Hospitality is a daily cash business with weekly wage bills, monthly rent and margins that disappear if nobody is watching the roster or the cool room. We work with cafes, restaurants, bars and caterers across Brisbane, Logan and the Scenic Rim, and this page covers the problems that actually decide whether a venue makes money: wages, food cost, POS reconciliation, GST and the lease.
A cafe or restaurant turns over cash every day, which makes it feel healthy right up until it is not.
02Wages are the largest controllable cost in any venue and the easiest to get wrong.
03Gross margin in a venue is sales less the cost of food and beverage, and it is the number the menu is priced on.
04Hospitality bookkeeping fails at the point where the point of sale system meets the bank.
A cafe or restaurant turns over cash every day, which makes it feel healthy right up until it is not. The margins are thin, the two biggest costs are wages and food, and both move with every roster and every delivery. A busy week can lose money if the roster was built for a bigger week, and a quiet week can be profitable if the owner was watching. The accounting has to be built to show that weekly, not at tax time.
Most hospitality owners we meet in Brisbane and Logan have good instincts about their food and their customers, and almost no visibility of the two numbers that decide whether they keep the doors open: wage cost as a percentage of sales, and gross margin after food and beverage costs. We set the books up so those two numbers are on the page every week, by venue if there is more than one.
The rest of this page covers the specific problems of cafes, restaurants, bars and caterers: penalty rates and Fair Work compliance, tips and cash, stocktakes, POS reconciliation, GST on mixed supplies, liquor licensing and leases. If you run a venue, you will recognise most of them.
Wages are the largest controllable cost in any venue and the easiest to get wrong. The hospitality and restaurant awards carry penalty rates for evenings, weekends and public holidays, overtime rules, minimum shift lengths, split shift allowances and different rates for casual, part-time and junior staff. Underpayment claims in hospitality are common, they are expensive to settle, and they almost always start with a roster that was never checked against the award.
We help owners set up rostering and payroll software that applies the award correctly, flows into Xero, and reports Single Touch Payroll to the ATO each pay run. Super guarantee has to be paid on time to avoid the super guarantee charge, which is not deductible, and the payment timing rules have tightened, so we build the due dates into the cash flow rather than leaving them to quarter end.
Tips need their own treatment. Cash tips that go straight to staff are generally the staff member's income, not the business's. Card tips that pass through the business bank account need to be tracked and distributed under a clear policy, and the records should show they were not absorbed into sales or taken by the owner without being declared.
Gross margin in a venue is sales less the cost of food and beverage, and it is the number the menu is priced on. If food cost drifts up a few points because of supplier price rises, portion creep or waste, those few points are usually the whole net profit. Owners who only see food cost once a year in the tax return find out far too late.
The fix is regular stocktakes and a consistent method for valuing them. A monthly stocktake, matched against purchases and sales for the month, gives a true gross margin rather than one distorted by whatever was sitting in the cool room. We help set up a stocktake routine the kitchen can actually sustain, and a reporting format that shows margin by category: food, coffee, alcohol, retail.
Menu pricing follows from that. Once the cost of each dish is known, pricing stops being a guess. We work with owners on menu costing, target food cost percentages and supplier reviews when one category is quietly eating the margin.
Hospitality bookkeeping fails at the point where the point of sale system meets the bank. A day's trade might arrive as card settlements two days later, cash banked once a week, delivery platform payouts net of commission, gift vouchers sold today and redeemed next month, and a float nobody counts. If the POS is not integrated properly with Xero, the books will never agree with the bank and the GST will be wrong.
We are a Xero Platinum Partner and we set up the integration between the POS, the payment terminals, the delivery platforms and Xero so that daily sales post automatically with the right GST split and the right clearing accounts. Then we reconcile, which is where the problems show: an unexplained cash shortage, a delivery platform fee that was never recorded, a voucher liability counted as revenue.
Cash handling matters more in this industry than almost any other because the ATO knows it. Clear float procedures, daily till reconciliations and prompt banking are not only good control, they are the evidence that the declared sales are complete.
GST in hospitality is messier than a flat ten percent. Food sold for consumption on the premises is taxable. Many basic food items sold to take away are GST-free, while prepared meals, hot food, most bakery products and drinks are generally taxable. A cafe selling coffee, bottled water, a loaf of bread and a takeaway sandwich is making mixed supplies and the POS has to code each item correctly. Catering is usually fully taxable. We review the item coding at set-up and spot check it with every BAS.
