As a restaurant owner, one of your most valuable assets is your time. The more time that you can save, the more money in your pocket. One excellent way to save both time and money is to automate your restaurant’s accounting system.
By automating your accounting, you free up your valuable time to focus on more important tasks and you also ensure a heightened accuracy when it comes to managing expenses, payment schedules, ordering processes and scheduling your staff, and overseeing payroll.
1. Integrate your POS system with a cloud-based accounting software
Many restaurants now have multiple channels to sell their food to their customers. There are opportunities to sell in-store, through the restaurant’s online ordering system, or through delivery services such as Uber Eats and Skip the Dishes. While this is excellent for increasing revenue, it also leaves significant room for error when it comes to tracking your sales, especially if you utilize a manual tracking system.
By integrating a POS system that can track your sales from all of these different channels, such as Revel or Touch Bistro, you can merge both your POS system with your cloud-based accounting software like QuickBooks Online, eliminating manual, daily sales data entry.
2. Capture your expenses using an Expense Management software
Dealing with supplier invoices and utility bills all go hand-in-hand with running your own restaurant. When you receive these invoices, many restaurant owners spend a significant amount of time on manual data entry, recording this information into their accounting software by hand.
Fortunately, technological advancements have created apps like DextPrepare and Hubdoc that can help you extract all of the key information from physical or digital documents.
All you need to do is scan an image of the document, take a photo or forward the digital invoice to a designated email address and these programs will handle all of the data extraction, saving you both the time and the hassle of doing it yourself. You can then review the record to ensure that everything is accurate before exporting it to your accounting software.
As an added bonus, your invoices are then stored in the cloud. This means that you don’t have to store the physical invoices and you can access this information from anywhere at any time, streamlining your expense management process.
3. Set up electronic payment for vendors
Now that you have imported your invoices into your accounting software, you are able to track when your payments are due and how much you will owe. You can fully automate your account payables process by using an online payment platform like Plooto.
Plooto allows you to seamlessly integrate your accounting software, your bank account, and your Plooto account. All of your bills, including vendor name, due date, and payment amount, are imported from accounting software into the Plooto program.
When a bill is about to come due, Plooto will automatically email the designated approver to sign off on the payment, and Plooto will deliver the funds to your payee's bank account electronically. Once the payment is complete, they will reconcile it with your accounting software, marking the bill as paid. Automating your electronic payment process also allows you to make batch payments twice a month to better manage your cash flow.
The benefits to automating your payments include:
- Saving you the time usually required to follow-up on uncashed cheques.
- Eliminating late payments due to long processing times.
- Making you less reliant on using cheques and having to mail them out.
- Allowing you to perform international payments.
- Creating a digital audit trail.
4. Use digital timesheets and integrate them with your payroll software
When it comes to staffing, schedules can change on a weekly basis or depending upon the season. You may have part-time staff or full-time employees and keeping track of everyone’s shifts and payroll can be challenging. The key to tracking your staff’s working hours is by utilizing timesheets.
The time has finally come to move away from physical timesheets to digital ones. Most restaurant management software now includes timesheets and scheduling functions so employees can clock in and out using the app and are given the convenience of being able to view their schedules online. Automate your payroll process by integrating your timesheet software with your payroll software, allowing you to populate the data for each employee and process their payroll with ease.
Automating your accounting processes can save you a lot of time and money and can ensure that you have access to more accurate and timely financial data. Doing so will allow you to focus more of your energy on running your restaurant and pleasing your customers and less on tedious bookkeeping tasks.
If you would like more information on how to automate your restaurant's accounting process, Enkel can help. With years of bookkeeping and accounting experience under our belts, we can give you valuable insight into your restaurant business and easier access to your important financial data. Contact us for more information.
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We thoroughly research and test the apps we include in our regular workflow for Client bookkeeping services. After deciding on criteria for evaluating the software and then researching the app itself, we tested the app, noting its strengths and weaknesses. We then work with the app for at least a few weeks before deciding whether to recommend it to our readers. We use the software as it was designed for its intended tasks. For a detailed walk-through of how we select and evaluate software, please see the details of our process.
