10 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Restaurant Accountant

Will this person actually understand my P&L, or just file my taxes? Are they going to tell me anything about my food cost that I didn’t already know? Am I about to sign up for another year of reports I never open?

If you’ve interviewed more than one accounting firm, you already know the hard part. Everybody says they work with restaurants. But where's the proof? How do you know whether someone is actually good at this, or just willing to take the work?

Luckily, you don’t need an accounting background to tell the difference. Ten questions will get you there in about 20 minutes. I’ve sat on the other side of this call for more than two decades, and the answers separate specialists from generalists fast.

For each question below, I’ll tell you why it matters for a restaurant specifically, what a strong answer sounds like, and what a vague one is really telling you.

1. Do you specialize in restaurant accounting, or do you just have a few restaurant clients?

Most accounting firms will say yes to the question, "Do you work with restaurants?" The follow-up is where it gets interesting.

A specialist can talk about concepts, not just clients. They should be able to describe how a fast-casual spot differs from a full-service place with a bar, or why a franchise operator's books look different from an independent's. They should know what a healthy prime cost looks like without pulling up a reference.

A generalist will usually answer with a vague number and move on. "We have a few restaurants." That addresses their client list, but it doesn’t speak to expertise. 

If they can’t describe how restaurant accounting is different, they haven’t done enough of it to know.

2. How do you track prime cost, and how often will I see it?

Prime cost is your cost of goods sold plus your labor. It’s the single most important number in restaurant accounting because it combines your two biggest variable expenses. For healthy restaurants, it typically lands around 60 to 65 percent of sales, a benchmark we walk through in more detail in our guide to fixed versus variable costs for restaurants.

The frequency of the answer matters as much as the answer itself. Monthly prime cost tells you what already happened. Weekly tells you in time to change a schedule or an order.

Be realistic about what you need. Weekly is the goal for prime cost specifically, and that level of tracking sits in our Advanced Package rather than our entry-level service. Monthly is the floor for full financial reporting, and a single location may be fine there. What should worry you is an accounting firm that doesn’t track prime cost at all.

3. What accounting software do you use for restaurants, and how does it connect to my POS?

There are two answers I’d want to hear to this question: QuickBooks Online for simpler operations, or Restaurant365 for restaurants ready for a full management platform. I'll admit some bias here since these are the two platforms we work in.

The connection question is the real test. Your POS already knows your sales by daypart, by menu item, and by server. If that data has to be keyed in by hand every week, you’re paying someone to retype numbers your system already produced, and you’re introducing errors along the way.

Ask specifically how your sales data gets from the POS into the books. If the answer involves a spreadsheet and a person, keep asking. We cover what happens when this setup goes wrong in 5 Restaurant POS Mistakes That Hurt Your Profit Margins.

4. When during the month will I get my financial statements?

Not "how often." When. A firm that delivers on a date has a process. A firm that says "a few weeks after month-end" has a queue, and you’re somewhere in it.

We provide financial statements by the 25th of each month. That timing is deliberate because it gives you the month's numbers while you can still act on the next one.

One honest caveat about onboarding with us: New clients typically see their first set of clean statements 30 to 60 days after the initial strategy session, because cleaning up historical books takes time. Ask any firm you’re evaluating for both numbers: the ongoing delivery date and the ramp-up timeline.

5. Do you handle sales tax, liquor tax, and tip reporting?

These are where restaurant compliance gets messy, and they’re the areas where a general accountant is most likely to hand work back to you.

Sales tax filings are often monthly, depending on your state and sales volume. Liquor tax returns are their own animal if you serve alcohol. Tip reporting connects your payroll data to your tax filings, and getting it wrong creates problems in both places.

Ask whether these are included or billed as extras. We prepare and file sales tax and liquor tax returns as part of our restaurant packages, along with the annual filings like 1099s and gross receipts. Some firms treat every one of those as a separate engagement, which is how a predictable monthly fee turns into a surprise invoice in March.

6. Do you know the FICA tip credit, and will you claim it for me?

This one’s a fast filter. The FICA tip credit is a dollar-for-dollar federal credit for the employer Social Security and Medicare taxes you pay on tipped wages above a threshold based on $5.15 an hour. For a restaurant with a meaningful number of tipped employees, it's regularly worth $20,000 to $50,000 a year.

I’ve reviewed prior-year returns for new clients and found it left unclaimed. That doesn’t mean anyone did anything wrong; it usually just means the person preparing the return didn’t work with enough tipped businesses to look for it.

If the answer is a confident yes, ask them to explain how it works. If the answer is "I would have to look into that," you’ve learned something useful. We wrote up the mechanics in our guide to the FICA tip credit.

7. Is tax planning included, or do you only file my return?

There’s a big difference between an accounting firm that files your taxes and a firm that plans them. Filing happens after the year is over, when your options are gone. Planning happens while you can still do something.