Bars and licensed venues carry the additional cost of liquor licensing under Queensland's liquor and gaming regulator: annual licence fees that vary with trading hours and risk, responsible service training, and sometimes gaming accounting with its own reporting. These costs need to be in the budget, and the licence conditions need to match what the venue actually does.
The ATO publishes small business benchmarks for cafes, restaurants, takeaway food and bars. They show the expected range for cost of sales, labour and rent as a percentage of turnover. A venue outside the benchmark, particularly on cost of sales, is more likely to attract a review. We compare your figures to the current benchmarks each year, and if you sit outside them we document why.
Few venues trade evenly through the year. Inner Brisbane cafes slow over the summer holidays, tourist areas run the other way, and events can swing a bar's month either direction. Rent, wages and loan repayments do not move with sales. A cash flow forecast built around your actual trading pattern tells you how much to set aside in the strong months to carry the weak ones, and when the BAS, super and income tax will land.
The lease is usually the second largest fixed cost and the one owners understand least. Rent reviews, outgoings, make-good obligations, a fit-out amortising over a lease shorter than its useful life, and personal guarantees all change the real economics. We review the lease terms against the forecast before an owner signs, and again before an option is exercised.
For owners with more than one venue, or plans to open a second, our virtual CFO service provides monthly reporting by site and a sounding board for the decision: is the first venue genuinely profitable enough to fund the second, and what happens to cash if the new one takes a year to settle?
Hospitality is high risk in the legal sense: staff claims, customer injuries, supplier disputes and the lease guarantee can all reach the owner. Most venues should trade through a company, often with a trust holding the shares, and with the equipment and fit-out held in a way that protects them. We review the structure at set-up and again when a second venue or a partner comes in.
Venues are bought and sold constantly, and most are sold badly: on the strength of the fit-out and the location, with financials that do not survive a buyer's accountant. Whether you are buying your first cafe in Victoria Point or selling a restaurant group, we prepare or review the numbers, value the business properly and manage the due diligence. Greg Blackaby has advised on business acquisitions for more than twenty years, and the approach works just as well for a single cafe as for a franchise group.
“We have been working with Acquire Strategic Accounting for some time now, and we couldn't be more pleased.”
There is no single right figure. It depends on the service model, trading hours, whether the owner works shifts and how much is counter service versus table service. The ATO's small business benchmarks publish a labour cost range for cafes, restaurants and takeaway venues, and we compare each client against the current range. What matters more is tracking the percentage weekly against the roster so it is managed rather than discovered.
Generally, tips paid voluntarily by customers and passed on to staff are not ordinary time earnings, so super guarantee usually does not apply to them. A mandatory service charge the business adds to the bill and then distributes is treated differently and may attract super. The records need to show which is which, and the policy should be written down. We check the arrangement against the current ATO position.
Most venues with staff, a lease and a fit-out should not be run as a sole trader. A company separates your personal assets from the business's liabilities, which in hospitality include wage claims, customer injuries and the lease. It also gives a capped tax rate on retained profit and makes it easier to bring in a partner or sell. A trust holding the shares can add flexibility. We assess the facts rather than apply a formula.
It depends on the item. Food consumed on the premises is taxable. Takeaway sales of many basic foods, such as plain bread, fruit and unflavoured milk, are GST-free, while hot food, prepared meals, most bakery items, confectionery and drinks are taxable even when taken away. Catering is generally taxable. A cafe makes mixed supplies every day, so each POS item needs the right GST code and the BAS needs to reflect it.
The ATO publishes small business benchmarks each year for cafes, restaurants, takeaway food and licensed venues. They give the typical range for cost of sales, labour, rent and total expenses as a percentage of turnover, drawn from lodged returns. If a venue sits outside the range, particularly with unusually low cost of sales, the ATO may ask about unreported cash sales. We compare your figures to the current benchmarks annually.
Yes. We are a Xero Platinum Partner and we set up integrations between the main hospitality POS systems, payment terminals, delivery platforms and Xero so that daily sales, GST, fees and tips post automatically to the right accounts. We then reconcile the clearing accounts against the bank each week or month, which is where cash shortages, missing platform fees and voucher liabilities show up.
