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Vast CFO

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From tracking your cash flow to managing taxes, our dedicated restaurant accountants handle your finances so you can focus on delivering great food and service.

07/10/2026

10% EBITDA. That's the floor I look for when I'm assessing whether a restaurant is actually a business or a job that pays in tips.

The industry average sits around 6% for independents. Healthy operators run 12-18%. Anything under 8% means the owner is buying themselves a job and calling it ownership.

Why 10% matters specifically. Below that line, three things break:

You can't pay yourself a real salary AND reinvest. One or the other, never both. The business stays small by default.

You can't survive a soft quarter. Three bad months at 4% EBITDA wipes out a year of positive cash. At 10%, the same three months hurts but doesn't kill you.

The business isn't sellable. Buyers price restaurants on EBITDA multiples. A restaurant at 4% EBITDA on $1.5M revenue sells for the equipment. At 12% on the same revenue, it sells for the business.

If you don't know your trailing twelve-month EBITDA off the top of your head, that's the first number to fix this quarter. Not because of any specific outcome it guarantees. Because you can't manage what you don't measure, and EBITDA is the cleanest single read on whether the operation works.

Full breakdown on the blog: https://www.vastcfo.com/restaurant-ebitda-10-percent/

06/25/2026

The average independent restaurant owner pays themselves less per hour than their kitchen manager. Often by a wide margin.

This is the line most owners don't want to look at. The business is doing $1.8M in revenue, the team is paid market rate, and the owner's take-home math comes out under $50K once you back out the hours they actually work.

A few things I look at when this comes up:

Distributions vs. salary split. If you're an S-corp and pulling everything as distributions, the IRS reasonable comp rule applies. There is a real number that should be on a W-2, and it's usually higher than owners want to set it at.

Hours worked vs. dollars taken. If you pencil out your actual weekly hours (most owners undercount by 15-20%), the per-hour comp number is what tells the truth.

What the business owes you. Owner comp isn't a residual after everyone else is paid. It's a line item the P&L has to cover, the same as rent.

If the business can't cover a market-rate owner salary, it's not a profitable business yet. That's a structural conversation, not a budgeting one.

Full breakdown on the blog: https://www.vastcfo.com/how-much-should-a-restaurant-owner-pay-themselves/

06/22/2026

Most restaurant operators open a second location two years too early.

The pitch from inside the business sounds right. The first location is profitable. The team is strong. The brand has traction. Why not double the revenue.

What the financials actually need to show before a second location makes sense:

Location one running at 15%+ EBITDA on its own, sustained for at least 18 months. Not a strong quarter. A pattern. If you're at 8%, doubling that doesn't get you to a healthy business. It gets you to two struggling ones.

Owner-replacement built in. The first location should be functioning without you needing to work the line, cover shifts, or close the books personally. If pulling you out of location one drops its EBITDA by 5 points, location two will demand more than you have left.

Cash reserves equal to 4-6 months of fixed cost across both locations combined. Not just construction budget. Operating runway. Most operators raise the buildout money and forget the cash buffer.

A real second-location pro forma, not the first one with the numbers copy-pasted. New geography, new staffing, new vendor terms, different ramp curve. The model has to start from zero on covers and build.

If those four boxes don't check, the second location isn't expansion. It's a hedge that costs you the first location.

Full breakdown on the blog: https://www.vastcfo.com/should-you-open-a-second-restaurant-location/

06/18/2026

Father's Day is the second-biggest brunch day of the year for most full-service restaurants. The prep math is different than Mother's Day in three ways that hit the P&L.

Check average is lower. Mother's Day skews to multi-generation tables with higher per-cover spend. Father's Day skews shorter, often beer-and-burger ticket. If you menu-engineer the same way for both, you leave 8-12% of revenue behind on Father's Day.

