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Auditproofing – Average Costs

So far, I’ve discussed the POS system and how to maintain it for accurate reporting, how to document your sales mix for all audit periods, and the importance of maintaining an accurate history of your menu prices.  Taken together, these bookkeeping tasks are crucial in helping the restaurateur determine, and properly support, accurate weighted average prices.  This is a crucial component of the mark-up calculation performed during a typical audit.

Now we’ll take a look at the actual cost of the alcoholic beverages purchased for sale.

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Auditproofing – Tracking Menu Changes

As a restaurateur, you probably have a general idea how your menus and prices have changed over the last few years.  Unfortunately, only having a “general idea” can land you in a big pot of trouble when your restaurant is audited.  This post reviews a few of the methods of documenting key changes to your menu and prices.  When the time comes, you will have accurate, credible information to support your actual margins and document the reasons for variances from the expected margins.

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Auditproofing – Know Your Mix

This is the second post in the series on auditproofing your restaurant from an unfair audit.  Most restaurants and bars with weak internal controls (almost all independent establishments), will be audited by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) or a provincial tax authority using an indirect audit approach.  In most cases, this approach will be the mark-up method, which seeks to project the sales level that was likely to have been generated based on the amount of alcoholic beverages purchased by the establishment.  As we have seen in other posts, this audit method involves making a number of assumptions about the operation.  Determining what these assumptions should be, can be quite complicated.

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