Comparison
FIXE
Accounts Payable
Financial Reporting
Financials
FIXE
Reading Your P&L and Reports
FIXE
Read your P&L top to bottom: sales, cost of goods sold, payroll, then operating and admin costs. Read it next to your balance sheet, where tips, sales tax and delivery receivables live and where errors often hide. To trust it, compare each month to the last and scan the detail for duplicates or missing bills.
Start with the section-by-section guide, then learn which reports matter and how to check them.
Start here
- How to read your restaurant P&L, section by section: To read a restaurant P&L, go top to bottom: sales, COGS, payroll, then operating costs. Ryan from FIXE explains what each section holds and what's missing.
- Which Financial Reports Should I Look at to Understand My Restaurant Business?: 3 main documents tie together to tell your entire financial story: your Profit & Loss report, the balance sheet, and statement of cash flows.
- How do I know if my Profit & Loss statement is accurate?: FIXE trains Account Managers to review Profit & Loss statements to ensure accuracy. Learn tricks of the trade so everything looks correct.
Everything else in this guide
- Restaurant bookkeeping essentials: Financials vs. Statistics: Financials show your Profit & Loss. Statistics tell us more about performance, but don't quantify whether you have a successful business.
- How is my restaurant doing with sales and efficiency?: Which metrics and efficiencies should restaurants focus on to find whether their business is succeeding? Prime cost, rent, meal parts, sales.
- How am I doing with my restaurant investment?: How do people know if they’re making the right restaurant investment? Cash on cash return, sales, construction cost and rent per square foot.
- FIXE custom, multi-entity reporting is a game-changer for restaurant bookkeeping: The FIXE portal features custom, multi-unit comparative reporting, a powerful resource to make better informed, timely business decisions.
Frequently asked questions
Why don't tips and sales tax show up on my P&L?
Because neither is your money. You're holding tips for your team and sales tax for the state, so both sit on the balance sheet as liabilities until they're paid out. That's also why your P&L sales won't match the total your POS collected.
Why does my labor cost jump around from month to month?
Often it's payroll timing, not staffing. Two biweekly payrolls cover four weeks, but most months run a few days longer, so a good bookkeeper accrues the extra days. Without that accrual, your labor percentage swings for no operational reason.
What should I check on my balance sheet each month?
Three areas: delivery app receivables, which should be about one week of deposits; prepaid expenses like annual insurance, which should shrink as they're allocated; and tips owed, which shouldn't exceed one payroll. A receivable that keeps growing without deposits means something wasn't reconciled.
How do I spot mistakes in my P&L?
Compare it to last month and look for lines that jumped, dropped or vanished, like a missing utility bill. Then scan the general ledger detail for duplicate vendor charges, especially on autopay, and confirm beginning and ending inventory and every payroll for the period are there.
Your next step
Want a second set of eyes on last month's numbers? Roast my P&L.
Ready to talk it through? Book a demo.
