How do I account for catering and events separately?
The standard approach is using classes in QuickBooks or creating separate income and expense accounts in your chart of accounts. Either method works as long as you’re consistent about assigning transactions to the right category.
With class tracking, you create classes like “Restaurant,” “Catering,” and “Private Events.” Every transaction gets tagged with the appropriate class when you enter it. Sales from a catering job get coded to Catering. The food cost for that job goes to Catering. Staff wages for that event go to Catering. This lets you run a profit and loss by class to see how each segment performs independently.
If you prefer separate accounts, you’d create distinct income accounts for Restaurant Sales, Catering Revenue, and Event Revenue. You might also create separate cost of goods sold accounts for each segment. This shows the breakdown directly on your P&L without needing to run class reports.
The key is tracking both revenue and direct costs separately. Knowing your catering brought in $15,000 last month means nothing if you don’t know whether it cost you $12,000 or $8,000 to deliver that revenue. You need to see the margin on each segment, not just the top-line sales.
Direct costs to track by segment include food and beverage purchases for that specific job, labor worked on catering or events like delivery and setup staff, rentals and supplies specific to that event, and transportation costs for off-site catering.
Some costs don’t separate cleanly. Your rent, utilities, and kitchen equipment serve all three segments. Most restaurant businesses allocate these based on percentage of revenue or leave them unallocated as general overhead. Getting too precise with allocation creates busywork without adding insight. Focus on separating the direct costs and you’ll have useful data.
For events especially, track them by individual event if possible. A single “Events” bucket tells you whether events as a category are profitable. Individual event tracking tells you which events are worth repeating and which ones lost money.
The goal is answering questions like: Should we take more catering jobs? Are private events worth the disruption to regular service? Which segment actually makes money after accounting for the extra labor and logistics?
Restaurant owners who set this up often discover one segment is subsidizing another. Maybe catering looks busy but barely breaks even once you factor in the delivery vehicle and extra prep labor. Or maybe events are wildly profitable and you should be booking more of them. Without separate tracking, you’re guessing.
Set up the tracking structure before you need the data. Our Nampa business tax preparation service can help you configure your accounting software correctly from the start. Retroactively separating a year of mixed transactions is painful, but starting with clean categories gives you useful reports within a few months.
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