Summer is the busiest—and most expensive—season for restaurants. Between seasonal staffing, higher food costs, patio operations, extended hours, and catering requests, small financial gaps can turn into major cash problems fast.
The owners who come out of summer profitable aren’t always the ones with the most covers. They’re the ones who went in with clean books, clear margins, and systems that didn’t fall apart under pressure.
Before June hits full stride, take time to run these five financial checks. None of them require a full audit. Most can be knocked out in a single afternoon with your accountant or bookkeeper. And collectively, they can save you thousands—or prevent a crisis you didn’t see coming.
1. Review Your Cash Reserves and Credit Lines
Summer revenue is higher, but so are expenses—and the expenses hit first. Seasonal hires need onboarding and training before the rush pays off. Food orders increase weeks before the extra revenue shows up. Equipment that barely survived winter starts breaking down.
Before June, check three things: your operating account balance, your available credit line, and how many weeks of fixed costs (rent, payroll, insurance, utilities) you can cover if revenue dips unexpectedly. A rainy two-week stretch, a health inspection closure, or a key employee walking out can all stall income without stopping expenses.
If your cash cushion is thinner than two weeks of operating costs, talk to your CPA or banker now—not mid-July when lenders are slow and you’re too busy running the floor to sit down with a spreadsheet. A short-term line of credit arranged in May is a safety net. The same request in August, after a bad month, looks like a distress signal.
2. Lock In Your Food Cost Percentages
Food costs are the single biggest variable that kills restaurant margins. Prices shift with supply chains, weather events, and seasonal demand—and summer pushes certain categories (produce, dairy, proteins) higher every year.
Pull your actual food cost percentage from the last 90 days and compare it to your menu pricing. Most full-service restaurants target 28–35% food cost; QSRs often run tighter at 25–30%. If your cost-of-goods has crept above your target, the time to adjust is now—before high-volume months lock in a bad margin across thousands of plates.
Here’s what to look at specifically:
- Vendor contracts: Are you locked into pricing, or are you absorbing weekly increases without realizing it? Even a conversation with your distributor about summer pricing can save hundreds per month.
- Menu engineering: Which items have the worst margin? Can you feature higher-margin dishes as specials during your busiest nights?
- Waste and comps: Is your POS tracking voids, comps, and waste accurately? A 2% untracked waste rate on $50,000 in monthly food purchases is $1,000 gone every month with no record of where it went.
The goal isn’t to overhaul your menu in a week. It’s to know your actual numbers so you’re not guessing your way through summer.
3. Get Payroll Ready for Seasonal Staff
Hiring seasonal workers means more moving parts in payroll: new W-4s, tip reporting, split shifts, overtime calculations, and potentially workers under 18 with restricted hours. If you’re adding five or ten people to the roster in a matter of weeks, the administrative load increases fast.
Before the first seasonal hire clocks in, verify the following:
- Tip reporting and tip credits: Wisconsin allows a tip credit against minimum wage for tipped employees, but the rules are specific. Make sure your payroll system calculates it correctly and that reported tips match what’s flowing through your POS.
- Overtime calculations: If seasonal staff pick up shifts across multiple roles or locations, overtime can trigger in ways you don’t expect. One missed overtime flag on a biweekly payroll can cost more in penalties than the wages themselves.
- Minor labor laws: If you hire workers under 18, Wisconsin limits their hours and the types of tasks they can perform. Violations carry fines, and the Department of Workforce Development does audit.
- Onboarding timing: Enter new hires into your payroll system before their first shift, not retroactively after a pay period closes. Backdated entries create reconciliation headaches and increase the chance of errors on quarterly filings.
Payroll mistakes made in June create tax headaches in October. The IRS and Wisconsin DOR don’t care that you were short-staffed when the errors happened.
Summer revenue should show up as profit — not just busy nights. Let’s make sure your numbers tell the full story.
4. Confirm Your Sales Tax Is Current
If you’ve added patio service, started catering, signed up with a new delivery platform, or begun selling branded merchandise, your sales tax obligations may have changed. Different items and services can carry different tax treatments depending on your municipality and what you’re selling.
Summer is particularly risky because volume increases amplify any errors. If your POS is applying the wrong rate, you might undercollect by a small amount per transaction—but across hundreds of daily sales, it adds up to a real liability by September.