Beverage mix shifts hard. Mother's Day pulls champagne, cocktails, wine. Father's Day pulls beer and bourbon. Your COGS on Father's Day should be 2-3 points higher than Mother's Day because beer carries thinner margin than sparkling wine, and the kitchen mix is heavier on protein.

Labor stretches longer. Mother's Day is a defined brunch shift. Father's Day pulls a late lunch, an early dinner, and a bar push at 8pm. If you staff it like Mother's Day, you over-staff brunch and under-staff dinner.

The operators who run this well start three weeks out. Menu mix forecast. Inventory order based on last year's actual, not last week's pace. Staffing built backwards from the dinner peak, not forward from open.

If you didn't break apart your Mother's Day P&L this year, you have three weeks to learn from it before Father's Day repeats the same mistakes.

06/15/2026

Summer hiring season runs every operator over the same wall. You add headcount in May for the volume you expect in July, and by the time August invoices hit, your labor percentage is up four points and no one can tell you why.

The miss is almost always the same. Operators staff to peak covers, not to peak hours within peak days. A Saturday with 280 covers is not the same labor load as a Tuesday with 140, even though the per-cover labor math says it should be.

When I model summer labor for a hospitality client, three lines drive most of the variance:

Hourly labor per daypart, not per shift. The cost of a server who starts at 4pm is different from the cost of a server who starts at 5:30 and stays through close. Most schedules don't track that.

Manager OT exposure. Salaried managers are not always exempt under the 2025 DOL rules. If your AGM is making under the threshold and you're stacking 55-hour summer weeks on them, you have OT liability you're not booking.

New-hire training drag. The first two weeks of a new server are 60% of a tenured one in productivity. If you hire eight servers in June, that is real money. Most P&Ls don't isolate it, so it looks like labor inefficiency rather than a one-time onboarding cost.

Summer doesn't have to be the season that surprises you in September. The numbers are knowable now.

06/11/2026

Six months into 2026. If you haven't pulled apart your P&L yet, here's what I look at first when I sit down with a hospitality operator mid-year.

Prime cost as a % of sales. If COGS plus labor is north of 65%, something is off. The two need to be looked at together because operators trade them off all the time without seeing it.

Food cost variance month over month. Not the absolute number, the variance. A food cost that holds steady at 30% is fine. A food cost that runs 28%, 32%, 29%, 33% is telling you something is broken in inventory or ordering.

Labor % at peak vs. off-peak. Most operators look at the monthly total and miss that the peak shifts are profitable and the slow ones are bleeding. Break it apart by daypart at least once a quarter.

Comps as a % of gross sales, by category. We covered this earlier in May. If it's blind, fix it before summer hits.

Cash on hand vs. monthly fixed cost. Especially before summer hiring. The number to know is how many months of fixed cost you can cover if revenue dropped 30%. For most independents, that number is uncomfortable.

The first half of the year tells you what to do for the second half. The numbers are already there. The question is whether you're going to read them before July.

06/09/2026

Most restaurant operators sign their first lease without reading it carefully. They sign their second one and start paying attention.

Lease accounting changes when you go from one location to two. Here's what shifts.

First, the obvious: your rent expense doubles, but your overhead doesn't. Some functions consolidate (accounting, marketing, ownership salary) and some don't (managers, FOH/BOH leadership). Knowing the split before you sign the second lease is the difference between accretive growth and dilution.

Second, the lease itself: ASC 842 requires most operating leases to show on the balance sheet now. If you ignored this for one location, fine. With two, your bank starts caring. Your debt-to-equity ratio looks different to a lender when leases are on the books.

Third, CAM charges. Common Area Maintenance reconciliations are where landlords find money. Multi-location operators usually have CAM charges across multiple landlords with different reconciliation cycles. If you don't track them by location, by year, against the original estimates, you'll overpay.

Fourth, sales-tied rent clauses. Most second-location leases include a clause that triggers extra rent above a sales threshold. If you negotiate the threshold based on your first location's volume, you'll regret it. The second location should justify itself on a different curve.

