will actually thank you for.
Restaurants aren't the only business we know from the inside. See how we handle the books for other industries across the Flathead Valley and Montana.
Free 30-minute consultation. No pressure, no commitment — just a real conversation about your restaurant and what clean books would change about running it.