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Restaurant owners who own their own restaurants often handle bookskeeping on their own. Even if they employ a professional accountant at year’s conclusion, they can save money by taking care of the tasks for the week themselves.

Making the chart of accounts to meet the needs of restaurants generally means altering the default options of any accounting software. The selection of cost of goods and sales accounts of most systems do not provide for the separation of categories for food and beverages that are required.

Even the most popular bookkeeping program for small businesses, even though it comes with a default choice for restaurants, does not provide the full range of accounts that restaurant owners need. Additionally, many of the expense accounts created aren’t used often creating confusion in entries, and do not help with the overview of the financials of the business.

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The National Restaurant Association publishes a book titled Uniform System of Accounts that Restaurants. The book offers detailed descriptions of the application of generally accepted accounting standards for the restaurant industry.

The book contains an example chart of accounts however it the book also notes the fact that “the codes used here are not the only method for classifying the accounts”. The book explains that most restaurants will not use all of the categories listed in the book, and also isn’t able to break down inventory or cost categories that go beyond “food” and “beverage”. Many restaurant owners are seeking additional separation of these categories into sub-categories, like “meat”, “seafood”, and “produce”, and possibly “beer” and “wine” for categories of beverages.

While many programs don’t require account numbers However, the NRA book recommends that some kind of account numbering system should be used. If your application isn’t showing account numbers, you should offer a setup screen to activate that feature.

Any account numbering system is usually arranged so that accounts belonging to a certain type are within a particular number range. For example, assets might be in the 1000 range as well as income accounts in the range of 4000. If you have systems with a large number of detail accounts, 5 digit numbers may be used to create more sub-categories, but that is rarely needed for a small eatery.