Cafe accounting, where the margin is measured in cents.
A cafe turns over a lot of small transactions on a thin margin. Twenty cents of milk, a barista rostered half an hour early, a supplier rise nobody noticed: none of it looks like much until you multiply it by a year of cups.
Why cafes need a tighter read than most businesses
On a $3.50 flat white a few cents of drift is a rounding error. Across 300 coffees a day it is real money, and it never shows up as a line item you can point at. It shows up as a bank balance that does not match the profit and loss.
The way to catch it is to read ratios rather than dollars, every month, against the same bands.
| Line | Where we want it | Where it starts costing you |
|---|---|---|
| Wage cost | at or under 30% of sales | 35% is where we start calling it a leak |
| Food and beverage cost | at or under 36% of sales | 40% and the menu needs work |
| Prime cost, wages plus stock | at or under 62% of sales | 68% and the venue is running for someone else |
| Rent | at or under 10% of sales | 15% and the site has to earn its keep |
The bands we work to on a standard single-site venue. Licensed venues, function work and heavy takeaway sit differently, which is part of the conversation.
The cafe-specific traps
- Open hours that do not pay. The first and last ninety minutes of trade often carry full labour and almost no sales.
- Milk, cups and takeaway packaging. These sit in cost of goods and creep quietly with supplier changes.
- Staff coffee and comps. Small, constant, and almost never measured.
- GST coding on retail lines. Some packaged goods are GST-free while anything sold for consumption on the premises is taxable, and a POS mapped once and never checked will quietly get it wrong.
- Casual loading and penalties. A roster that works at ordinary rates can stop working on a Sunday.
Run the 60-second Margin Check on your own figures. Nothing is sent anywhere; it runs in your browser.
What you get from us
Books kept current from the POS and the bank, payroll run against the award, a monthly review that tells you what moved, and the compliance handled underneath it.
Most venues sit on Hospitality Margin Protection at $990 + GST a month, which carries the bookkeeping, payroll for up to five staff and BAS oversight underneath the monthly margin review.
Straight answers.
We are a small cafe. Is $990 a month worth it?
A single point of wage cost or food cost on a $700,000 venue is $7,000 a year. That is the arithmetic the plan has to beat, and it is the first thing we look at on the call.
Do you set up the POS mapping?
Yes, we check how takings, GST codes and tips flow into the file before the first review, because everything after that depends on it.
Stop finding out in July.
Fifteen minutes, direct with Pink. We look at your real numbers and tell you where the margin is going.