Lease accounting at one location is a bookkeeping question. At two, it's a strategic one.

Full breakdown on the blog: https://www.vastcfo.com/lease-accounting-basics-for-restaurants/

05/22/2026

Restaurant payroll is the number one thing your bookkeeper is probably doing wrong.

Not because they're bad. Because restaurant payroll is genuinely different and most generalist bookkeepers don't know it.

What I find when I clean up restaurant payroll books:

Tip reporting buried in gross wages instead of separated out. This makes labor % look correct on paper and wrong in reality, and it kills the F**A tip credit on the way through.

Tipped vs. non-tipped employees coded the same. So the labor reports lump dishwashers with servers and you can't see your true FOH vs. BOH spread.

Overtime calculated on base wage only when it should include the regular rate of pay. If a server makes $5/hour plus tips and works 50 hours, the OT calculation isn't on $5. The DOL has been aggressive on this for the last four years.

Tip pooling reported wrong, especially in states with mandatory pool rules.

Health insurance and retirement deductions hitting the wrong account so the P&L misclassifies benefits as wages.

When this is cleaned up, two things happen. Labor % stops jumping around month to month. And you can finally answer the question every operator should be able to answer: what is my real cost per cover for FOH vs. BOH.

If your bookkeeper has been doing your books for years and you've never had this conversation, it's worth having.

Full breakdown on the blog: https://www.vastcfo.com/restaurant-payroll-cleanup/

05/19/2026

The F**A tip credit is one of the most under-used tax credits in restaurants.

If your servers report tips and you pay employer F**A on those tips (which you do, automatically), you can claim a credit on most of it. The credit is roughly equal to 7.65% of reported tip income above the federal minimum wage threshold.

For a restaurant with $400K in reported tips, that's around $30K in tax credit. Not deduction. Credit. Dollar for dollar against tax liability.

Three things we see operators miss:

1. They claim the credit one year and forget the next. The credit is annual; it doesn't carry. If your CPA didn't claim it on your last return, you may be able to amend.

2. They don't have clean tip reporting. The credit is only as good as the documentation. If servers under-report tips because the tracking is sloppy, you lose credit on every dollar that didn't show up on the W-2.

3. They assume their accountant is doing it. We've audited firms where the credit was missed for three years running. Accountants who don't specialize in restaurants miss this regularly.

This isn't a deduction strategy or a guarantee of savings. It's a credit that's been sitting in the tax code for decades and is specifically designed for tipped-employee businesses. Restaurants that report tips correctly should be claiming it.

If you've never asked your CPA whether you're claiming the F**A tip credit, that's the question for this week.

Full breakdown on the blog: https://www.vastcfo.com/fica-tip-credit-for-restaurants/

05/15/2026

Most operators have no idea what their comps actually cost them.

I see comp ratios as high as 8% with no tracking. Voids running blind. Promo discounts coded the same as service comps. Manager comps coded the same as quality comps. Nothing tied to a reason.

Here's why it matters.

A 5% comp rate on $2M revenue is $100K. If your gross margin is 65%, that's $65K of profit walking out the kitchen door. Every year. With no record of why.

The fix isn't to ban comps. The fix is to make every comp tell you something:

- Quality comp: the kitchen made an error. Track who and which station.
- Service comp: the FOH dropped the ball. Track section and shift.
- Promo comp: a marketing decision. Track which promo, which guest segment.
- Manager comp: a relationship investment. Track frequency per manager.

When comps have categories and counts, patterns appear in 30 days. The same dishes get sent back. The same shift takes the most service comps. The same manager comps the same regulars three times a week.

You don't need expensive software for this. Most POS systems can handle it. You need someone to set up the categories and read the report monthly.

Most operators stop reading the comp report because it's a blob. Make it useful and it becomes the most actionable line in the P&L.

Full breakdown on the blog: https://www.vastcfo.com/restaurant-comps-voids-discounts-promotions/

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