Restaurants & Retail

Every shift, every table, every transaction. We won’t let anything fall through the cracks.

Restaurants and retail businesses move fast. Payroll runs weekly or bi-weekly. Sales tax is collected on nearly every transaction. Vendor invoices stack up. And through all of it, there’s a lot to keep organized.

Clarke works with restaurant and retail operators to keep the books organized, taxes current, and cash flow visible, so owners spend less time untangling numbers and more time running the operation.

Built Around Day-to-Day Operational Demands

Bookkeeping That Fits Your Revenue

Restaurant and retail revenue doesn’t arrive in neat monthly invoices. It comes through POS systems, delivery platforms, and split-tender transactions that each need to be categorized accurately. We organize your books to reflect the actual flow of money, not a generic chart of accounts that doesn’t fit your operation.

Point of Sale Integration

We connect your POS system directly to QuickBooks Online including Toast, Square, Clover, Shopify, Lightspeed, and others so your sales data flows into your books automatically. Clean data, less manual entry, and nothing falling through the cracks between your front-of-house systems and your financials.

Payroll for Hourly, Tipped, and Salaried Staff

Managing payroll for a mix of hourly, tipped, and salaried employees, often with variable schedules, is one of the most administratively demanding parts of running a restaurant or retail business. We handle it accurately, every pay period, with records that feed directly into your financial reports.

Sales Tax Organization & Support

If you’re collecting sales tax on transactions, you have ongoing filing obligations that don’t pause when business gets busy. We help you stay organized around sales tax so deadlines don’t sneak up on you and filings reflect what was actually collected.

Seasonal Cash Flow Visibility

Seasonal swings and variable revenue can make cash flow unpredictable. Consistent monthly reporting gives you a clearer picture of where you stand so you can make better decisions about staffing, purchasing, and distributions.

Vendor & Cost of Goods Tracking

Food costs, merchandise purchases, and vendor payments need to be tracked accurately to understand true profitability. We organize cost of goods and vendor expenses so your margins are visible rather than buried in a mix of uncategorized transactions.

Every transaction counts. We make sure the numbers do too.

Organized financial processes and consistent reporting help restaurants and retail businesses stay informed, prepared, and better positioned to manage day-to-day operations with confidence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. We help businesses stay organized around sales tax obligations, including tracking what’s been collected, supporting filing preparation, and making sure records are clean so there are no surprises when returns are due.

Yes. Payroll for tipped employees involves specific tax treatment, including tip reporting and accurate wage calculations, that differs from standard payroll. We handle it accurately and make sure it’s reflected correctly in your books.

Yes. If you’re running more than one location, we maintain organized financial records at the location level so you have visibility into how each one is performing not just the business as a whole.

Consistent monthly bookkeeping and reporting give you a clear picture of revenue trends, expense patterns, and cash position so you can make informed decisions about purchasing, staffing, and distributions rather than relying on whatever’s in the bank account at any given moment.

The most useful: profit and loss broken down by category (cost of goods, labor, occupancy), cash flow, and cost of goods as a percentage of revenue. These tell you whether the operation is actually profitable not just whether revenue is up.

Once you have employees on payroll, sales tax obligations, and more than a handful of vendor relationships to manage. The administrative burden of doing it yourself typically outweighs the cost of having it handled correctly. The risk of errors in payroll taxes and sales tax filing also increases significantly without organized systems in place.