A hospitality accounting firm, not a general practice with a hospitality page.

What we are

A complete back office: bookkeeping, accounts payable, payroll, financial reporting, cash flow management, tax and CFO-level advisory, delivered by a team assigned to your operation. For most clients that costs a fraction of building the same function in house.

Every person on staff has a minimum of five years in hospitality. A typical assigned team carries more than thirty combined years of experience, roughly half of it in the industry. All work is completed in our US offices.

Who leads the firm

Back of House Accounting was founded in 2017 and is led by Douglas Carpenter, CPA, CFA, the firm’s principal.

Those two designations matter for different parts of the work. A CPA — Certified Public Accountant — is a state-licensed accountant, which is the standard that governs the accounting, the closing of the books and the tax side of what we do. A CFA charterholder has completed the Chartered Financial Analyst program, which is investment and financial-analysis training rather than compliance training. That is the side of the practice an operator feels when the conversation moves past the monthly close: budgeting, unit-level return, lease and debt decisions, and the numbers a lender or an investor will actually interrogate before funding the next location.

Most restaurant groups outgrow a bookkeeper before they outgrow the need for one. Having both skill sets under one roof is why the same firm can produce the close and then sit in the financing conversation.

How we work

We work in your systems — QuickBooks, Restaurant365, Compeat, PlateIQ, XtraChef and a range of POS and payroll platforms — and can accommodate other ERP environments or set up a new one. Changing systems is never a condition of working together.

Moving your books to us does not require you to break with your current accountant awkwardly or wait for a year end. We run the transition in a set sequence, and we have written down exactly how it works: switching accountants, and the accountant handover pack your outgoing firm should be asked for.

What we commit to

A closed profit and loss statement and balance sheet by day 10 of the following month. That is the single commitment we make in writing, because it is the one that determines whether every other number we produce is worth anything. A P&L that lands on the 25th describes a month you can no longer do anything about.

Everything downstream of the close — weekly flash reporting, prime cost, labor percentage, food cost — is only as good as the date the books shut.

A result we can point to

A multi-unit restaurant group came to us at three locations. The books were accurate but not bankable: no budget, no forward view, and financial statements that a credit committee would not underwrite. We built the budget and produced bank-ready financials, which secured a credit line at a good rate. The group operates nine locations today.

We do not publish client names. Every case study on this site is anonymised.