restaurant

[lud]

Hi, I'm looking for a way to track numbers in a chain restaurant business that has 5 different locations. I plan to setup a class for each location but am not quite sure it's the best way. I will appreciate any advise.

marco

[LauraD]

Setting each location up as a class is definitely the way to go. . . .if they are all under one legal entity.

You might want to create a class called Operations if there are expenses which are not location specific.

Classes are great for tracking income and expenses. . .

Hope this is helpful,

Laura

[Joe Williams]

Classes whii alwo you to track the P&L for each CLASS but not he Balance Sheets. All of the assets and liabilities will be under the company, not the differant locations.

[flagship]

To expand on what Joe said...

While it's true that classes don't apply to balance sheet accounts, if your main goal is analyzing profitability at the different restaurant locations then allocating depreciation expense to each location will be your primary concern with respect to assets.

There are several ways to accommodate that need. For instance, you might use separate asset subaccounts--one for each location--to track assets specific to the various locations. Other assets of the company which are not location-specific might be recorded in the parent accounts of those subaccounts.

This mostly helps with the problem of identifying assets with specific locations, however. You are still faced with the problem of figuring depreciation on each of those assets, and charging depreciation expense to the appropriate restaurant classes by a QuickBooks transactions. There are various ways to do this, including using a spreadsheet or an external depreciation-calculation program.

As for "overhead" or "general & administrative" depreciation expense (for those assets not associated with a specific restaurant location), there are various approaches depending on your philosophy of analyzing location-based profitability. A popular approach is to allocate this depreciation expense to each of the locations on some reasonable basis.

Mark Wilsdorf
Flagship Technologies, Inc.
QuickBooks™ Add-Ons and Solutions You Can Use
http://www.goflagship.com

[lud]

Laura, Joe, Mark: Thank you very much, I appreciate it. The other thing I bumped into today is managing inventory. This restaurant has two different operations, a distribution center and the restaurant as a whole with 4 different locations. The issue is how to control ingredients needed to "build" a meal. The menu has about 20 different meals, and the thing is that if ingredients are tracked as expenses you have less control than if tracked as inventory, mostly for reorder point purposes and theft. My idea is to use premier instead of pro to take care of that.

Thanks again

Marco

[gibbo]

We have been working with accounting integration from a POS software solution to QuickBooks and MYOB that is used extensively in Australia in the Hospitality & Leasure industry. My suggestion would be to use a good POS solution to do all the difficult work and then bring summary transactions only into QuickBooks.
Some of the things you need to do in your industry are just too complex for QuickBooks. The POS software we are working with (we do the integration - the software comes from H&L Australia- see www.hlaustralia.com.au) allows you to buy eggs and then sell them as a dozen eggs, or to use them in meals and recipies. It allows you to sell the same item in different locations and to link these locations to General Ledger account codes in the accounting export. This means that you can actually do virtually anything you want and to get it to show how you want it. Not sure if their software is available in the US, but I know they are in Canada in a chain of Bakery stores.

[Joe Williams]

You can track the inventory of RAW goods (in the pantry) using all of the items there as inventory. When you remove then to make the days meals, enter the amounts on a Sales Receipt with the Quanity but set the Rate/Amount to zero. This will remove the amount of goods used from the pantry and put their cost into COGS with the class on the Sales Receipt so the P&L will show thate amount.
When you take things out of the pantry use the same Quanity. If you but eggs by the dozen and you sell meals that use 91 eggs, the quanoty on the Sales Receipe would be 91/12 or 7.6 doez. This will help track when you need to reorder items.

[lud]

Thanks, Can I use group items instead? I think maybe it's less complicated

[Joe Williams]

You can group items but QuickBooks WILL NOT report on item groups, just the items in the group.

[lud]

It means I'm not going to be able to track group items? I was also thinking that to form those group items I don't need the items involved totally, just parts of them like say 6 ounces only, and the items are registered as a pound per unit, so maybe it's absolutely not possible. I really appreciate your input.