Who we serve
Food Service, Cafés & Catering
Margins are thin, staff turnover is constant, and the CRA pays close attention to cash businesses. Clean books aren't just for tax season here — they're how you spot food costs drifting before they eat a quarter's profit.
Restaurants & Hospitality
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Restaurants are a cash-and-margin business with more tax touchpoints than almost any other small operation: payroll, tips, sales tax, spoilage, and thin profits that punish sloppy books.
How we help
- Monthly bookkeeping with food and labour cost tracking against sales
- Payroll for hourly staff, including source deductions and records of employment
- Tip reporting handled correctly — tips the business pools or distributes (controlled) run through payroll with CPP and EI, while tips guests hand straight to staff (direct) do not
- GST and PST on food service, where the rules differ from groceries
- Cash handling procedures that stand up to a CRA review
- BC Employer Health Tax and WorkSafeBC filings as your payroll grows
Common mistakes we see
- Handling tips incorrectly. Tips the employer controls — pooled, added to bills, or distributed by the house — are pensionable and insurable payroll; tips paid directly by guests to staff are not. Mixing them up creates CPP/EI remittance problems.
- Running personal and restaurant spending through one account, then losing legitimate GST input tax credits because the records won't support them.
- Not reconciling POS sales to bank deposits, which is exactly the gap the CRA looks for in a cash-heavy business.
- Ignoring inventory and spoilage tracking, so food cost — the number that decides whether the place survives — is a guess.
The British Columbia angle
In BC, restaurants navigate GST on most food service alongside PST on liquor, plus liquor-licensing records that have to hold up. Payroll crossing the Employer Health Tax threshold of $1,000,000 in BC payroll catches growing groups off guard. We keep the sales-tax split and the payroll side clean.