Dallas restaurant bookkeeping guide. Track margins, manage tips, meet Texas taxes on time.

Running a restaurant in Dallas is a knife fight with spreadsheets, vendors, and tax forms. Margins are thin, people come and go, prices creep up, and the state still wants its cut of every drink you pour. Bookkeeping is the system that keeps all of that from drifting. This guide walks you from the big margin picture down to the unglamorous parts like tip liabilities and mixed beverage filings, written so you can actually use it.

Pick the Few Numbers You Will Live By

You can drown in reports. Choose a handful of metrics and stare at them every week. Everything else should support those.

Watch these every week:

Prime cost % = (food + beverage COGS + direct labor) ÷ total sales. Target 60–65.
Food cost % and beverage cost % tracked separately.
Contribution margin per item (price − true recipe cost).
Net operating margin after payroll and rent.

Once those are chosen, work backward. Build reports and routines only if they help you manage those numbers. If a spreadsheet doesn’t inform action on prime cost, contribution margin, or operating profit, skip it.

Create a Weekly Rhythm and Stick To It

Margins leak a little at a time. A short, repeatable cadence beats a once-a-month scramble.

Here is the flow that works for most independents:

Every day the manager closes the POS, separates sales by bucket (food, beer, wine, liquor, non-alcoholic beverages, gift cards, discounts, tax), and drops the reports where the bookkeeper can grab them. Credit card batches get matched to those numbers the same day, not next week when memories are foggy.

Every week you look at sales and cost together. Inventory counts happen on a schedule: high-cost proteins and seafood every week, dry goods and paper once a month. That lets you calculate COGS properly: beginning inventory plus purchases minus ending inventory. If you skip counts, your food cost % is a guess.

While invoices are fresh, code them correctly. Produce belongs in food COGS, spirits in beverage COGS, paper towels in operating supplies. A single mis-coded Sysco bill can hide a thousand dollars of margin.

Finally, review variances instead of just totals. Compare actual food cost to the recipe-based ideal. That gap is where spoilage, portion creep, theft, or an unnoticed vendor price hike lives.

Keeping Food Cost in Line Without Ruining the Menu

Cutting cost is about discipline, not cheaper ingredients. Standardize portions with simple station checklists that line cooks actually use. Re-cost recipes at least quarterly; vendors quietly move prices and your plate cost drifts. Track waste with a quick photo log and a one-minute note about why it happened. You will learn faster from seeing a pan of chicken tossed than from a percentage on a sheet. Train servers to steer guests toward plates with strong margins. And order to usage, not to delivery minimums. Negotiate drop days so you are not throwing out case lots every Sunday night.

Labor, Payroll, and Scheduling: Match Hours to Sales

Dallas is competitive for staff. You will not fix labor by underpaying. You fix it by tying hours to sales and accounting for every payroll dollar cleanly.

Start schedules from a sales forecast, not whatever last week felt like. Separate prep shifts from service shifts so you can see where hours are stacking up. Code salaried managers apart from hourly service so prime cost is honest. Accrue PTO, benefits, and employer taxes weekly so month-end labor cost is real, not a surprise.

When payroll runs, the journal entry matters. Split wages, employer taxes, workers comp, benefits, tips payable, and withholding liabilities into the right buckets. Sloppy payroll postings are where a few percentage points of margin quietly disappear each year.

Tip Reporting Without Headaches

Tips touch payroll, HR, and the IRS. Treat them as liabilities and run the same clean process every period.

Straightforward tip workflow:

Capture charged and cash tips per employee from the POS every night.
Post them to a tips payable liability, not wage expense.
Include tips in gross wages when you run payroll so FICA is correct; claim the FICA tip credit if you qualify.
Clear the liability when payroll funds go out.
Separate voluntary tips from automatic service charges (service charges are revenue and usually taxable).
Average 10+ tipped employees? File Form 8027 each year.

Document the policy in your handbook so no one is surprised at year end.

