Food cost tracking comes down to a simple formula. Beginning inventory plus purchases minus ending inventory equals your cost of goods sold. Divide that by food sales to get your food cost percentage. Most full-service restaurants target 28% to 35% depending on concept and pricing. The formula is easy. Keeping the inputs accurate is where restaurants struggle.

Purchases need to be captured completely and categorized correctly. Every invoice from Sysco, your produce supplier, the specialty vendors, and those cash-and-carry runs to Restaurant Depot. If it goes into the kitchen, it belongs in food cost, not lumped into a generic supplies category. When invoices pile up uncategorized or get coded inconsistently, your food cost number becomes meaningless.

Inventory counts need to happen on a regular schedule. Most restaurants count weekly for high-cost items like proteins and dairy, then monthly for everything else. The count has to happen at the same point in your ordering cycle to be comparable. Counting Sunday night before the Monday delivery gives you a different number than counting Tuesday after it arrives. Pick a time and stick to it.

Once you have reliable purchase data and inventory counts, your accounting software can calculate actual food cost. QuickBooks handles this fine if your chart of accounts separates food purchases from other expenses and someone keeps up with categorization. A bookkeeper for a small business can maintain this consistency so you see real numbers instead of estimates.

The next level is comparing actual cost to theoretical cost. Theoretical is what your food cost should be based on recipe costs and menu mix. If your POS says you sold 50 burgers and each burger should cost $3.50 in ingredients, theoretical food cost for burgers is $175. When actual runs significantly higher than theoretical, you have waste, portioning problems, theft, or unrecorded comps eating into margin.

Weekly food cost reports catch problems early. Monthly reviews are too late if a prep cook has been over-portioning proteins for three weeks. The earlier you spot the variance, the faster you can fix it.

Restaurant bookkeeping setup matters more than which specific tools you use. A spreadsheet works if someone maintains it. QuickBooks works if it’s configured properly and updated consistently. The system fails when invoices sit uncategorized because nobody has time or inventory counts get skipped during a busy week.

If your food cost percentage swings wildly from month to month without an obvious reason like menu changes or supplier price increases, the tracking system is probably the issue. Clean, consistent bookkeeping reveals the real numbers. From there you can actually manage them.