So I’m the third member of the Kasa ownership team, the most invisible because I kept my day job in order to keep the lights on should Kasa stumble and, most painfully, the one who chose the short straw and became Kasa’s Chief Financial Officer.
The best thing about being the Chief Financial Officer is that I get a fancy sounding title. The list of the worst things about being the Chief Financial Officer is much longer and includes:
- Having to enter around 20 fields of data into Quickbooks for each day of sales. Typically the fields of data include numbers that were illegibly scribbled by Tim, Anamika or one of our other great staff during the hustle and bustle of the day. Trust me, it’s exactly as fun as it sounds.
- Having to organize, 3 hole punch and enter all our bills into Quickbooks. That includes our daily deliveries from our produce and meat vendors, twice weekly deliveries of our spices, thrice weekly trips to farmers markets with scribbled (yet again) receipts, payouts to our nightly cleaning service, beer and wine deliveries, dry good deliveries, flower receipts from the vendor down the street and so much more goodness.
- Paying all our bills on-time so our vendors continue to love us. This is…stressful.
- Reconciling all of our accounts each month. Now you might ask…what does it mean to reconcile each account? Great question. It means going back through every single transaction — every bank deposit, every individual expense, etc — and categorizing it, confirming that it’s accounted for in our bank statements and that our ending balances in Quickbooks are the same as they are in our bank statements.
This may not sound like much, but when you factor in the many unexpected laptop crashes, accounts that don’t balance, receipts that have gone missing and so much more wacky fun, one can start to understand why many restauranteurs advised us to outsource the bookkeeping function as quickly as we could. But that would be far too easy (and expensive).
I’d much rather be in the restaurant, rocking a dinner shift and chatting up our customers, but for now, you can find me at home many nights after work, watching Eastbound & Down, engaged in an epic battle with Quickbooks.
If you want to share tips, or want advice on how we set things up financially, or just need moral support as you struggle through restaurant bookkeeping, feel free to hit me up (contact at kasaindian dot com or @kasaindian on twitter).
Suresh