Ask what planning looks like on their calendar. Quarterly projections so you know what you owe before you owe it? A mid-year strategy meeting? A year-end conversation with enough runway to act on it?

We build mid-year and year-end tax strategy meetings into our packages for exactly this reason. A firm that only appears in March is selling you compliance, not strategy.

8. Who runs my payroll, and does that data flow into my books?

Labor is half your prime cost. If your payroll lives at one company and your books live at another, that half arrives as a single lump number, and nobody owns the connection between them.

The question to ask is whether labor comes through as one line or as usable detail. Can you see it by department? By location? Are tip wages mapped correctly?

We ask clients with employees to run payroll through Whirks, our sister payroll company, and it’s one of the bigger changes we ask people to make. When payroll and accounting live under one roof, payroll gets set up with accounting in mind from day one, so labor lands in your books already sorted the way you need to read it.

9. How do you price your services, and what triggers a bigger bill?

Hourly billing punishes you for asking questions. That’s the practical problem with it. You start rationing calls to your accountant, which defeats the point of having one.

Ask for the pricing model in plain terms. Fixed monthly fee? Hourly? What specifically causes the number to change?

We bill a fixed monthly fee by ACH, so the amount is the same whether you call us twice or 12 times. You can get a sense of the range through our pricing calculator. One thing worth expecting from any firm, including ours: We ask to see your financials before quoting, because a price given without looking at your books is a guess that gets revised later.

10. How will you explain my numbers to me?

Most owners don’t think to ask this question, and it’s the one that actually determines whether the relationship is worth anything.

Reports are not insight. A P&L with no explanation attached is a document you file. What you actually need is someone who tells you what changed, why it changed, and what to do about it.

Ask the accounting firm how they communicate. Do they send a written summary with the statements? Can you call with a question in July without it becoming a billable event? Every set of financials we deliver includes a monthly summary explaining what the numbers mean for the business, because a report you don’t understand is a report you won’t use.

What a Good Restaurant Accountant Actually Sounds Like

Read back through the answers you got and look for one thing: specifics.

Specialists answer with numbers, dates, and names of systems. Generalists answer with adjectives. "We provide excellent service" and "we deliver by the 25th" are not the same kind of sentence, and the difference tells you what you need to know.

You aren’t testing whether they’re smart. You’re testing whether they’ve done this before.

When Patrick Accounting Isn’t the Right Fit for Your Restaurant

I’d rather tell you this now than three months into an engagement.

• We’re not a good fit if your restaurant is brand new or very simple. If you're pre-opening, running a small single concept with no tipped staff, and mostly need a return filed, the math on monthly accounting probably doesn't work in your favor yet. Our pricing calculator will tell you in about two minutes whether we're in your range.
• We’re not a good fit if you want tax filing only. We don’t offer tax-only or standalone bookkeeping engagements. Our model is monthly accounting with tax work included, and it doesn’t unbundle.
• We’re not a good fit if you want to stay on your current systems. We work in QuickBooks Online or Restaurant365, and we’ll ask you to move payroll to Whirks if you have employees. If either of those is a dealbreaker, we’re the wrong call.

FAQs About Hiring a Restaurant Accountant

What makes restaurant accounting different from general business accounting? 

Daily cash handling, tip reporting, food cost variance, liquor tax, and margins thin enough that a few points of drift matter. A general accountant can keep your books clean. A restaurant accountant can tell you why last month's food cost moved.

Do I really need an accountant who specializes in restaurants, or is a general accountant good enough?

If your only goal is a filed return, a good general accountant is enough. If you want someone tracking prime cost, catching the FICA tip credit, and reading your POS data, the specialty pays for itself. We ran the full cost comparison in “Is a restaurant-specialized accountant worth the extra cost?”

How often should a restaurant get financial reports?

Monthly is the floor for financial statements. Prime cost and labor are worth watching weekly, since those are the numbers you can still change mid-month.

How much does outsourced restaurant accounting cost? 

It varies with your location count, revenue, and complexity. We walk through the full picture in our guide to what restaurant accounting costs, and our pricing calculator will get you a range for our services in a couple of minutes. We confirm the number after reviewing your financials.

Start Asking These Questions Before You Hire a Restaurant Accountant

Before you started looking for an accountant for your restaurant, you probably felt like it would be a decision you’d make on gut feel and a referral. Perhaps every firm sounded roughly the same, and there wasn’t an obvious way to tell the good ones from the ones with a nice website.

But now you have 10 questions that do the sorting for you. You know that specifics beat adjectives, that delivery dates reveal process, and that a firm that can’t explain prime cost isn't the solution you need.

It's time for a better conversation. Take these questions into every discovery call you have, including one with us. If our answers hold up next to everyone else's, let's talk about your restaurant. And if they don’t, you’ll have found that out in 20 minutes instead of a year.

Schedule a conversation about your restaurant or run your numbers through our pricing calculator.