Ostrow Reisin Berk & Abrams, Ltd.

Whether it’s getting that gym membership or tweaking your personal savings plan, people always want to hit the ground running at the beginning of a new year. With all of these personal goals you’ve set up for yourself, it’s easy to forget about some key deadlines that relate to your restaurant.

Pick up a local newspaper or browse your local deal or restaurant websites and you’ll find an array of elaborate and unique restaurant promotional campaigns to attract more customers. Restaurateurs spend countless hours and dollars developing ideas on how to increase their restaurants’ sales by increasing the foot traffic that is coming into their establishments.

Maintaining effective and efficient control over inventory is a challenge for every restaurant. The following are best practices to address inventory issues such as theft, high costs, excessive waste, etc.

Many restaurants estimate and recognize gift card breakage income based on their historical redemption patterns. Restaurants analyze their specific patterns of redemption and use the results to determine the amount of the unredeemed gift card balance that is estimated to have a remote probability of being redeemed. The next question to consider is how this income should be recognized on your financial statements.

When restaurant owners think of all the different hats they have to wear in their day-to-day business operations, an engineer’s hat probably isn’t one of them. However, many restaurateurs are finding that adding this skill set can dramatically improve their bottom line. Menu engineering is an effective tool for evaluating the profitability and popularity of your menu items.

Whether your restaurant is currently profitable or not, a best practice you should begin now is analyzing how your restaurant compares to industry benchmarks.

The IRS recently released a series of guidance on the tax treatment of tips with Rev. Rul. 2012-18 and it could have an impact on your bottom line and tip reporting systems. The key takeaway is how the IRS is distinguishing between tips and service charges.

Restaurants have been victimized by their servers for almost as long as restaurants have been in existence. Many servers take advantage of the industry’s historically high turnover rate to commit their scams at each new place of employment. Unfortunately, background checks rarely result in uncovering a potential new server’s fraudulent activities since restaurants rarely make this information public.

In the restaurant industry, the ability to effectively improve the management of food and labor costs (a.k.a. prime costs) is a huge key to maintaining that profitability. Even with lower sales revenues, the improvement in the management of prime costs could actually result in an increase in the bottom line.