Hospitality bookkeepers who only work with venues.

Three questions to ask any hospitality bookkeeper

A hospitality bookkeeper should answer three questions on the first call: which award your staff are on, how your POS and delivery payouts get into Xero, and how often you'll see your numbers.

We'd check the name on the TPB register before that call, too. Our piece on choosing a hospitality bookkeeper sets out what good answers sound like.

A venue's year is 52 pay runs and 1,560 supplier bills

Count what a venue paying staff weekly puts through its books in a year:

• Pay runs: 52, each with an STP report due on or before payday.
• Super: 52 payments, each due at the fund within 7 business days after payday.
• Supplier bills: about 1,560 if 30 suppliers deliver once a week.
• Card and delivery payouts: several a week, each one net of fees or commission.
• Activity statements: 4, or 12 once you withhold more than $25,000 of tax from wages a year.

Batch it up monthly and you find out how the month went after it's over. So we run it on a fixed week: invoices Monday, payroll Tuesday, the supplier run Wednesday, reconciliation Thursday and your P&L on Friday.

Pay runs follow the award your venue sits under

Most venues fall under one of three awards. Fair Work's summaries put eat-in restaurants and cafes on the Restaurant Industry Award, venues that mainly sell to take away on the Fast Food Industry Award, and pubs, hotels, taverns and wine bars on the Hospitality Industry (General) Award, along with restaurants connected to a hotel.

All three pay the same on Saturdays and public holidays and split on Sundays. A Level 2 casual gets 150% on a Sunday under the Restaurant Award and 175% under the Hospitality Award, so a hotel cafe paid under the Restaurant Award by mistake underpays $200 on every $1,200 of Sunday wages. Our piece on which award covers your cafe has the full table.

Super moved to every payday on 1 July. Before that, we lodged super guarantee charge statements for venues that came to us with super paid late or not at all, and we still check each fund's receipt dates when we take over a payroll.

If you run a restaurant, our restaurant bookkeepers page shows what a drifting week costs on $22,000 of sales.

Every POS and delivery app needs its own clearing account

Your POS records what customers paid. The card provider and each delivery app pay you less, later, after fees and commission. In Xero each one should run through a clearing account: sales in at the full amount, fees out as a cost, and the account back to zero when the payout lands.

Take a venue doing $16,000 a week before GST, with $5,120 of wages and $3,200 of delivery orders that the apps pay out as $2,400. If someone codes the payout straight to sales:

• Sales should read: $16,000, with wages at 32.0%
• The P&L shows: $15,200 of sales
• Wages read: 33.7%, 1.7 points worse than the week was
• Commission: $800 missing from costs, or $10,400 over a quarter

Profit comes out the same, so the error is easy to miss. You can't see that delivery costs you $800 a week, and every percentage on the page is off.

A clearing account can also go wrong the other way. We have seen a Square clearing account blow out because Xero's auto-reconcile matched the wrong lines, and our piece on Square payouts in Xero shows how to find that and get the GST back. We reconcile every clearing account weekly, so a short or doubled payout shows up within a week.

Supplier invoices are coded as they arrive and paid once a week

Your suppliers send their invoices to one capture email. We code each one as it arrives, to the right account and GST code, and queue it for a weekly payment run you approve in one click.

The GST code matters more in a venue than in most businesses. Unflavoured milk, eggs, fresh fruit and vegetables, raw meat, and tea and coffee are GST-free, while packaging and cleaning carry GST. Our food cost piece shows how that split changes the sum on $12,000 of food sales.

Coding as they arrive also puts a price rise into that week's cost of goods. Supplier price rises turn up on the invoice with no warning, and we flag them the week they happen.

Your venue can be anywhere in Australia

We're in Sydney and look after over thirty venues in every state and territory. Invoices come in by email, the work happens in your Xero file, your P&L arrives every Friday, and you talk numbers with Amit on the monthly call.

What changes by state is the payroll around the award. Payroll tax is a state or territory tax with its own threshold, workers compensation rules vary by state, and public holidays differ from state to state. Our piece on wage cost shows where payroll tax and workers compensation go in the sum.

What a hospitality bookkeeper costs

Xero's guide to hiring a bookkeeper puts outsourced bookkeeping at $500 to $2,500 a month. Ours starts at $499 a month, about $115 a week, which is 0.7% of sales on a $16,000 week.

Core, at $499, is the weekly bookkeeping: payroll, supplier payments, reconciliation, the Friday P&L and a monthly call with Amit. Essentials, at $599, adds monthly IAS and quarterly BAS lodgement. Foundation, at $799, adds annual company and personal tax returns, and our hospitality accounting page covers that side.

Switching hospitality bookkeepers, in order

• You: nominate us as your agent with the ATO and give us access to your Xero.
• Your current bookkeeper: hands over staff leave balances, year-to-date pay and super, and unpaid supplier bills. We handle that conversation.
• Your suppliers: we contact them and point their invoices to your capture email.
• Your history: we clean up the file, free, before the weekly service starts.
• Then: the weekly rhythm starts, with your P&L every Friday.

During the clean-up we look for what costs money later. In files we've taken over we have found pay runs processed but never filed through STP, sometimes for months, and ATO debt parked in the file and forgotten about.

Who we're not for

If you want to keep running payroll yourself, we'd cost you more than you need to spend. Every package includes the weekly pay run.

If you want a bookkeeper at your desk once a week, a local one will suit you better. We work remotely.

If neither is you, tell us about your venue below and we'll reply within one business day with a flat price.