Sector specialism
Accountants for hospitality businesses
Restaurants, bars, hotels and operators who live on thin margins.
Hospitality is the sector where the accounting is least forgiving and most often done badly.
Margins are thin enough that a percentage point matters. Payroll runs weekly, not monthly. VAT applies to almost everything you sell, and the tips your staff earn sit in a scheme that HMRC looks at closely. Get the mechanics wrong and it shows up in cash, fast.
Tronc schemes, done properly
A correctly operated tronc keeps qualifying tips outside National Insurance for both the business and the staff. A badly operated one doesn't — and the liability lands on the employer, with interest, often years later.
The rules tightened with the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act, which made a written tipping policy and fair allocation a legal requirement rather than good practice. We set the scheme up, appoint and brief the troncmaster, keep the arrangement genuinely independent of the employer, and run the payroll through it.
The independence is the part most schemes get wrong. If the employer decides who gets what, it isn't a tronc — it's just wages with extra steps and an NIC bill attached.
The rest of the job
- Weekly and fortnightly payroll, including casual and zero-hours staff
- VAT on mixed-rate sales — eat-in versus takeaway, alcohol, service charge
- Stock and gross-margin reporting that reconciles to the till, not to guesswork
- Wage-percentage tracking by site and by week, so drift is visible early
- Capital allowances on fit-out — usually worth more than operators expect
- Multi-site consolidation where a group has grown past one set of books
Underneath all of it is the core compliance work — statutory accounts, corporation tax, VAT under MTD — which we do from £275 a month.
Numbers you can act on in the same week
Hospitality is a weekly business run by people who are given monthly numbers six weeks late. That's the single most common complaint we hear from operators who move to us.
A quarterly management pack tells you a site was losing money in March, in mid-May. By then you've lost another two months of it. We report on a cadence that matches how the business actually moves — wage percentage, gross margin and covers by site, weekly — so a problem is a decision you make on Tuesday rather than a discovery you make in a quarter's time. For groups that need that discipline permanently, an on-demand finance director is the usual next step.