BOOKKEEPING FOR PITTSBURGH RESTAURANTS

Pittsburgh restaurants charge 7 percent sales tax on prepared food. That is 6 percent state sales tax plus a 1 percent Allegheny County surcharge. Dine-in, takeout, catering, and delivery all get treated a little differently, and we make sure your POS is set up to apply the right rate to each order type. We file monthly with the PA Department of Revenue and make sure you stay current.

Yes. Toast is the most common POS we see in Pittsburgh restaurants, but we work with Square, Clover, Aloha, and others. We connect your POS to QuickBooks Online so daily sales, tips, taxes, discounts, and merchant fees flow into the books automatically. Then we reconcile every month so you know the numbers match.

We set up dedicated tip tracking in QuickBooks with separate categories for cash tips, credit card tips, and tip pool distributions. This gives your payroll provider clean tip numbers for employee tip reporting and year end W2s. We coordinate with your payroll provider to make sure tip income flows through correctly for tax withholding.

Pittsburgh has one of the most layered local tax systems in the country. We don't run payroll or file payroll returns. We know the local rules: each employee's EIT follows their home municipality, the Local Services Tax applies to Pittsburgh workers, and the city's Payroll Expense Tax applies if you have staff working in the city. When what your payroll provider withheld or paid doesn't line up with those rules or your books, we catch it and tell you what to fix.

You need both, and they do different jobs. A CPA is focused on tax strategy and filing your annual return. A bookkeeper handles the day to day and week to week work that keeps your books accurate. For a restaurant, that means daily POS reconciliation, weekly food cost reporting, monthly sales tax filing, and month end close. Your CPA can only do their job well if your books are tax ready when you hand them off. We get your books tax ready so your CPA can focus on saving you money.

Most full service restaurants aim for food cost between 28 and 35 percent of revenue. Fine dining tends to run higher, fast casual lower. We track your food cost weekly and break it down by category (proteins, produce, dairy, alcohol) so you can spot trends before they hurt your margin. If your prime cost (food plus labor) is creeping above 65 percent, that is usually the first sign something needs attention.

Our Essentials plan starts at $399 per month. Most Pittsburgh restaurants fit best in our Growth plan at $599 per month which includes deeper reporting, quarterly strategy calls, and more transaction volume. High volume operations typically use our Scale plan at $1,199 per month. The exact price depends on your transaction volume, how many employees you have, and whether you need catch up work to clean up past books. Use our calculator to get a real estimate.

Yes. Catch up bookkeeping is one of our most requested services. We have cleaned up restaurant books that were 6 months behind, 12 months behind, and a few that were 2 years behind. We rebuild the chart of accounts, categorize every transaction, reconcile every bank statement, and get you current so you can actually see what is happening in your business. Then we keep you current monthly going forward.