Expert Hospitality Accounting Services
Hospitality Accounting for
Fine Dining Restaurants
Mastering Your Restaurant’s Prime Costs
Your prime costs are the single biggest lever for restaurant profitability. Are you pulling it?
Prime costs (the combination of your cost of goods sold and labor) are the two largest line items in any restaurant’s budget. For most restaurants, they should land around 60% of total food and beverage sales. When they creep above that threshold, the difference between breaking even and turning a real profit narrows fast.
Acuity’s restaurant accountants know exactly where to look.
We specialize in prime cost accounting for restaurants and multi-location food and beverage operators – identifying the leakage that’s hardest to spot, whether that’s variance in high-cost proteins, front-of-house labor inefficiencies, or seasonal fluctuations that quietly erode your margins. We don’t just track your prime costs; we use them as a diagnostic tool to find where your operation can run leaner and more profitably.
Because in restaurant accounting, prime costs aren’t just a metric – they’re the clearest signal of how healthy your business actually is. Acuity helps you understand that number, control it, and use it to make smarter decisions at every stage of growth.
Maximizing Beverage Profit Margins
Reporting via 13-Period Accounting
Standard monthly reporting wasn't built for restaurants. The 4-4-5 calendar was. Most businesses run on a 12-month calendar – but restaurants aren't most businesses. Month-to-month comparisons get distorted by extra weekends, holiday shifts, and seasonal noise that make it nearly impossible to tell whether performance is actually improving or just reflecting the calendar. The 4-4-5 accounting calendar solves for that. Acuity maintains the industry-standard 4-4-5 calendar for all restaurant and hospitality clients – organizing your 52-week fiscal year into four quarters, each containing 13 weeks split across two 4-week months and one 5-week month. The result is a consistent, standardized framework that makes year-over-year comparisons clean, accurate, and actually meaningful.
With 13-period accounting in place, you get a clearer picture of true performance across sales, inventory, and payroll – without the distortion of uneven reporting periods. Better data leads to better planning, and better planning is how restaurants move from reactive to strategic. It's the gold standard in hospitality accounting. Acuity makes sure you're using it. A 4-4-5 calendar provides a clearer picture of true performance, which leads to better planning. It will allow for proper fiscal planning by providing a consistent, standardized, year-to-year framework. Acuity will maintain this standard to improve accuracy in comparing sales, controlling inventory levels, and managing payroll.
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