Discounts — ID ‘em, and use ‘em (you betcha!)
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008Freebies. Giveaways. Two-for-ones. Ten percent off. Good neighbor breaks. Corporate favors. Air Supply medleys. Employee discounts. All of these financial elements (okay, all but one of them, which just creates a pool of barf) and others create a couple of things: 1) less money in your pocket as the restaurant owner and 2) the chance to include some useful accounting detail on your eatery’s profit and loss statement.
Whether you’ve got a $200 Staples cash register or a state-of-the-art POS system in place, take advantage of the opportunity to separately identify and account for all the different discounts you provide to your customers and employees. Create multiple buttons on your registers to key in all of these items as they occur. They’ll give you a wealth of information on your income statement.
When you cash out your registers at day’s end, the inexpensive register or pricey POS system should be able to separately identify and account for all of these items. Why bother with all that, you ask? Well, because I want to create more mindless work for you, that’s why.
Actually, this detail can help you track what kind of response you’re getting from that mailer you recently sent off. It’ll let you know if you are giving away too many free employee meals. It could also tell you if your employees who operate the registers are accurately keying in these items. It’ll tell you if you need to go stumping for your business a bit more at “Teen Angst Threads” in the adjacent strip mall.
So don’t lump all of your discounts into one button on the register. You’ll find out considerably more by slotting each item into its own category, and including them all on your restaurant’s financial statements.
