Hi Lina,
I've been away from community for a while, but happened to spot your question today. I've been doing restaurant books for over 20 years... and frankly my constant search is for a good solution to this problem.
Here are a couple of tips -
1. There are a few apps that work with QuickBooks online that specialize in reporting. I personally use Futrli, which allows me to report on a fortnight (2 weeks) for some items.
2. A friend/colleague Angela Meharg of Datisfy has been developing a way to satisfy some elements of these requirements by using budgeting features and some other neat tricks..
3. If you are on Facebook, please join us over at Restaurant Accounting Network. This closed group has a lot of people sharing a lot of ideas on how to best do restaurant books.
4. I would also recommend stating to QuickBooks in every way you possibly can that the ability to customize reporting periods on reports needs to be more robust. To date, I think their position has been that reporting apps can handle that. But since most reporting apps take cues/limits on how they can deal with data from the database they are pulling from, it often means they are only set up to riff off of what QuickBooks can do, at best.
***If you are interested, I am doing a webinar next week about how to better streamline the bookkeeping process for restaurants. There will be a particular focus on making the books reflect what really matters to restaurants in a manner that is actually helpful to them. Tips on how to customize some stuff will be throughout, including allusions to 13/4 periods etc. So feel free to reach out to me if you are interested.
On a personal note, QuickBooks and other accounting platforms love to use retail and hospitality in advertising. These businesses are very visual, and frankly come off very authentic. They typify, I think, everything that is 'small business entrepreneurship'.
It's kind of no secret to anyone who knows me that in my opinion this means that they owe retail and hospitality a product that fits their basic needs!
It's ok if QBO and desktop aren't equipped with the defaults necessary for these industries, but shouldn't they be at least more friendly to customizations that they need? For instance, do a report on last week and it goes Sunday to Saturday. Which means weekends are split. Perhaps a great thing for Monday to Friday businesses, but not the best for retail and hospitality, where weekends mean A LOT. Such a simple thing....
I hope in the coming year Intuit will make an effort to fold in some improved ability to customize the basics (reporting, company defaults, etc.) in their products. It certainly would help the very business owners whose faces I keep seeing, again and again, helping to sell a product that could be such a better fit!
Just my two cents.
Kristen Nies Ciraldo
