Accountants for cafes, restaurants and venues.
Hospitality runs on thin margins, big rosters and GST that never behaves. We give venue owners live numbers, compliant payroll and an advisor who answers between services.
Rated 4.9 from 520+ Google reviews · Chartered Accountants · Xero Platinum Partner
The numbers that make or break a venue.
Award payroll
Penalty rates, overtime and allowances configured correctly in Xero payroll - because hospitality is the underpayment headline nobody wants to be.
GST on food
POS and Xero tax mapping set up once, properly - GST-free, taxable and mixed sales all landing right on every BAS.
Tips, clean
A documented tips process that is fair to staff and clean for tax, whatever mix of card and cash your venue runs.
Weekly margin visibility
COGS and labour percentages tracked weekly against revenue, so a drifting margin gets caught in days, not at year end.
Seasonal cashflow
Forecasts that expect the quiet months, a tax provision that keeps BAS painless, and a buffer built when the sun shines.
Growth and exits
Second sites, partners buying in, or selling the venue - structured and modelled before the handshake.
Guides for your kind of business.
What your corner of the industry can claim, how GST treats your work, and the structure question answered for your situation. Pick yours:
What this looks like in practice.
A two-venue group - a cafe and a licensed restaurant - around $2.4m combined turnover, 31 staff.
Case study · HospitalityFull every Friday, and still short at the end of the month.Prime cost measured weekly instead of discovered annually, and a roster costed before it ran. See what changed
The background
Both venues were busy. The restaurant had a genuine local following and the cafe had a queue most weekend mornings. The owner worked service, knew every regular, and had never had a quiet month worth worrying about.
The challenge
Busy and profitable are different questions, and the business could only answer the first. Food and beverage costs were reviewed when the accountant produced the annual figures, by which point the year was finished. Rosters were built on who was available rather than on what the shift was forecast to take, so penalty-rate hours landed wherever the roster happened to put them. Award interpretation was being done by feel - a real risk in an industry where classifications, penalties, overtime and allowances under the Hospitality Industry (General) Award are the single most common source of underpayment findings. GST was messy for the ordinary reason: a mixed menu where some items are GST-free and some are not, mapped once at POS setup and never checked since.
The approach
Prime cost - cost of goods plus labour, as a percentage of revenue - is the number a venue lives or dies by, and it has to be weekly to be useful. Everything else followed from making that number appear on time and be trustworthy.
How the work ran
Weeks 1–3
Make the inputs trustworthy
POS-to-Xero mapping was rebuilt so GST-free and taxable lines stopped landing in the same bucket, and supplier invoices were split into food, beverage and non-consumables. Payroll was reconfigured against the award: classifications checked, penalty and overtime rules set in Xero rather than applied manually, allowances added.
Weeks 4–8
Weekly prime cost, per venue
A one-page weekly report per venue: revenue, food cost, beverage cost, labour, prime cost percentage, and last week beside it. The restaurant's beverage margin turned out to be carrying the food margin; the cafe's labour percentage spiked on exactly two shifts a week.
Weeks 9–16
Cost the roster before it runs
Rosters moved to being costed against forecast revenue before publication rather than reconciled after. The two problem shifts were restructured. Menu engineering followed the beverage finding: six dishes were repriced or re-specced against actual plate cost rather than against what the old menu charged.
What changed
- Prime cost reporting
- annualweekly, per venue
- Award payroll
- interpreted manuallyconfigured in Xero
- GST mapping
- mixed lines in one bucketsplit and checked quarterly
- Roster
- costed afterwardscosted before publication
- Food cost visibility
- one blended numberfood and beverage separated
A venue that finds out its food cost in September for a year that ended in June is not managing a food cost. It is reading a post-mortem. The whole job is making that number arrive while the week is still in front of you.
A worked example, built from the pattern these engagements follow in hospitality. The business is composite and unnamed; the mechanics, the sequence and the order of work are the ones we use. Talk to us about your own numbers.
Frequently asked questions.
How should tips be handled?
Tips belong to staff, but how they flow through your till, payroll and tax depends on how they are collected and distributed. We set up a clean, documented process so neither your staff nor your BAS gets shortchanged.
Why is my GST always messy?
Food GST is genuinely fiddly - some items GST-free, some taxable, mixed sales everywhere. The fix is your POS and Xero mapping, set up once and checked periodically, not heroic BAS-time corrections.
Can you help with award compliance for my roster?
Hospitality award payroll - penalty rates, overtime, junior rates, allowances - is a top underpayment risk area. We configure Xero payroll against the award and sanity-check your roster costs against revenue.
What margins should a venue be running?
The classic guardrails: cost of goods around 28-35% and labour around 30-35% of revenue, varying by format. More useful than the benchmark is weekly visibility of YOUR numbers - which is what we set up.
We're seasonal. How do we survive the quiet months?
A cashflow forecast that expects the dip, a tax provision account so BAS never lands in the trough, and a war chest built in the busy season. Boring, and it works.
Run your venue on numbers, not vibes.
Free chat, fixed fees, and an advisor who won't call during the lunch rush.
Or call 07 3899 8311.