Texas and Dallas Taxes You Cannot Ignore

Texas feels business friendly until you miss a deadline. Know the taxes and park the cash as you go.

Key filings and due dates:

Sales tax (Dallas ~8.25%): file monthly if over the small threshold; due the 20th of the following month.
Mixed Beverage Gross Receipts Tax (6.7%) and Mixed Beverage Sales Tax: separate returns if you sell liquor.
Dallas County personal property rendition: list equipment/furniture each spring; due around April 15.
Texas franchise tax: margin based; if revenue exceeds the no‑tax‑due threshold, plan before May.
1099 NECs: pay a contractor over $600? Send by January 31.

Accrue each liability in your books so writing the check doesn’t hurt cash flow.

Daily Sales Reconciliation in Fifteen Minutes

Close the day so month end is just rolling numbers up, not detective work.

Grab the POS Z report, confirm the categories and the tax collected, and match credit card batches to that total. Count the drawer and petty cash, write down deposits with the date and bank bag number, and book discounts, comps, and gift card activity so sales are not overstated. Post a sales journal entry with a clear memo like “2025 07 24 Daily Sales” and attach the report. Update the tips payable and sales tax liabilities. If a manager cannot do this without calling you, the SOP needs another pass.

Close the Month in Under Ten Days

A fast close is a habit, not a miracle. Keep it short and consistent.

Month‑end checklist:

Reconcile all bank, credit card, and merchant accounts.
Post inventory adjustments from real counts.
Accrue rent, insurance, utilities, loan interest, and payroll items.
Run variance reports: actual vs budget for food, beverage, and labor.
Deliver a one‑page KPI snapshot to owners/managers.

Nobody reads a 30 page packet before service.

Tech Stack: Fewer Tools, Better Links

More apps do not equal better books. You need five pieces that talk to each other: a POS that exports cleanly, accounting software with a restaurant-ready chart of accounts, an inventory and recipe tool, payroll that handles tips, and something to automate sales tax if those filings make you miserable. Toast plus QuickBooks Online plus MarginEdge plus Gusto is one workable combo. Square plus Xero plus Craftable plus ADP is another. Pick a stack and learn it inside out instead of bolting on a new app every time a vendor emails you.

Use Your Numbers to Engineer the Menu

Recipe costs come from the kitchen. Profitability comes from your books. Combine them and you can engineer the menu instead of guessing.

Pull the sales mix from the POS and pair it with recipe costs. Classify each item: a “star” (high margin and high volume), a “puzzle” (high margin, low volume), a “plowhorse” (low margin, high volume), or a “dog” (low margin, low volume). Then decide whether to raise the price, re-plate, push it harder, or cut it. Do this quarterly. Waiting a year means you carried weak items through two seasons.

Cash Control and Fraud Prevention

Cards dominate, but cash is still the easiest place for dollars to vanish.

Separate duties. The person counting cash should not be the one making deposits. Lock the safe and change combinations when a manager leaves. Require manager PINs on voids and comps. Track gift card liabilities instead of letting them sit as a mystery balance that never gets cleared. If you cannot explain yesterday’s cash position by 10 a.m., your process is loose.

Forecasting: Dallas Seasonality Is Real

Weather, events, and holidays swing sales hard. Build a rolling thirteen-week cash flow forecast. Project weekly sales by category, apply target COGS percentages, plug in scheduled labor, then layer fixed costs and upcoming tax or loan payments. Update it every week. Use last year’s actuals as a base, then adjust for current trends and price changes.

When to Bring in a Bookkeeper (or Upgrade the One You Have)

You need professional help when month end drifts beyond two weeks, sales tax filings become a fire drill, prime cost is a surprise at year end, POS reports never tie to the books, or tips payable does not clear with payroll. A bookkeeper who understands restaurants will set up the structure once, automate the repeatable pieces, and hand you a short dashboard instead of a pile of PDFs. If you are not getting that, keep looking.