Restaurant & F&B CPA

Financial Infrastructure for Food & Beverage Growth
Serene restaurant interior with tables set for dining

Success in food & beverage comes down to mastering costs and making fast, data-driven decisions.

From single-location restaurants to multi-unit franchise groups, we design the financial infrastructure that keeps prime cost under control, cash flow visible, and growth fundable.

Control Your Prime Costs Before the Month Ends.

In the F&B industry, cash flow moves fast. Lantern by SW Accounting gives you the real-time financial visibility you need to protect your margins, straight from your browser or mobile device.

  • Dynamic Profit & Loss: Monitor your Statement of Operations in real-time. Spot alarming trends in your food costs or labor before they drain your monthly profits.
  • Transaction-Level Transparency: Need to know why operating expenses spiked? Click any number on your dashboard to drill down into the specific vendor payments and journal entries.
  • Always-On Analytics: Access your restaurant’s financial heartbeat 24/7. No more waiting for your accountant to email you a static spreadsheet.
  • Multi-Location Comparison: See each location’s P&L side by side with consolidated totals — spot your strongest and weakest units at a glance.
See How Lantern Works
Lantern by SW Accounting — restaurant financial dashboard with YTD revenue, gross profit, operating income and monthly performance (demo data)
Lantern by SW Accounting — multi-location comparison showing each restaurant entity P&L side by side with consolidated totals (demo data)

Demo data shown · every number in Lantern drills down to its journal entries.

What We Do for Restaurants & F&B

POS-integrated monthly close, tip reporting, and multi-location payroll with full federal and state tax compliance. Your employees get paid accurately and on time, every time.

Prime cost tracking, menu profitability analysis, and owner KPI dashboards. We turn your raw numbers into actionable intelligence that drives daily decisions.

Entity structuring, tip credits, depreciation strategy, and multi-state SALT compliance. We handle the complexity so you can focus on operations.

Financial due diligence, business valuation, and deal support when you expand, acquire, or exit. When your expansion involves purchasing real estate or major leasehold improvements, we deploy advanced strategies like Cost Segregation and 1031 Exchanges to accelerate depreciation and free up cash flow for your next location.

Entity registration, accounting system setup, and first-year compliance in one package — a complete financial launchpad for new concepts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Prime cost is your food and beverage cost plus total labor (including payroll taxes and benefits). A healthy full-service restaurant targets prime cost at or below 60% of sales; consistently above 65% usually signals menu pricing, portioning, or scheduling problems. Our Lantern dashboard tracks it monthly so you can correct course before profits erode.

No. Unlike many states, California requires employers to pay the full state minimum wage regardless of tips — tips are always on top. However, the federal FICA tip credit (IRC §45B) still lets restaurants claim a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for employer Social Security and Medicare taxes paid on reported tips — a credit many California operators overlook.

Under the 2025 OBBBA law, tipped workers can deduct up to $25,000 of qualified reported tips per year on their federal return (2025–2028), phasing out at higher incomes. Employers must still report tips on W-2s, and proper tip reporting actually becomes more valuable to your staff — making payroll compliance a recruiting advantage.

A common structure is a separate LLC for each location, often under a management company that centralizes payroll, purchasing, and accounting. This isolates liability per location and produces clean unit-level financials that lenders and buyers want to see. We design and maintain these entity structures, including inter-company accounting.

We build automated pipelines from major POS platforms — Toast, Square, Clover, and others — into your accounting system, so daily sales, comps, and tips flow into your books without manual entry.

Yes. If you own your building, a Cost Segregation study accelerates depreciation on kitchen infrastructure and leasehold improvements, and a 1031 exchange can defer capital gains tax when you sell one property and reinvest in another. We coordinate both strategies as part of expansion planning.

Yes. Our payroll service covers tip reporting, federal and state filings, W-2/1099 issuance, and multi-state compliance for growing groups.

Yes. All services are available in English and Korean.

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