Welcome to the Business.gov Community Jeff! Check out the Department of Labor's Recordkeeping, Reporting & Notices Advisor where you can find more information on specific recordkeeping requirements for accommodation and food services. Please also check out our food & beverage page and let us know what other types of information would be helpful to you. Regards, Erin

Hello Jeff, If I understand your question correctly, you are wondering about keeping sale records for tax purposes. There are requirements insofar that you need to them to pay your taxes and in the event you are audited. Here are a couple of resources to help answer your questions about recorkeeping for restaurant owners: 1) IRS Tax Guide For Restaurants 2) IRS Pub 583 - Starting a Business and Keeping Business Records - provides information on keeping records and illustrates a record-keeping system Also, you may want to refer to this article on keeping restaurant records -- it's linked from the IRS site. Do these resources help answer your question?

Jeff, Do yourself a favor and go paperless from the start. I know it's expensive and there's a learning curve involved, but I promise you that you will literally save yourself thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars per year if you go paperless. By paperless I mean get a good scanner like the Fujitsu Scansnap Scanner. It is between $400-500 but it also comes with Adobe Acrobat Professional. I know that sounds like an extravagant and unnecessary expense, but I promise you that you won't be disappointed. You will save yourself a lot of hassle. If you don't go paperless, here is what I can promise you: You will someday be in a jam and you will need to find a certain piece of paper, a contract, a receipt, a phone number, whatever: it will be 2:am in the morning in your office and you will be going crazy looking for one small paper. And then it will hit you that you need to hire another employee to help with the paperwork. You will then hire this person and realize that your new employee HATES filing and dealing with paper. While your new employee is supposed to file your invoice in the cabinet, he's thinking about the Marlins' awful bullpen. And in 3 weeks you will see that all the papers your new employee was supposed to organize neatly away is now a disaster. You can prevent all this by going paperless from the get go. By going paperless you can find any receipt, invoice, contract, etc. in a matter of seconds, if you do it right. You can store all these documents on your laptop and have instant access whenever you want. I know that you think that since you're running a restaurant and not an attorney's office there can't possibly be that much paperwork. Trust me, you will if you last long enough. Now, I will admit that figuring out how to use Adobe Acrobat Professional is a real pain in the you know what. But if you stick with it and maybe get some help you'll thank me later. Trust me. And no, this is not an advertisement. LOS ANGELES PATENT BUSINESS ATTORNEY LOS ANGELES TRADEMARK LAWYER ATTORNEY