Run through this checklist before the rush starts:
- Filing frequency: If your sales volume has increased, Wisconsin may require you to switch from quarterly to monthly filing. Check your current assignment and make sure it matches your actual revenue.
- POS tax rates: Verify that rates are correct for dine-in, takeout, delivery, and catering. Some municipalities apply different rates or exemptions depending on the transaction type.
- Third-party platforms: If you’re selling through DoorDash, UberEats, or similar services, confirm whether the platform is collecting and remitting tax on your behalf—or if you’re responsible for it.
- Unfiled periods: If you owe back filings or have unfiled periods, resolve them now. Wisconsin Department of Revenue penalties compound, and high-volume summer months make any outstanding balance grow faster.
5. Run a Mid-Year Tax Projection
Half the year is almost gone. If you haven’t looked at your estimated tax payments, entity-level deductions, or depreciation schedules since filing season, now is the time.
A quick mid-year projection tells you whether you’re on track, underpaying quarterly estimates, or leaving deductions on the table. For restaurant owners operating as an S-Corp or LLC, several levers directly affect your year-end tax bill:
- Reasonable compensation: If you’re an S-Corp owner, your salary needs to be defensible. Setting it too low invites IRS scrutiny; setting it too high costs you in payroll taxes. Mid-year is the right time to calibrate based on actual revenue.
- Retirement contributions: SEP-IRA and Solo 401(k) contributions can significantly reduce taxable income, but they require planning. Waiting until December limits your options.
- Equipment and improvements: If you’re planning any kitchen upgrades, furniture purchases, or technology investments, Section 179 deductions and bonus depreciation let you write off the full cost in the year of purchase. But you need to know whether that deduction actually helps your tax position—or just shifts the benefit to a year when you don’t need it.
- Estimated payments: If Q1 and Q2 estimates were based on last year’s income and this year is trending higher, you may be underpaying. An underpayment penalty is avoidable if you adjust by the Q3 due date in September.
A 30-minute conversation with your CPA in June is worth more than a two-hour scramble in December.
Why These Checks Matter More Than You Think
Restaurants that skip these steps before summer don’t just risk losing money—they lose visibility. When your books are behind, your food costs are unclear, and your payroll is reactive, every decision becomes a guess. You end up managing by gut instead of by numbers.
And the damage compounds. A payroll error in June triggers a corrected filing in Q3. An underreported sales tax month creates a balance that accrues interest through the fall. A food cost problem that goes unnoticed for 12 weeks costs multiples of what a one-week fix would have.
The restaurants that stay profitable through summer aren’t necessarily busier. They just know their numbers, trust their systems, and catch problems before they compound. That’s not luck—it’s preparation.
What to Do If You're Already Behind
If you’re reading this and your books are months behind, your payroll is a mess, or you’re not sure what your actual food cost percentage is—you’re not alone. Most restaurant owners we work with come to us in exactly this situation. It’s the nature of the business: operations eat up every hour, and the financial side falls behind.
The fix doesn’t start with perfection. It starts with getting current: reconcile your bank and credit card accounts, pull a real profit-and-loss statement, and identify the three biggest leaks. From there, build a simple monthly rhythm—closing your books within two weeks of month-end, reviewing food and labor costs weekly, and keeping payroll on a clean schedule.
That’s a conversation we have with restaurant owners every week. It’s not about catching up on everything at once. It’s about knowing where you stand right now so that every decision you make this summer is informed, not improvised.
How JTA‑CPA Helps Restaurant Owners Prepare
We work with restaurant owners across southeastern Wisconsin—from single-location diners to multi-unit QSR operators—in Cedarburg & Grafton, Milwaukee, Racine, Mount Pleasant, and surrounding communities.
Our restaurant accounting services are built around the specific challenges restaurants face: POS reconciliation, tip and payroll compliance, food cost tracking, vendor management, sales tax filing, and seasonal cash flow planning. We also handle tax preparation and year-round advisory so your financial strategy doesn’t reset every April.
If any of these five checks raised a red flag—or if you’re not sure where you stand on any of them—we can help you get ahead of it before the rush. Schedule a restaurant accounting review and we’ll walk through your numbers together.
Ready to Get Clear on Your Restaurant’s Numbers Before Summer Gets Busy?
JTA-CPA serves restaurant owners and hospitality businesses across southeast Wisconsin, including Cedarburg & Grafton, Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, Mount Pleasant, Brookfield, and Waukesha.
